Customer Reviews

Foundations of Complex-system Theories: In Economics, Evolutionary Biology, and Statistical Physics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an amazing work. Sunny Auyang has written an easily comprehenedible book on applications of complexity theories to economics, biology and physics. It is a professional writing to professionals in different fields.One needs college level maths and some physics to fully grasp it but she has made minimum use of mathematical symbols. Her writing flows, the examples are clear, some illuminate important issues in the applied fields, some are just homey bits that convey an idea insightfully. A lot of depth in her philosophical explorations of the complexity ideas. I consider this to be a must for any person studying or instructing in system thinking.

This is a very interesting book.The author demonstrates that she has command over a number of different fields.She exhibits a wide ranging scholarship in this book.In a nutshell,one can categorize the major conclusions she arrives at as the whole is not the sum of the parts alone.Neither a strictly micro or macro approach to the different fields she investigates,using a complex systems framework, yields the idealized types of scientific discovery and knowledge one finds postulated in some philosophy of science discourses that emphasize deductive closure laws.I have one slight criticism of the book,which is why I have subtracted one half a star.The author has a deep general understanding of the Keynes-Knight distinction between risk and uncertainty in economics(and in social sciences).However,she lacks an understanding of the specifics of Keynes's approach in the A Treatise on Probability(1921;TP).She is unaware of Keynes's interval estimate approach to probability,his index,w,used to measure the completeness of the evidence ,ranging from ignorance through partial knowledge to a complete information set,and Keynes's conventional coefficient of weight and risk,which treats risk, based on the purely deductive laws of probability, as a special case.This would be a very minor criticism if she had integrated the work of D.Ellsberg(Ellsberg's 2001 book,Risk,Ambiguity,and Decision gives a modern,improved and updated version of the TP) and B.Mandelbrot into her discussions involving economics,risk,and uncertainty(Ellsberg's Ambiguity with his rho and alpha indexes and the wild versus mild risk of the cauchy distribution versus normal distribution as discussed by Mandelbrot).Unfortunately,Ellsberg's contributions are not discussed at all while Mandelbrot receives a single footnote that completely ignores his contributions to economics.She can certainly obtain a 5-star rating by bringing out a revised edition in which the original,technical, pioneering work of Keynes is covered followed by the modern and updated contributions of Ellsberg and Mandelbrot.

Philosophers of science need to read this book: the hands-on
account of how three sciences work is a healthy
corrective to the usual practice of writing philosophy of science
without actually knowing how the science is done.