A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation · HackerPapers discussions

A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation — mentioned by gjm11

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:55:25 GMT

I looked at the paper (already kindly linked by bartonfink, but here it is again: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375). I think there's considerably less to it than meets the eye. The authors have a very simple model of the dynamics of religious adherence, which amounts to saying: people convert from one (ir)religious position to another in numbers proportional to some function of (1) the fraction of the population currently adhering to each position and (2) some measure of how attractive each position is. They assume that #2 is constant over time. They choose a particular (reasonably plausible)…

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A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation — mentioned by bartonfink

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:40:35 GMT

I find this very interesting, and I hope that they get it peer reviewed somewhere so it's more "official" than arxiv. I don't normally view religion as a social activity, and this analysis seems to hinge on social factors (i.e. it seems to be counting edges instead of nodes). Religion doesn't seem to necessitate multiple people in the same way that language does, so I wonder whether their model might be fundamentally flawed. Looks like my pile of papers to read just got a couple pages higher. The link to download the paper is here if anyone wants it. http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.