Fair enough! My own reaction is different, as you’ll have guessed: my intuition/prejudices don’t make me optimistic about the model being proposed, and there are enough things in the presentation that just seem wrong-headed (and little enough that feels like it’s providing valuable insight) that I don’t feel any particular appetite for more.
But, of course, criticism is easier, and a less scarce resource, than original thought—and my gut reactions could very easily be badly wrong. (So, in particular, my comments aren’t intended to persuade the OP not to post more.)
I take your point about heavy-tailed distributions, but remark that in so far as that’s an accurate description we need to draw the live/dead boundary between *the very most original agents* and *everyone else*, which I don’t think is the OP’s intent—at any rate, I find that hard to square with judging Russia “live” merely because they did something that plenty of other countries do and “is merely new for modern-day Russia”, or with putting the boundary between Jobs-era Apple and Cook-era Apple.
Fair enough! My own reaction is different, as you’ll have guessed: my intuition/prejudices don’t make me optimistic about the model being proposed, and there are enough things in the presentation that just seem wrong-headed (and little enough that feels like it’s providing valuable insight) that I don’t feel any particular appetite for more.
But, of course, criticism is easier, and a less scarce resource, than original thought—and my gut reactions could very easily be badly wrong. (So, in particular, my comments aren’t intended to persuade the OP not to post more.)
I take your point about heavy-tailed distributions, but remark that in so far as that’s an accurate description we need to draw the live/dead boundary between *the very most original agents* and *everyone else*, which I don’t think is the OP’s intent—at any rate, I find that hard to square with judging Russia “live” merely because they did something that plenty of other countries do and “is merely new for modern-day Russia”, or with putting the boundary between Jobs-era Apple and Cook-era Apple.