Comment on Quantifying the potential causes of Neanderthal extinction
Axel,
Thank you for sharing your paper. Academia.edu notified me that you had uploaded it. I read it this morning, then read it again. I wish your model was in a form that could be shared more easily.
I follow groups using the internet. I am interested in how people approach complex problems, and the tools they use.
I downloaded the NC, DAT and other materials posted at https://climatedata.ibs.re.kr/data/papers/timmermann-2020-QSR
I use Matlab, but never recommend it to groups on the Internet for collaborative modeling. Proprietary and expensive, very expensive to learn and work together, seldom accessible for most of the roughly 4.8 billion people with some access to the Internet. You are talking to only a tiny fraction of the people who use the Internet who could use what you did. On the Internet, a few hundred thousand is tiny. I spent years tracking Matlab, Mathematica, GitHub and similar tool communities.
Are all the necessary pieces of your model in that dataset? or are there dependencies? How long did it take to develop the model and how long to run the simulations? Would this be a useful tool for teaching this kind of model? Have you ever considered real time global collaboration on a model of this sort? How long would it take someone without your computer tools to replicate your model and check it? Actually use it? Adapt it to other or connected problems?
“simulation” “neanderthal” has 1.39 Million entry points today (Google, GMT 12 Mar 2022, 21:23)
Most all those groups and individuals are NOT working together. And mostly only serving their own local and selfish purposes. When groups are able to work collaboratively over large regions, they usually go to war and wipe each other out, or try to.
It is rare for groups on the internet to share openly, despite words and assurance to the contrary. “Covid”, “global climate change”, “nuclear fusion” are just a few of the groups that stay separate trying to reach their local maxima, while the whole collapses. (“covid” OR “corona virus” OR “coronavirus”) had just over 7.5 Billion entry points at its peak, and it shrunk to about 4.41 Billion today because the people and groups making money from it have institutionalized it fairly rigidly and have local monopolies established that are hard to impossible to change.
I have been at this every day for 24 years now, and never once found an organization or group that shares without first and only serving its own needs. I think it is possible, and know the rules to follow, but trying to change human groups is a mostly a waste of my time. I can solve most problems faster than trying to get groups to focus on the high cost of collaboration modeling on the Internet, and in society. LIGO, Large Hadron Collider, European Space Agency, NASA and others have listened and changed a bit. But not really as far as needed.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
