Can you grow it?
Perhaps one day people will interpret the question, “Can you explain it?” as asking, “Can you grow it?”
Artificial society modeling allows us to grow social structures in silico, demonstrating that certain sets of micro-specifications are sufficient to generate the macro-phenomena of interest. And that, after all, is a central aim.
As social scientists, we are presented with already-emerged collective phenomena, and we seek microrules that can generate them. We can, of course, use statistics to test the match between the true, observed structures and the ones we grow. But the ability to grow them [...] is what is new. Indeed, it holds out the prospect of a new, generative kind of social science.
-- Epstein & Axtell