Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference wrap
Over the past year I have posted several times about the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference, which was held in Sydney this week. It turned out to be a great conference, and I am very pleased with how it panned out.
The conference has increased my optimism about the potential for more work to be carried out at the inter-disciplinary boundaries between economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology and so on. When I compare it to the Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology conference I attended almost three years ago (an excellent conference), we managed to drag in a broader range of economists and other social scientists to this event. I suspect this is evidence for increasing interest on the part of social scientists in how sciences such as biology can add to the social science toolkit.
As a result, I hope this conference is the first of a continuing series (although hopefully with a wider group of organisers). An interesting challenge for the next iteration will be to pick an appropriate theme. In this case, the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family theme was useful in pulling together people who may not have necessarily considered that there were useful insights in other disciplines. We would not have gotten such an interesting mix of people if we had pitched the topic specifically around the integration of disciplines.
It was interesting to see the different presentation styles across disciplines, and I have to say that the biologists (on average) have the edge in presenting their work in an easy to understand way - particularly in relation to the submitted presentations. Us economists are still too tied to our equations to dump them. This was best illustrated in the presentations of two plenary speakers - Michael Jennions and Hanna Kokko - who used simple cartoons and illustrations to describe their models. If you go to their papers (particularly the supplementary materials), there can be some relatively hefty math behind them. Yet they are able to present the ideas without relying on the equations. And maybe this should also be taken as an indication for how economists write their papers - more of the math in the supplementary appendix, more time in the (shorter) main paper on the important intuition. And then dump the math when we intend to communicate our ideas verbally.
The conference also reminded me of how hard it is to work across disciplinary boundaries without full immersion in both sides (or having someone from both sides engaged in the work). Again turning the Michael Jennions presentation, he talked about Bateman’s gradient and the operational sex ratio, and about what each of them actually show (the paper on this is here). I thought I knew what each were about, but am now revisiting my understanding.