This isn't quite a fully baked idea yet, but personlike agents are so ubiquitous in human modeling of complex systems that I suspect they're a default of some kind -- and that this doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of deep understanding of a system's behavior. Programmers often talk about software they're working on in agent-like terms -- the component remembers this, knows about that, has such-and-such a purpose in life -- but this doesn't correlate with imperfect understanding of the software; it's just a convenient way of thinking about the problem. Likewise for people -- I'm not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, but I doubt people in those professions think of their fellows' emotions as less real for understanding them better than I do.

See also

“Empirically true statements”?

I don't do any sophisticated calculations. I just try to avoid accidents.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2980#comic

But there is a common everyday quantity which we ordinarily measure with an affine scale, and that's temperature.

Also time (there's the Big Bang, but no-one uses it as the zero in everyday usage); for broader values of “everyday”, voltage and energy, too.

“degrees util?” (or if it has to be named after a person, “degrees von Neumann” or “degrees Morgenstein” depending on whether you're closer to Hungary or Germany).

What do you mean? The differences between me now and me in epsilon seconds are of order epsilon, aren't they?

Those two are only vaguely connected.

Well, “only vaguely” is a massive understatement. There's a helluva lot of mutual information between me tomorrow and me today, much, much more than between me today and you today.

OTOH, we're not logically omniscient, so certain statements are useful to hear even if they are correct in all universes (e.g. “3107418240490043721350750035888567930037346022842727545720161948823206440518081504556346829671723286782437916272838033415471073108501919548529007337724822783525742386454014691736602477652346609 equals 1634733645809253848443133883865090859841783670033092312181110852389333100104508151212118167511579 times 1900871281664822113126851573935413975471896789968515493666638539088027103802104498957191261465571”).

13 of the respondents to the latest survey said they were from Russia.

On average Niger women have 7 children and presumably raise them on 2*GDP per capita income.

AFAIK, “per capita” means ‘divided by the whole population’, not just the adult one. (Am I missing something?)

Aside: how do you make links here that include parentheses in them?

[Like this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita) (28 and 29 being the ASCII values for ( and ) respectively in hexadecimal).