> Often incorrectly represented as s-curves, they are the result of the inherent cost/benefit of the technology [...]
You're taking from two completely different levels of abstraction here. Tech adoption rather obviously happens in an S-shaped curve, at least sometimes. See the article for examples. And of course that shape, and its exact parameters, are the result of some underlying processes.
These two things aren't contradictory. Outside air temperature follows a roughly sinusoid curve. It's the result of the earth turning and therefore alternating between night and day. But it's still sinusoid.
And the S-curve does acknowledge state, or it would just be exponential.
Yes, there are different approaches to disease modelling, such as agent- and rule-base simulations. Unfortunately, they tend to be really bad because we just don't enough data to satisfactorily simulate societies at the level necessary for this application.
But having an s-shaped curve is not the same thing as being a sigmoid function, in the same way that having a bell-shaped density is not the same thing as having a gaussian distribution. There a tons of processes out there that can approximate well with either of those two, while being extremely different in extrapolation.
One thing that can immediately disprove mathematical sigmoid modeling: curve symmetry. If the early adoption exponential growth is not exactly the same shape as the late adoption slowdown, then you don't have a sigmoid function.
And that's the problem: if you're using a single function to model the result of two (or more) separate processes with distinct mechanics and parameters, you're going to have the same exact pitfalls as you would trying to model a bimodal process with a single probability distribution. Namely that they might fit well with interpolative methods, but completely fail with extrapolative methods (like forecasting!).
You're taking from two completely different levels of abstraction here. Tech adoption rather obviously happens in an S-shaped curve, at least sometimes. See the article for examples. And of course that shape, and its exact parameters, are the result of some underlying processes.
These two things aren't contradictory. Outside air temperature follows a roughly sinusoid curve. It's the result of the earth turning and therefore alternating between night and day. But it's still sinusoid.
And the S-curve does acknowledge state, or it would just be exponential.
Yes, there are different approaches to disease modelling, such as agent- and rule-base simulations. Unfortunately, they tend to be really bad because we just don't enough data to satisfactorily simulate societies at the level necessary for this application.