Comment on "Mixing beliefs among interacting agents"

TL;DR

This paper critiques the derivation of the main equation in the bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics, highlighting a small mistake in the original ad-hoc counting method and proposing a more systematic approach.

Contribution

It identifies a flaw in the original derivation and introduces a systematic 'micro to macro' method to improve accuracy without added complexity.

Findings

The original derivation contains a small mistake.

The systematic approach avoids such mistakes.

The qualitative impact of the mistake is minimal.

Abstract

We comment on the derivation of the main equation in the bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics. In the original work, the equation is derived using an ad-hoc counting method. We point that the original derivation does contain some small mistake. The mistake does not have a large qualitative impact, but it reveals the danger of the ad-hoc counting method. We show how a more systematic approach, which we call micro to macro, can avoid such mistakes, without adding any significant complexity.