Re: [FRIAM] models that bite back
That's only in you model, and leaves out the rest of the world. My hunch is it's good to watch the rest of the world for diverging continuities too... Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 12:25 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] models that bite back Phil Henshaw wrote: All well and good, unless something in the environment develops a continuity of divergence A model can be built around whatever hunch and evaluated in a Bayesian framework. At some point, if the divergence really exists, the model will reflect that in its likelihood. It's all well and good. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] models that bite back
Well Marcus, isn't that is entirely the point, and why models are unreliable and need help? A model invariably represents only a person's belief's about the world. The physical subject being represented is both fabulously more complex than any belief system can be, and full of things that are differently organized and requires it's own language of description. It's why one needs a different mode of description for each way of describing what a person is. It's why science, being one language of description, is incomplete. In some cases, a common language seems adequate for many subjects, but only when you are careful to ask the same kind of question of each subject, consistent with that common language. To use common terminology for different things you do need to ignore the discrepancies as insignificant, though. As when your economic system collapses because they were not actually insignificant, that turns out to be an error. It ends up being much safer to think of the physical world as complexly changing place needing many languages of description and close attention, and for science, to watch the fit of your model to see if discrepancies are developing. In order to pick up significant errors due to emerging discrepancies, you need to become aware of what's happening. One way is to watch closely for them. You can also rely on hearsay. The world is full of independently evolving systems, each changing it's organization in response to its own place in the world, in its own way, and developing emergent behaviors as it does. Lots of systems we share the environment with seem sort of diffuse and passive, and others rather distinctly individual with strong independent individual reactions to being interfered with. There's no 'book' you just have to watch. If you're not watching and only wait till you loose your job to know that you should have been watching, (like a lot of us are at the moment) you're out of a job. It's like we were imagining an open road and were driving along in our car and didn't see the water coming because it wasn't on the map. The water coming was real obvious to the people looking out the window who were repeating saying in increasingly urgent tones hey there's water coming. Am I wrong to be stunned at how difficult it is to get an acknowledgement here that living in a physical world means that theory is not enough? Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 2:12 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] models that bite back Phil Henshaw wrote: That's only in you model, and leaves out the rest of the world. My hunch is it's good to watch the rest of the world for diverging continuities too... Nothing prevents a person from explicitly representing and revising beliefs about the world in a model, especially in an ABM. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] bye
There is much further to fall, and I think it's likely the Obama plan will aggravate the failure of the system and push it over the next edge. It will certainly not relieve it of strain and allow it to heal. The Obama plan is designed by the same theory that caused the collapse, and intended to pump up the process of harvesting multiplying returns from our diminishing, dangerously unstable, and increasingly unresponsive set of physical resources. If we pull out all stops to continue on that path as intended it will probably push the system to a significantly greater failure that may be relatively permanent. The only thing that will work is for the people who have financial claims to be paid more than the physical system was able to produce to rescind those claims, i.e. come to a realization that having taken too much money out of the system enough debts need to be forgiven or enough money put back as needed to relieve the system of unachievable obligations to them. Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's
Steve, I guess it wasn't clear what I meant, and you seem to be sorting over and over what is the correct pretence is for relating one body of work to another. I think bodies of work are like species in a jungle, all part of the same jungle.I think the two extensions of the conservation laws, mine and Noether's, are quite different. Certainly how hers has been used is greatly different from how I use mine. If anyone has questions. or finds a glitch. etc. I'd of course be interested. Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com From: Steve Smith [mailto:sasm...@swcp.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:40 PM To: s...@synapse9.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's Phil Henshaw wrote: Owen, You say: Clip... I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy Noether, right? She's of the same historic stature as most of the early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely should have won her a Nobel. [ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in scientific questions either, right? I had not known of Noether's theorem before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and her extension of the conservation laws. It does seem similar to the one I did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially, to have Noether's theorem as a limited case. This reminds me of the difference in idiom between the person who says Did you notice that I look a lot like Russel Crowe? and the one who says Did you notice that Russel Crowe looks a lot like me? It is (more) conventional to compare ourselves to those (through popularity or recognized work) rather than them to us. I believe that both are correct and somewhat factually symmetric, but illuminate a critical difference in perspective. I admit that when I discover that something I'm working on has been well covered by someone previous to me, that I have a mix of satisfaction (I *knew* I was on the right path), of jealousy (it's not *fair* that someone already took credit for this discovery), and hope (maybe my approach, unsullied by the conventional has something new to offer that was missed the first time). I sense that those of us (active?) on this list range across the spectrum from folks who thoroughly study previous work as we proceed, and those who proceed without necessarily being so thorough. Sometimes it is the ignorance of previous work that allows us to find something new, rather than being limited by what might have been minor mistakes or lack of perspective in previous work. On the other hand, we can spend our entire lives simply re-inventing (discovering) things that were long-since well understood. One of my areas of interest is in the emergence of new concepts in Science as well as the convergence of Scientific Disciplines. It is common for researchers in one field to not be aware of previous work in another and to reproduce it under slightly differing contexts, terminology and assumptions. Ultimately someone in one field or the other (or in a unifying or spanning field like nonlinear systems, operations research, modeling and simulation, etc.) to recognize the overlap of work and do the (then) hard work of resolving one against the other. This is why being a research librarian or working in a patent office might be a great way to become a great inventor/discoverer. Our recent discussions about Cladistics are apropos of this topic. In the process of classifying sets of systems or artifacts, one often discovers interesting overlaps and redundancies. - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's
Owen, You say: Clip... I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy Noether, right? She's of the same historic stature as most of the early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely should have won her a Nobel. [ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in scientific questions either, right? I had not known of Noether's theorem before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and her extension of the conservation laws. It does seem similar to the one I did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially, to have Noether's theorem as a limited case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether Its hard to imagine a next level for her work in this context! Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem and let us know where to extrapolate to get to your theorem. Clip... Can you formalize this in the same way Emmy did? That certainly would put your work on the map big time! [ph] I did, extending the linkage of the conservation laws for undefined and open systems 14 years ago and refreshed it last fall, told you and others about it, and submitted it to Complexity again. Not a sole responded with any comment or question. Over the years I've mentioned it to hundreds of physicists and mathematicians and believe I have never gotten any comment except one friend of a friend reportedly saying it doesn't go anywhere about 12 years ago. It presents continuity as an envelope of developmental possibilities, and serves as a guide to locating and investigating them. Sorry if I appear reactionary, but my Quantum Electrodynamics teacher spent many a patient hour letting us get a peak of just how ground- breaking her work was and how it was used by generations of physicists as a means of tackling problems that were otherwise intractable. [ph] no not reactionary at all, just uninquisitive. I'm not sure of the details of Murray Gell-Mann's work leading to the Nobel, but I suspect Emmy was needed to pave the way. [ph] I have not yet spent the time needed to understand the range of Noether's work, but I'd surely concur there are indeed lots and lots of people whose major insights wait and wait for some linkage with other things to be of either general use or get the recognition they deserve. I think that's even an important feature of how complex systems work, how their development seems to rely on strings of wonderful found objects that seem to connect unusually well. I think that's a lot of what the mystery is. Best, Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's
Saul, On first glance it appears that Noether's theorem is quite similar to mine, but just does not take it to the next level. My similar theorem starts from extrapolating the three conservation laws for energy flow as a hierarchy applying to all derivative levels, apparently like Noether seems to do. Taking that another step finds that the whole hierarchy of separate laws becomes one unified law of continuity in energy flows.The particular usefulness of that is to then work backwards from the n'th derivative to observe that the form of equation for the beginning or ending of any energy flow is a developmental sequence which has all derivatives real and of the same sign for a finite period as a necessity for avoiding infinite accelerations and energy densities. So, finding rates of change that are all of the same sign then indicates where one might find a conserved process that is beginning or ending. What I find most useful is the unprovable extension of the principle, that anything displaying continuity of change is a conserved process, and measures of it may have useful conservation laws of their own at least temporarily.For example, a complex system's total mass (however estimated) often behaves as if a strictly conserved quantity, changing only by smoothly differentiable progressions of change. That's basically how business development or the health of newborn infants is gauged, using stable rates of changing scale as a stand-in for complex system developmental health.Sometimes the conserved properties of systems display emergent or transient derivative continuities, ones that weren't there before. One well documented example is in my plankton punctuated equilibrium study, where the speciation event was shown to be comprised of a series of emerging eruptions of developmental change in the organism's profile area. Yes, it may well be true that being able to classify things need not be particularly informative. As you say, Nothier's theorem only holds for certain classes of problems, but I think that suggestion is that that class may be most generally for the class of problems that involve continuity. It's just a guess, but maybe the way the Wikipedia entry states the restrictions of Nothier's theorem to systems following Lagrangian dynamics and so excludes dissipative processes indicates that the theorem might have been developed with unnecessary shortcuts that reduce its generality. Theorem http://www.synapse9.com/drtheo.pdf Background an applying to physical systems http://www.synapse9.com/physicsofchange.htm Best, Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com From: Saul Caganoff [mailto:scagan...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:44 AM To: s...@synapse9.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's Phil, your statement in bold below peaked my interest because there seems to be a tenuous analogy with symmetry or conservation laws as described by Noether's theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem . This theorem relates symmetries in a physical system to conservation laws. E.g. rotational symmetry in space is related to conservation of angular momentum. So does your observation relating energy transfer to derivative continuity have a deeper basis behind it? Also with respect to ABM classification, Noether's theorem only holds for certain classes of physical problem and hence could form a basis for classification. Similarly for your observation? After all, there are two classes of insert phenomenon here - those that fall into two classes and those that don't :-) Regards, Saul Caganoff On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Phil Henshaw s...@synapse9.com wrote: Steve, Well,. there are rather practical sides to some kinds of top level views. You might notice, possibly, that wherever energy transfer is involved derivative continuity in developmental processes will be too. That tells you nothing at all bye itself, but might give you a great observation tool. I use it something like a change process magnifying glass. Where a natural system subject of interest displays continuities of energy flow, or any other similarly conserved property only changed by addition or subtraction, it may give you a clear view of the sequence of assembly (adding and subtracting steps) for the complex systems involved. Seeing how it's done naturally might give you ideas, or even help you replicate things of similar kinds. Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 10:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's Doug - On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as * Order matters, or * Complexity
Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Hmmm,. that does seem to be a problem for me sometimes.Didn't you build on other people's ideas and incorporate them in you models, and so create an inheritance connection between them? Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw s...@synapse9.com wrote: The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose ideas and model parts.It's basically a time network map of parentage and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes. Well, I've been designing, developing, and using ABMS for pert' near 18 years, but I must confess that the the two sentences above conveyed absolutely no meaning to my poor, befuddled brain. I' serious: none. Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to the Carnot-Cycle device and prise open the magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier and extract a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed pressure vessel containing Brettanomyces-modified Hordeum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordeum vulgare carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a moderate dosage of Humulus Lupulus-produced aromatic oils. Then, once I'm done with that one, I might just go get myself another beer from the refrigerator. -- Doug Roberts, RTI International drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Calling all cladisticists
Jack, Nice comments on the history of science and the issue. I'd agree with the cladists that design does not reveal its provenance, but with the evolutionists that most differences in design arise from their provenance. So to me, looking at your evidence to see a) how to distinguish one pattern from another and b)where the differences came from, can both lead to methods that give us greater or lesser purchase on given pragmatic objectives. Since most ABM models are probably from one or another community of models, designed to use some common features as standard and others as experimental, one might ask the contributors of the model be published in the community 'cladogram' about that, but it's going to end up looking like a network history map, which is a hard thing to read and probably as much of a challenge to analyze... Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's
Steve, Well,. there are rather practical sides to some kinds of top level views. You might notice, possibly, that wherever energy transfer is involved derivative continuity in developmental processes will be too. That tells you nothing at all bye itself, but might give you a great observation tool. I use it something like a change process magnifying glass. Where a natural system subject of interest displays continuities of energy flow, or any other similarly conserved property only changed by addition or subtraction, it may give you a clear view of the sequence of assembly (adding and subtracting steps) for the complex systems involved. Seeing how it's done naturally might give you ideas, or even help you replicate things of similar kinds. Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 10:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's Doug - On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as * Order matters, or * Complexity is, or * Taxonomies exist rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier. Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism! clip. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind spot to the danger? That's often the problem when people dont recognize the meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions (the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the problem changes unexpectedly with scale. Would you include that in your problem statement? Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much more discussion. I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions, probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people representing differing but well-considered points of view. I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but find that it is a very difficult topic. Perhaps the most difficult is the polarization that seems to come with it. I have a lot of strong opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share here. This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed. We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the many opportunities for spinning out. Ideas, issues, topics are welcome. - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k) Have any of you heard of the Academy of Management Review or Connie JG Gersick? She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a great job of threading together six different theories of change between complex system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls revolutionary change. The familiar ones are the models offered by TS Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine. She seems to come to the conclusion, yes, there are discontinuities. My view has developed as being that, yes, there are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used and not the physical process. Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of explanation for complex system features as a important reason for using the word 'complex' to describe them? Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
Steve, Phil - This is a very timely reference. I often find that Survey papers, especially from outside of the field I am working in, but on a subject overlapping said field can be very illuminating. They help to provide a common-sense perspective on the problem... help to remove me from the trees enough to see the forest, as it were. [ph] Yes, just my thought, that it seems to be a good survey by a management science person. The paper has actually been cited 750 times since it was published in 91.Clarifying the forest by getting a good look at separate kinds of trees is also one of the things I found interesting in writing my short encyclopedia entry covering all the approaches to complex systems science and practice. I may have left out just a few things. of course. but it did force me to look at the subject from several different time tested orientations. Your comment about the discontinuities are often observably in the mode of explanation used and not the physical process might be a corollary of Kierkegard's Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward. [ph] Well, that certainly applies to the discontinuity between foresight and hindsight, when in the one you're looking for choices and in the other you're only looking for excuses. you might say. :-) I'll have to read Gersick more carefully to understand what she defines as the discontinuity displayed by revolutionary change but what I was thinking was more that once you see the finished form you suddenly see the whole effect of the distributed events coming together, that would have been all undeveloped and incomprehensible before. Most of them you also would never have seen before because they were distributed, and so not occurring where you were looking too, as well as because they were undeveloped as a whole and so would be naturally meaningless too. So even if the distributed process was continuous and developmental, you would necessarily miss most of it happening, and then be distracted by the false simplicity of hindsight to boot. It is my (anecdotal) experience that many people live through, or even participate in revolutions without realizing it until (long?) after they are over. Often the turmoil that is attendant to the Revolution is not a new experience for them, a series of tumultuous periods lead up to it, and it is only the actual breaking through that ultimately marks it as a Revolution. To the extent that that breaking through is an emergent phenomena, it is often not visible at the scale of the individual observer, especially an observer who is steeped in the old way of experiencing things. [ph] What that suggested to me was that a parcel of hot air might be locally experiencing a gradual decrease in air pressure, and not much else, as it rose along with an air mass as part of a large accumulating column of air breaking through an inversion layer to become a great erupting cumulus cloud.Widely scattered things become unobservably connected is the first step as far as any part may be concerned. So for emerging revolutionary change might it sometimes be that neither the parts nor outside observers could know about it? Phil - Steve www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k) Have any of you heard of the Academy of Management Review or Connie JG Gersick? She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a great job of threading together six different theories of change between complex system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls revolutionary change. The familiar ones are the models offered by TS Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine. She seems to come to the conclusion, yes, there are discontinuities. My view has developed as being that, yes, there are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used and not the physical process. Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of explanation for complex system features as a important reason for using the word 'complex' to describe them? Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
Thanks, yes that way of asking it does expose the fact that I often deal with the issues of poorly explained complex systems like those one finds all over the place in societies and ecologies.Science is a policy to understand things better, though, with the knowns ultimately nested in unknowns, so the posture is still basically similar. For less defined systems the main system model is not in a computer, though, but in the experience of the people involved, reflected mostly in their way of making snap judgments or asking probing questions, say, about whether it's time to use the opposite rule as before. You can have interacting systems requiring alternating choices, for example, like when driving on a road where you'd expect a left turn to follow a right turn and so forth, like a period of adding followed by one of subtracting to keep a balance, and not always make progress by turning in the same direction as before. It can be both necessary and rather difficult to convince people with institutional habits to consider remarkable concept like that. ;-) Phil Henshaw From: Russ Abbott [mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 3:07 PM To: s...@synapse9.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge When I first read this question, I thought that it was somewhat off topic. It is asking about policy rather than science. But the implication of that perspective is that there is no science of policy, i.e., that political science or sociology isn't a science. But of course it should be. In fact it should be one of the sciences of the complex. -- Russ On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw s...@synapse9.com wrote: Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind spot to the danger? That's often the problem when people don't recognize the meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions (the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the problem changes unexpectedly with scale. Would you include that in your problem statement? Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much more discussion. I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions, probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people representing differing but well-considered points of view. I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but find that it is a very difficult topic. Perhaps the most difficult is the polarization that seems to come with it. I have a lot of strong opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share here. This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed. We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the many opportunities for spinning out. Ideas, issues, topics are welcome. - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose ideas and model parts.It's basically a time network map of parentage and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes. I asked what families of models there were at the SASO-07 conference on self-organizing and self-adapting software and controls. As I recall there were a great many variations on the pheromone 'wisdom of the crowd' type of learning systems and a lot of peer to peer organisms, with a couple whacko things like amorphous computing.What you'd need maybe is someone to create a relational network map and have the authors of ABM's draw links with the ones it was based on somehow. ?? Phil Henshaw From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:39 PM To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net Cc: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is likely to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting abstractions, they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy. But I would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the effort. I can't imagine an argument that says a priori that it won't be. How could anyone possibly know that? -- Russ On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Hi, Russ, Thanks for your interesting response. Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to gather information about human evolution. After all, it matters not how we got here, but who we are, now that we are here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are. But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based modeling. I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain. Might it illuminate how we got stuck in some way or other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it. But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us? that is the question I was asking. Thanks again for helping me clarify, NIck Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) - Original Message - From: Russ Abbott mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday mailto:friam@redfish.com Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists Hi Nick, What's wrong with this argument? My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, No what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think. Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art. -- Russ On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: All, For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally
[FRIAM] encyclopedia entry on complex systems
Hi, hope all are having a good holiday. I'd appreciate any comment on my condensed encyclopedia entry on the history and issues of complex systems science for the Encyclopedia of the Earth. The initial review comment was that I think it is a nice piece, and appropriate in terms of language, balance, and reading level for the EoE. Are there basics I'm missing, or better turns of phrase I might use? If you're not familiar with EoE, it's a venture of the National Council for Science and the Environment with Boston University, and fairly good at presenting the hard science of global issues for a general educated audience. Review draft: http://www.synapse9.com/drafts/EoE.ComplexSys-pfh.pdf EoE Journal http://www.earthportal.org/ and encyclopedia http://www.eoearth.org/ All the best, Phil, e...@synapse9.com http://www.synapse9.com it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] art and science
How about listing some of the true open questions, you know, what's missing from the view of science?That would be a kind of scientific use of art. So many of the 'portals' between mental universes seem to be through their respective dark matter. Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Approximation in Science and Engineering
For a course on approximation to omit individual case differences is curiously systemic, as that (individual case differences) is one of more important complex system properties Phil Henshaw From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Alfredo Covaleda Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 3:19 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Approximation in Science and Engineering Hola Este material de MIT OpenCourse que tiene que ver con complejidad parece interesante. The Art of Approximation in Science and Engineering http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-055J Spring-2008/CourseHome/index.htm -- Alfredo Covaleda Vélez Ingeniero Agrónomo Tecnología en Informática Teléfono celular 311 213 7829 * Las matemáticas nos permiten formular lo esencial y desterrar lo inesencial, lo cual propicia también hacer las mismas preguntas en muchos campos sin comprometernos con ninguno de ellos. Norbert Wiener, 1954. * FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker
Surowiecki, view is perfectly logical, but in terms of natural systems rather unrealistic. The standard bearers of the old order are unlikely candidates for agile innovators in the new one. There are profound language differences, and lots of other things. James should watch how real things really grow. It sounds much too much like he's thinking of businesses as only columns in a spreadsheet... Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 12:02 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker James Surowiecki has an article in the New Yorker on the failure of newspapers: http://newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/12/22/081222ta_talk_surowiecki He makes a few good points from the economic development standpoint. Here's an example: snip In a famous 1960 article called Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net. Theres some truth to this. Local papers could have been more aggressive in leveraging their brand names to dominate the market for online classifieds, instead of letting Craigslist usurp that market. And while the flood of online information has made the job of aggregation and filtering tremendously valuable, none of the important aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper. Even now, papers often display a not invented here mentality, treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news outlets. From a print perspective, thats understandable: why would you advertise good work thats being done elsewhere? But its an approach that makes no sense on the Web. /snip I'd read James' Wisdom of Crowds, but I hadn't realized how broad his writing was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Surowiecki -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Science and Art - swarm example?
24hr global air traffic image. http://www.clipjunkie.com/Global-Air-Traffic-vid4043.html Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Required Reading: News (Lessig Blog)
If Lessig's idea is to make institutions that require trust to work better, wouldn't experts need to be interested in identifying their own expert errors to make that work.? If we found it fun to look for our untrustworthy assumptions, maybe we'd become more trustworthy... Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2008 11:42 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Required Reading: News (Lessig Blog) Lessig leaving Stanford for Harvard: http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/required_reading_news_1.html Reason: He needs their infrastructure for tackling his new goal: corruption .. well, really, the way money distorts the commons. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] what generally happens here
Carl, I think I agree, but how does a robust theory remain accessible by many explanations. In a sense that's my general idea of having one theory in any local circumstance for how to search for explanations for the what's happening question. As I do that it generally involves noting what's developing and identifying the stage of that development in the normal sequence of things of coming and going (¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸). Does that fit your model of one theory accessible to many explanations? Do you have examples of other cases that either fail to or demonstrate the aspect of robustness that you're describing? Phil (sorry if this is a repeat) A robust theory would then be one that is accessible by many explanations, unifying them by showing how they could make equivalent paths through an heuristic. It would serve to maintain open questions by allowing them to be more local. A theory with only one explanation would be a crappy theory; mistakes would propagate more globally instead of getting metabolized more locally. I liked Phil's second question, which I take to lead more towards using models to make sense of the present, rather than to predict ; The second question is more about individual complex systems in a particular circumstance requiring one to start from the limited information that raises the question and to go to the trouble of expanding your understanding while exploring possible patterns in the environment until you find one that seems to fit. Another one would be who's environment?, which I think leads one back to ontology formation/niche construction. Is it not so much that prediction is bad but rather that it is quaint for the types of questions we want/need to ask? Carl Phil Henshaw wrote: Why prediction fails does not seem to be just believing your own script.. as it were. Im suggesting that a theory of some sort is generally the same thing as a statement of what generally has happened. The real question may be sort of the opposite of but who would believe such a thing?! since believing in a theory with little or no way of checking how what is actually happening is different from it, seems to be nearly everyones preference. To do the latter you need to maintain the open questions of your induction, and not cast them off as soon as you have made something useful with it. So I dont think its a fallacy of induction per se. I think its more just that any handy tool can be greatly misused if you dont keep asking how does it apply here. There is also an all too common preference for absolutist rules that contributes to our dodging any information about how they might not quite apply too but I guess thats not just a matter of clumsiness. So, is that saying it is so or it isnt so, Im confused ;-) Phil Henshaw *From:* Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Tuesday, December 02, 2008 12:32 PM *To:* Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group *Cc:* [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Subject:* RE: what generally happens here Ah, Phil. If you are correct that the answer to what generally happens here? is regarded by some as an explanation, then the source of the confusion underlying this conversation becomes immediately evident. But who would believe such a silly thing?! What generally happens here is just a summary statement of past experience One cannot rationally pass from such a summary of past events to any statement about the future without a theory of some sort that models the world as the sort of place where what generally has happened is what happens in the future. Could it be the case that all this talk about the evils of prediction has occured because Epstein and a few others woke up yesterday to the Fallacy of Induction? Oh, my. Say it isnt so! N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Original Message - *From:* Phil Henshaw mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com *Sent:* 12/2/2008 8:28:03 AM *Subject:* RE: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes Theres always the difference between the kind of question you ask and the type of prediction and explanation for it. For example, you might ask either what generally happens here or what is happening here. The first asks for a simple explanation and a rule of thumb type prediction. It might be helpful for responding to the second question, or not. The second question is more about individual complex systems in a particular circumstance requiring one to start from the limited information that raises the question
Re: [FRIAM] what generally happens here
Nick, Well, it's hard to follow all the different conventions people have for the terms they use. I agree that a generalization implies a broader and more inclusive way of explaining things, but I find that most generalizations are rather particular to the assumptions of the person or the community that finds them inclusively explanatory. so. I keep having to attach the little foot note for the way the question was asked.As they say y is a crooked letter. :-) but experience suggests there are some explanations that have very great generality, and other that have less, though it's hard to tell which much of the time.Asking about 'causes' doesn't always narrow it down for me. I think it's a little less confusing to ask how something happened rather than why as the causal question.You tend to use wild leaps of association that way. :-) I still endlessly stumble into how language equates different metaphors in a speaker's and listener's mind with processes in the physical world we occupy in common, making it unusually difficult to be clear about whether our words are referring to anything in common a listener and speaker might independently consider. I think you were recently puzzling over why it's so very hard to communicate anything in particular.Do you think this mixed reference problem might have something to do with that? Phil Henshaw From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 1:57 PM To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: what generally happens here Phil, I strongly disagree. The difference between an explanation and a generalization is, plainly, a model of the process being summarized in the generalization. Explanations inevitably invoke metaphysics ... not only a generalization but a vision, picture, a understanding of how the world is. Even if all swans WERE white, the fact that this bird was a swan would not, to me at least, be a satisfying explanation for why it is white. I guess this is where I part company with Hempel. An explanation, by its very nature, requires us to paint the roof of the chapel from our imaginations. The explantion is what accounts for the generality, not the generality itself. It is the reason WHY all swans are white, not the fact that they are. In my world, anyway, explanations speak of causes. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Original Message - From: Phil Henshaw mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning mailto:friam@redfish.com Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 12/2/2008 11:09:33 AM Subject: RE: what generally happens here Why prediction fails does not seem to be just believing your own script.. as it were.I'm suggesting that a theory of some sort is generally the same thing as a statement of what generally has happened. The real question may be sort of the opposite of but who would believe such a thing?! since believing in a theory with little or no way of checking how what is actually happening is different from it, seems to be nearly everyone's preference. To do the latter you need to maintain the open questions of your induction, and not cast them off as soon as you have made something useful with it. So I don't think it's a fallacy of induction per se. I think it's more just that any handy tool can be greatly misused if you don't keep asking how does it apply here. There is also an all too common preference for absolutist rules that contributes to our dodging any information about how they might not quite apply too. but I guess that's not just a matter of clumsiness. So, is that saying it is so or it isn't so, I'm confused. ;-) Phil Henshaw From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 12:32 PM To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: what generally happens here Ah, Phil. If you are correct that the answer to what generally happens here? is regarded by some as an explanation, then the source of the confusion underlying this conversation becomes immediately evident. But who would believe such a silly thing?! What generally happens here is just a summary statement of past experience One cannot rationally pass from such a summary of past events to any statement about the future without a theory of some sort that models the world as the sort of place where what generally has happened is what happens in the future. Could it be the case that all this talk about the evils of prediction has occured because Epstein and a few others woke up yesterday to the Fallacy of Induction? Oh, my. Say it isnt so
Re: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes
There's always the difference between the kind of question you ask and the type of prediction and explanation for it.For example, you might ask either what generally happens here or what is happening here. The first asks for a simple explanation and a rule of thumb type prediction. It might be helpful for responding to the second question, or not.The second question is more about individual complex systems in a particular circumstance requiring one to start from the limited information that raises the question and to go to the trouble of expanding your understanding while exploring possible patterns in the environment until you find one that seems to fit. I think there are lots of differences between any kind of explanatory causation and the instrumental causes.Maybe explanations become useless if they try to include all the complexity of the instrumental processes, but also often loose their value by ignoring the underlying complexity too. Re: earth quakes, I went to a lecture at Columbia recently that was just great on the physics of 'slow slips' in a shearing crust, large horizontal zones of gradual internal tearing within the crust, having leading vibration events and propagation fronts, etc. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 3:04 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes Dear All, We have been having a discussion on a SF Site called Wedtech about the relationship between explanation, simulation, and prediction. If you want to get a sense of the starting point of that discussion, have a look at Josh Epstein's forum entry in the current JASSS, which seems to be just about as wrong headed as a piece of writing can be. In it, he makes a radical separation between prediction and explanation, implying that the quality, accuracy, scope, and precision of predictions that arise from an explanation is no measure of that explanation's value. In the course of trying to discover where such a silly idea might have come from, I was led to literatures in economics and geophysics where, indeed, the word prediction has taken on a negative tone. These seem to be both fields in which the need for knowledge about the future has overwhelmed people's need to understand the phenomenon, so that predictive activities have way outrun theory. However, acknowledging the problem in these literatures is not the same thing as making a principled claim that prediction has nothing to do with explanation. In the course of thinking about these matters, I have stumbled on an extraordinary website packed with simulations done by people at the USGS in Menlo Park California. the page is http://quake.usgs.gov/research/deformation/modeling/animations/. I commend to you particularly, the simulations done on teh Anatolian Fault in Turkey (BELOW the stuff on california) and ask you to ponder whether the mix of simulatoin, explanation, and predicition is appropriate here. I suggest you start at the top of the Anatolian series and move from simulation to simulation using the link provided at the bottom right of each simulation. Stress buildup and stress release are represented by red and blue colors respectively and the theory is one of stress propogation. I would love to know where the colors come from i.e., how stress is measured. If there is no independent measure of stress, then, as in psychology, the notion of stress is just covert adhockery. Please let me (us) know what you think. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] what generally happens here
Why prediction fails does not seem to be just believing your own script.. as it were.I'm suggesting that a theory of some sort is generally the same thing as a statement of what generally has happened. The real question may be sort of the opposite of but who would believe such a thing?! since believing in a theory with little or no way of checking how what is actually happening is different from it, seems to be nearly everyone's preference. To do the latter you need to maintain the open questions of your induction, and not cast them off as soon as you have made something useful with it. So I don't think it's a fallacy of induction per se. I think it's more just that any handy tool can be greatly misused if you don't keep asking how does it apply here. There is also an all too common preference for absolutist rules that contributes to our dodging any information about how they might not quite apply too. but I guess that's not just a matter of clumsiness. So, is that saying it is so or it isn't so, I'm confused. ;-) Phil Henshaw From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 12:32 PM To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: what generally happens here Ah, Phil. If you are correct that the answer to what generally happens here? is regarded by some as an explanation, then the source of the confusion underlying this conversation becomes immediately evident. But who would believe such a silly thing?! What generally happens here is just a summary statement of past experience One cannot rationally pass from such a summary of past events to any statement about the future without a theory of some sort that models the world as the sort of place where what generally has happened is what happens in the future. Could it be the case that all this talk about the evils of prediction has occured because Epstein and a few others woke up yesterday to the Fallacy of Induction? Oh, my. Say it isnt so! N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Original Message - From: Phil Henshaw mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning mailto:friam@redfish.com Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 12/2/2008 8:28:03 AM Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes There's always the difference between the kind of question you ask and the type of prediction and explanation for it.For example, you might ask either what generally happens here or what is happening here. The first asks for a simple explanation and a rule of thumb type prediction. It might be helpful for responding to the second question, or not.The second question is more about individual complex systems in a particular circumstance requiring one to start from the limited information that raises the question and to go to the trouble of expanding your understanding while exploring possible patterns in the environment until you find one that seems to fit. I think there are lots of differences between any kind of explanatory causation and the instrumental causes.Maybe explanations become useless if they try to include all the complexity of the instrumental processes, but also often loose their value by ignoring the underlying complexity too. Re: earth quakes, I went to a lecture at Columbia recently that was just great on the physics of 'slow slips' in a shearing crust, large horizontal zones of gradual internal tearing within the crust, having leading vibration events and propagation fronts, etc. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 3:04 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Wedtech to Friam: earthquakes Dear All, We have been having a discussion on a SF Site called Wedtech about the relationship between explanation, simulation, and prediction. If you want to get a sense of the starting point of that discussion, have a look at Josh Epstein's forum entry in the current JASSS, which seems to be just about as wrong headed as a piece of writing can be. In it, he makes a radical separation between prediction and explanation, implying that the quality, accuracy, scope, and precision of predictions that arise from an explanation is no measure of that explanation's value. In the course of trying to discover where such a silly idea might have come from, I was led to literatures in economics and geophysics where, indeed, the word prediction has taken on a negative tone. These seem to be both fields in which the need for knowledge about the future has overwhelmed people's need to understand the phenomenon, so that predictive activities have way outrun theory. However, acknowledging the problem in these literatures
[FRIAM] Reading the signals of environmental systems
Reading the signals of environmental systems The Reasoner, www.thereasoner.org (cc FRIAM) Ive been working with an effective method for reading the signals of change within and for developing complex systems, for many years. It seems to have produced a list of apparently high quality new findings but a rather short list of people able to understand them, or the simplicity of the technique.I did a better job describing it than usual with a mixed philosophy/methodology paper for Cosmos History, linked below. It describes the turning points of developmental learning curves as resources for learning about the individual systems producing them.When the curves change direction, the directions of learning for the systems producing them are changing direction. What could be simpler? What seems complicated to people is; how do you square that with determinism? Its done as a study of the freedoms that exist within the laws, particularly the special freedoms of accumulatively divergent processes, following the lines of reasoning of Elsaser and Rosen.This approach is a way of turning the corner to acknowledging that physical processes typically combine both deterministic and creative behavior and design. It offers that individual system creativity within the laws is a better and more consistent explanation for finding such diversity of well organized things than a principle of general disorganization in systems as a rule.Determinism applies, but outside the range of freedom within the rules for individual accumulative organizational processes. The variation on the scientific method is based on physics, but is used unlike other physics methods. Its primarily diagnostic physics, for raising better questions, not representational physics. It lets one systematically explore the relationships between the different cells of self-organization that constitute individual complex systems and their learning processes. Its a window into the animating hearts of our world, opened by a disciplined way of watching their paths of development and helping reveal both what makes life exciting and dangerous. Learning to read the signals of how your environment is changing directions helps a lot with avoiding the error of not responding to them Failing to respond with curiosity to signals of change in your whole environment is to display a deep denial and a most backward kind of response to new realities. Today the world is surrounding us with new realities of all kinds that are confusing, and dangerous, but most people have not seen them as world changing for us.Having a better way to read the signals can help. But we still need to cross the big divide to acknowledging the presence of individual complex systems in our world. We need to learn to read the individuality of their learning processes and that for us, each is different and out of control. The big expert error of determinism taken as a universal principle seems to be its implication that the universe constitutes only one system. Its also big jump, conceptually, to move from an idea that the symbolic relationships we sketch on our notepads and in our computers are not actually what the systems of nature use to operate.If they have been quite effective in giving us control over lots of things, they have also been less useful for helping us see what we cant control. They wont ever give us control over the ranges of freedom that individual systems have within the laws to develop their own independent designs and behaviors. Its a jump that many others have seen but not quite seen how to make. Stuart Kauffmans new image of the universe as being indelibly creative in its natural processes and requiring a Reinvention of the Sacred paints the problem brilliantly.We find ourselves with a deep conflict, representing the new world we now find ourselves in cant be done using the tools we developed to find it. My approach to crossing that divide is based on a way to indentify independent behaviors without loosing the connection between science and evidence, giving away only the small detail of descriptive certainty by allowing descriptive uncertainty. Thats what a diagnostic physics for reading the learning curves of individual systems has some potential to make efficient and effective, while also helping to open up the fascinating intricacy of our living world to view. Pfh Lifes Hidden Resources for Learning - http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/200/259 Features of Continuity in data shapes - http://www.synapse9.com/fdcs-ph99-1.pdf Physics of Change - http://www.synapse9.com/physicsofchange.htm Learning curves Learning limits - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve Other Papers - http://www.synapse9.com/phpub.htm Physics of Happening http://www.synapse9.com/drwork.htm Phil Henshaw
Re: [FRIAM] A Very Short Introduction to Everything
From the 1st intro, How on earth did we get here? Even Albert Einstein found himself misled by preconceptions when, in 1917, he fudged his equations describing a mathematical model of the universe to make it static and unchanging, as he though it should be. When, 12 years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, Einstein admitted his blunder if hed not been blinkered by expectations, hed have been able to predict Hubbles finding. If that's the intro.. then perhaps is the post script is -If only we were so lucky as to be as unassuming as Einstein... Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 3:22 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] A Very Short Introduction to Everything A Very Short Introduction to Everything: http://images.amazon.com/media/i3d/01/final_version_of_vsie.pdf .. is an overview of the A Very Short Introduction series from Oxford Press. Its an interesting series of books attempting to be brief, pocketable and good surveys of whatever catches the author's fancy. I stumbled over this looking for stuff by one of my favorite authors, Philip Ball, who has two titles in the series (The Elements Molecules). -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Stuart Kauffman
Alfredo, Thanks. Wow, Im sorry trying to talk about my work has been a struggle over language, somehow, but you could hardly ask for a better recommendation for it than Kauffmans numerous rigorous and compelling reasons why a new approach fitting his problem statement like mine does is needed. If anyone knows people in the larger Santa Fe community that might be interested in successful applications for the world Kauffman painted, locating good answerable questions about physical system evolutionary processes by direct study of them, please pass this on to them. Its the accumulative creativity of processes throughout the universe, not deducible in any reasonable approximation by any known kind of general laws or language.Its how natural form is continually changing in new improbably creative ways and presented to us as an integrated record of inexplicable emergent systems combining countless pre-adapted features which no means of guesswork would ever have identified as having local opportunistic value. Its that intractable distributed historiosity of complex organizational developments that displays the need for a new technique of learning about them lacking any means to realistically represent them or what they are doing.What seems possible is a tractable mathematical historiology of developmental system design that allows you to at least begin a rigorous exploration of the individual design and development of physical systems themselves, directly. I even like his reverence for the discovery that coming to grips with this apparent true form of nature that has been hidden in sight from us for so long calls for more than the normal level of rethinking, our ideas of reality, our ideas of whats sacred.Still, even after proving over and over that we cant represent natural form with any language, he still didnt yet seem to see that the perfect representations already exist, and all we need is to learn was how to study them.The opportunity to make the switch away from representing form with universal laws and math is finding a method of diagnostic exploration of the systems of interest themselves. As Ive mentioned before, www.synapse9.com/PICS.htm my method should even work interactively with exploratory modeling at some point, because it points to where systemization is occurring and changing, and maybe reveals interesting cybernetic body parts to project from the real phenomena and use in definitional form. Reconstructing the evolutions of natural form can start from tracing the temporary conservation of their local laws .·´ ¯ `·.Its a present useful approach to studying real individual systems, at least if you accept looking for simple questions first, and then looking around for others. Best Phil Henshaw systems design science .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com http://www.synapse9.com/ it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alfredo Covaleda Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 4:49 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Stuart Kauffman Hola: Did you watch this? Reinventing the Sacred: Science, Faith and Complexity http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1380403261776709885 104 minutos Muchos éxitos, Alfredo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] sure signals - when the problem has obviously changed or is about to
Nature continues to change the problem set.Systems embody rules, but they also develop and change. There are sure signals of that, well, some sure signals at any rate. It's sometimes easily forecast from a long way off, and then necessitates exploration to find new choices. What could be simpler and more potentially useful, if also seemingly not understood? Wazup? What's not to get in that? Really.. Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] funny shapes..
Yes, sure, try finding a buyer for the whole pack of ideas built around modeling the future is a projection from of the past. Notice that the exact point I sold things was when I was disturbed by the unusually high rate of price increase being unsustainable. I didn't wait for a high rate of price decrease and project that into the future. I was reading the curve with the expectation that the future would be different from the past (having spent decades watching and learning the signals of when and how). The problem with projecting from the past is that the future is actually a diverging processes running into entirely new conditions, and not continuing processes with random perturbations repeating old conditions. So the way to do real forecasting is not juicing up random variables for behaviors that won't be repeated, but watching the divergences that display the new behaviors as they develop. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Holmes Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 10:51 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] funny shapes.. Phil - thanks for your timely suggestion that I should sell my Monsanto stock a year ago. Do you have any recommendations for what I should sell last week? -- Robert On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:40 PM, Phil Henshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 5yr Dow Monsanto today www.synapse9.com/issues/images/Dow5yr11.08.jpg www.synapse9.com/issues/images/Monsanto5yr11.08a.jpg Phil FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] funny shapes..
5yr Dow Monsanto today www.synapse9.com/issues/images/Dow5yr11.08.jpg www.synapse9.com/issues/images/Monsanto5yr11.08a.jpg Phil FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Today's Sci Times re: a common expert error
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18tier.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18tier.html?_r=18dpc 8dpc about how doctors who showed no bias in their treatment of patients were described as making prejudiced life and death decisions by a widely accepted (quick) statistical means of measuring bias on test, that … gave them no chance to think it through or actually make a choice… Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The Black Swan
It’s interesting how rare it is that one gets to directly address the ‘academic prejudices’ that people hold, like the little sparks one can see flying from Gardner’s list of characteristics of a “crank” and Falkenstein’s use of it. The list and it’s use neatly ignore that both rather neatly fit the model their own derogatory stereotype!...We should beware of using “neo-con like” judgment in science. I prefer the ‘mantra’ that “no matter what the complaint, there’s nearly always something to it,.. if I only knew what!” “Expert error” and “expert confusion” is unquestionably the direct cause of our world collapsing right now, for example.It’s expert designed systems that are doing it.I’ve been pointing very directly to the critical errors being made.So has Taleb, from another approach. It’s important not only look for solutions, but also to see what is unsolvable.It explains why previously trustworthy systems can go hopelessly out of control.A usual part of expert error, of course, is reading “dismissal before content” in the usual peer review process. Is that truly as unsolvable as it seems? Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 3:18 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Black Swan Greetings, all -- It was nice to be in Santa Fe again, albeit briefly. Eric Falkenstein is not a lover of Taleb, and so I'll pass this along with that proviso and note that it's helpful to think through some of both Taleb's statements and Falkenstein's reactions: http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/fooled-by-randomness.html Here is an earlier posting by Falkenstein that may give you some of the flavor of his feelings for Taleb: Martin Gardner wrote a popular column for Scientific American, and in the process received a lot of mail from ‘cranks’ telling him about perpetual motion machines and the like. So he wrote a book called Fads http://www.amazon.com/Fads-Fallacies-Name-Science-Popular/dp/0486203948 and Fallacies. In the book he describes cranks who he describes as having five http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fads_and_Fallacies_in_the_Name_of_Science invariable characteristics: 1. A profound intellectual superiority complex. 2. Regards other researchers as idiotic, and always operates outside the peer review system. 3. Believes there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur. 4. Attacks only the biggest theories and scientific figures. 5. Coins neologisms. On Taleb’s personal website he describes himself thusly: He is also an essayist, belletrist, literary-philosophical-mathematical flâneur. The third-person is perfect pitch for describing himself, and the rest , well, literary-philosophical-mathematical types—especially flâneurs—tend to be full of themselves, supporting Gardner’s characteristic #1. He prides himself on not submitting articles to refereed journals, and considers most people who are indifferent to him as fools, disdains editors, even spellcheckers (#2). He pridefully notes that someone told him “in another time he would have been hanged [me: for what, inanity?].” Wilmott http://www.wilmott.com/ Magazine, a quant publication published by his colleague Paul Wilmott, wrote a fawning article http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/0603_coverstory.pdf about him where they noted that he is “Wall Street’s principal dissident. Heretic! Calvin to finance’s Catholic Church” (#3). His website states his modest desire to understand chance from the viewpoint of “philosophy/epistemology, philosophy/ethics, mathematics, social science/finance, and cognitive science”, supporting #4. Lastly, for #5, has gone so far as to print a glossary http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/glossary.pdf for his neologisms (eg, “epistemic arrogance” for “overconfidence”). In Martin Gardner’s taxonomy, Taleb is a classic crank. (end of excerpt - via Mahalanobis 20 April 2007) - Claiborne - -Original Message- From: Phil Henshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' friam@redfish.com Sent: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 7:42 am Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Black Swan I'd agree Taleb does not communicate his main insights consistently, and uses fuzzy generalities that you need to grok to make sense of. I don't think one needs to deal with all that to get the main point, though. The reasons why *statistical analysis fails for subjects of increasing non-homogenous complexity* seems invaluable. It's a principle that might be derived simply from any number of directions, and is an important point. Our world is making the critical error exposed in any number of ways it appears. It's also interestingly central to the complexity theory of W M Elsasser that he developed
[FRIAM] how well meant system solutions backfire...
Theres a general principle that productivity enhancing sustainable design eventually consumes more resources not less. Heres a good example from todays Science section of the NY Times.It forces you to think about the whole system effects when you solve symptoms not problems Productivity enhancements are profitable because they relieve bottlenecks for the growth system .!People may select them for the image of sustainability, but the bank funds them because of the profit involved. The profit comes from facilitating the rest of the system theyre part of. The multiplying side effects of that are not noticed because no one considers them. Thats also how we became dependent on the technologies that got us in trouble in the first place - Quoting from the article: NY Times 11/17/08 Drip irrigation also generally increases crop yields, which encourages farmers to expand acreage and request the right to take even more water, thus depleting even more of it. The indirect effect is very possibly to undermine policy attempts to reduce water consumption, Dr. Ward said. Article pasted below, link http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18obwater.html?ref=science Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com http://www.synapse9.com/ -- it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say -- Observatory Drip Irrigation May Not Be Efficient, Analysis Finds By Henry Fountain http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/henry_fountain /index.html?inline=nyt-per Published: November 17, 2008 In an effort to make irrigation more efficient to obtain more crop per drop farmers have adopted alternatives to flooding and other conventional methods. Among these is drip irrigation, shown above, in which water flows only to the roots. Drip systems are costly, but they save much water. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18obwater.html?ref=science#second Paragraph Skip to next paragraph Or do they? A hydrologic and economic analysis of the Upper Rio Grande basin in the Southwest, published in The http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/proceed ings_of_the_national_academy_of_sciences/index.html?inline=nyt-org Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that subsidies and other policies that encourage conservation methods like drip irrigation can actually increase water consumption. The take-home message is that youd better take a pretty careful look at drip irrigation before you spend a bunch of money on subsidizing it, said Frank A. Ward, a resource economist at New Mexico State University and author of the study with Manuel Pulido-Velázquez of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. With flood irrigation, much of the water is not used by the plants and seeps back to the source, an aquifer or a river. Drip irrigation draws less water, but almost all of it is taken up by the plants, so very little is returned. Those aquifers are not going to get recharged, Dr. Ward said. Drip irrigation also generally increases crop yields, which encourages farmers to expand acreage and request the right to take even more water, thus depleting even more of it. The indirect effect is very possibly to undermine policy attempts to reduce water consumption, Dr. Ward said. Policymakers, he added, must balance the need for more food and for farmers to make a living with water needs. Its fair to say that subsidies are very good for food security and very good for farmer income, Dr. Ward said. But they may be taking water away from other people. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/index.html More Articles in Science » A version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2008, on page D3 of the New York edition. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Oops theory... ?
Every great idea involves a little bit of a slip up. is the idea. Perhaps that's a way to open up a discussion of the rule following/breaking aspects of change, a creative slip ups feature of both mental creativity and independent learning systems exploring their environments. The rules of a system are strongly self-reinforcing, otherwise there would be no system. So it's place of creative possibility is to insert things that might develop in the occasional gaps in the rules? Is there any set of rules that can't have gaps? Well it depends on the 'forgiving eye' of the one being asked that question, but I think all the incompleteness theorems point to a quite clear answer of 'no'. Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation
The idea offered that why cities become such thriving places for humans is because of the intensity of noise in the connections is somewhat fantastic. That's really what Storgatz Ratti are proposing, as traditional science has always proposed to explain what is inexplicable to it's method. To their credit, the one thing they seem to accurately agree on is that science doesn't have a clue how that would work, and that we do indeed observe daily that it somehow really does. They should read Jane Jacobs on the Nature of Economies or the Economy of Cities, who brilliantly describes the actual creative mechanism of the environment. The productive wide open door to recognizing it, that most everyone opts not to walk through, is that it's the diversity options, not the diversity of instructions in a creative organism like a city that do it.That sort of messes up the deterministic model, of course, but points to a gap in our rules where things could both exit and enter. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 2:27 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation Nice one indeed , great catch Steve But do we all realize the implications with the words - Feedback Loops - Giant Non Linear systems ( being measured with linear systems ) - Network theory not translating into Euclidean geometry. I found the piece on natural laws of cities totally enlightening but fortunately for all of us SaFeans we live in Discworld nirvana where no natural laws apply as Owen can testify from his phenomenal research under Professor Pratchett ( : ( : pete Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com Stephen Guerin wrote: Nice video of Steven Strogatz and Carlo Ratti discussing complexity and urban design: http://salon.seedmagazine.com/salon_strogatz_ratti.html Strogatz mathematically describes how natural and sociocultural complexity resolves into vast webs of order. Ratti uses technology as a tool to create interactive urban environments. In this video Salon, Strogatz and Ratti discuss whether building and analyzing human networks can help us overcome our poor mathematical understanding of complexity. -S FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation
So very many Berliner's seem to rate the city above Paris, London and NY. I'm wondering how you might not be aware of the status so many people see in living there! Your second comment goes right to the point though, that the Jekyll Hyde feature of feedback loops is their special beauty and mystery at the same time. Awareness of that is also a key to watching them do it, how they switch from multiplying good to multiplying harm in the relative blink of an eye. It's also one of their highly predictable features. The way markets can promote a growth in wealth to a point and then beyond it's point of diminishing returns promote a growth of instability... is one that would be exceptionally profitable for us to pay close attention to, for example. The 'bitter pill' seems to be that nature changes her rules as the circumstances are altered, and we seem to define our identities in terms of which rules we believe in, and that itself is a big mistake. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 11:06 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation Who said that cities are thriving places for humans? I live in Berlin, which is not as big as London or Tokio, but it is loud, crowded and polluted enough. It is more exhausting than exciting to live here. Lots of carcinogenic and pathogenic substances in the air. You meet every day different people in the subway. I think in a small city people know each other much better, although you meet less people, you are connected with more. But I like the following statement from Steven Strogatz in this interview, which leads us to Black Swans again: In the world of dynamical systems, from a mathematical standpoint, feedback loops, especially in complex systems, can be really scary. Because of their unintended consequences. They can create all the beauty and richness in the world around us as well as unforeseen horrors. -J. - Original Message - From: Phil Henshaw To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 3:22 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation The idea offered that why cities become such thriving places for humans is because of the intensity of noise in the connections is somewhat fantastic. That's really what Strogatz Ratti are proposing, as traditional science has always proposed to explain what is inexplicable to it's method. To their credit, the one thing they seem to accurately agree on is that science doesn't have a clue how that would work, and that we do indeed observe daily that it somehow really does. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation
Peter, If that's what you saw in their discussion then that's fantastic. It's a common either a right brain thinking sign of an approaching ah ha moment to come to a real impasse, often a sign of an approaching new realization. Either that or of dumping the whole mess and being given the gift of a clean slate, or both! The basic difference I was hoping to bring out is that in natural systems exceedingly complex things are made simple when they are pulled as a chain of connections, but and even fairly simple things become unmanageably complex when you try to push them as a chain.The difference is between things getting pulled out of an environment by their user versus being pushed together into a tangle by some observer. Observer control of individual complex systems simply does not work. Sometimes we can apply observer control to statistically regular things that seem to take care of themselves the same way whatever we do to them.That can work fine. and be quite useful.It's no way to steer individualistic complex systems, though. Jane Jacobs is not the only person to point out the importance of environmental complexity as a foundation for environmental systems to thrive. It's the rich diversity of different kinds of technology, ways of thinking and overlapping interests that is key to the vitality of the vibrant cities, industries and conversations. It has to do with both stimulating the creativity of individual innovators and the adaptability of their communities in a changing world.Because it's the diversity that allows creativity and flexibility, decreases in diversity threaten ecosystems with collapse, as 'one legged stools' fall over.An urban example is how the automotive mono-culture around Detroit caused it to be a one-idea town that could not imagine anything else to do, and deteriorated after the automotive boom. The whole subject of complex natural systems is about how the parts learn new tricks, and adapt as their own behavior or other things change their environments.Anywhere I look for it I find the creative parts do their part in that by local exploratory learning processes, small scale evolutionary elaboration and selection. That's the inventor in the garage thing, or the idle conversations at lunch thing.It appears to only work if the learning parts have some rich leftovers of other forms to explore, and are not pushed in a way that disrupts their learning.It seems to be most basic to caring for systems you really must rely on to take care of themselves. Phil Henshaw From: peter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 1:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation Exactly the point that stuck out to me is two experts ( Top Rated ) from different disciplines saying This is scary we really don't know and should find out instead of heck lets just build it and see if the humans live ( We don't even do that to amphibians or reptile pets ) this from a senior member of a profession who's egos are bigger than Everest and about as unreachable. The big kicker here will always be You cannot measure or model therefore manage Giant Non linear Complex Systems with simple linear technology not mater how pretty the GUI Phil mentions Jane Jacobs and her work which is full of visually identified rules ( that work and do not ) with feedback loops and I will add Chris Alexander http://www.patternlanguage.com/ ( we are using both in our parametric model designs of education facilities tied to educational excellence ) Jochen's point about Berlin not being the greatest place to live in can be I think covered under What exactly do you call excitement that every psychopath wants to know and as Jane Jacobs and even Ratti points out designs go wrong but in many cases its just left up to the people in the FUBAR to suffer baby suffer. Again from the silliness and partially scary aspect --- model your city or town on Discworld and see how close you can get, thats either good news or bad depending on your Guinness quota or in Jochens case Berliner Weisse ( : ( : pete Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com Phil Henshaw wrote: The idea offered that why cities become such thriving places for humans is because of the intensity of noise in the connections is somewhat fantastic. That's really what Storgatz Ratti are proposing, as traditional science has always proposed to explain what is inexplicable to it's method. To their credit, the one thing they seem to accurately agree on is that science doesn't have a clue how that would work, and that we do indeed observe daily that it somehow really does. They should read Jane Jacobs on the Nature of Economies or the Economy of Cities, who brilliantly describes the actual
Re: [FRIAM] Obama, Proposition 8
I think that's actually very consistent with what I *intended* to say anyway. ;-)I think most married people I know thought the legally unbinding (formal spiritual) marriage was the real one, and I was just saying people should have the choice of what they think is the real symbol of their commitment, so long as they know if they want legal rights, obligations and recognitions from the government they need to pay $25 and sign a form too. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peggy miller Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 11:51 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Obama, Proposition 8 In response to Phil Henshaw, briefly, I believe there still remains a place for civil marriage -- that marriage has taken on a non-religious place in most people's hearts, sort of like Christmas trees and Christmas carols. It speaks of love, devotion, fidelity between two consenting adults, and should be something any two adults can partake in civilly. Love between two people should be able to celebrate and exist under a civil union, legally undertaken. ... and that union, historically, is called marriage. and I think gay male couples can also sort of choose the husband / wife roles to some degree -- though hopefully all couples, gay or straight, are beginning to edge into a shared mixture of both -- so does that mean that a straight couple who don't want to assume husband and wife roles are not able to be married -- maybe not under Webster .. So .. I have argued myself towards your position, rather than mine!! A new definition may be called for here. Peggy FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?
Steve, [ph] So we see many of the same historic signs of explosive acceleration, it's just a fact, and how it's been accumulative (till last month anyway. :-) ) Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of. People have declared the sky is falling and the end is near endlessly it seems too. There are plenty of other times and places when the sky WAS/IS falling compared to today. I am usually in the position of arguing your point. [ph] Oh, I'm not saying the 'sky isn't falling', but observe that when people thought so the real part of it just fell on the half the world that was replaced by the multiplications of the other. I think part of that persistent illusion was that it wasn't an illusion for the part of the world the rest of us stopped caring about. or something vaguely like that. I suppose we could now be being fooled the other way, by trusting that the appearance of danger isn't dangerous.In personal terms the continual acceleration of change has just seemed to mean excessive generation gaps and people with rich life experience not having much to teach the next generation.whizzing along in somewhat of a daze it seems. I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit. The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not? There are two key, qualitative differences having to do with human scale. One is that by having longer productive periods in life, under accelerated change, most adults have to endure several important changes in their lifetime. The other is that much of our technology is becoming life-extending and personal capability enhancing. There may be thresholds we have already crossed or on the verge of crossing which are pivotal. I don't think magic is what we're talking about. One would not have any way of confirming a premonition of magic. I don't know that magic is relevant, if I understand your point. What I think is important is positive feedback loops and time constants dropping below certain thresholds. [ph] right, the time constants, or in my focus, the learning response lag times What I don't know I can agree with is the following: I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching 'water shed moments' is very likely to be verifiable if they're real. I think that precisely the opposite is true. I think the best we can do is avoid regimes where such change is likely to be precipitated, not precisely when the system will go through a phase transition or what the phase it is transitioning to looks like. [ph]I didn't mean to suggest that one can't be caught by surprise when crossing unobserved and unsuspected thresholds or 'trip wires' in a changing world. The main one of those may be psychological, being fixated on our stereotypes for things and not paying attention to the independently changing and behaving things of the world they represent. What I'm saying is that if you do feel something coming it should be possible, using my approach of identifying developmental continuities anyway, to tell whether you know enough about it to be referring to something real or not. At one point I felt that same general acceleration of change and saw how it gave us the power to decide things with ever more far reaching effects with ever less thought, and it seemed suspicious. I then did dig to the bottom of it I think, and found very substantial reason why acceleration would continue until we were blindsided by errors of judgment resulting in cascading failures due to faults no one would have thought to look for. I got it down to continuous growth being a direct violation of the conservation laws actually, because the complexity of it's response demands would naturally exceed the learning lag times of its unchanging parts, and instantaneous responses require infinite forces.That our world is now indeed collapsing for essentially that reason isn't what proves the theorem. It's examining the reasoning, perhaps aided by the example of in happening before our eyes, to see that there are no other options. It's a fascinating puzzle. Others have seen the same radical acceleration of change and imagined a sort of 'convergence' in other areas like in computing power, and imagined other previously unimaginable things must be quickly approaching, like the machines of the world gaining consciousness. In that case I'd just say, well point to it, and show me where it's developing. That's the *sign* of a valid premonition to me, being able to point to the substantial leading signs showing where it's actually happening, not just some projection or
Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?
Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose?? Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative completion of the process of exploding rates of change? Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Johnson Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 3:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] com Subject: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete? All: Some of us may recall Bruce Sterling's fun site, Dead Media, technologies that no longer are necessary or exist. http://www.deadmedia.org/ The human side of all that can now be found at Obsolete Skills http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills Build your personal timeline of obsolescence, friends. -tom -- == J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA www.analyticjournalism.com 505.577.6482(c)505.473.9646(h) http://www.jtjohnson.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. -- Buckminster Fuller == FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Obama, Proposition 8
Yes, that's the problem that simple rules get into with complex subjects. Polygamy is taboo for quite other reasons it seems. I'd say let marriage be whatever the spiritual tradition you feel part of says and let whoever wants to fulfill the legal obligations of civil unions, whatever they happen to be called, do that too. Then who people are in their relationships is quite up to them. I think there are too many overlapping kinds of interpersonal relationships to start drawing lines between them, and what nature does to solve that problem, let them all drink out of the same stream, is the way to sort things out. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 12:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Obama, Proposition 8 Thus spake Phil Henshaw circa 11/11/2008 09:12 AM: It's not really about definitions, That was precisely my point. However, the law _is_ about definitions (though the purpose of the law is not about definitions). Hence, my preferred solution regarding the law would be to eliminate the concept of marriage completely, for everyone. This would include legalizing poly[gamy|andry]. If 2, 3, or N people want to enter into a contract that involves household assets and medical power of attorney, then so be it. But leave your religion at the threshold of the courthouse. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?
Steve, I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind? We've had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time. Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of. People have declared the sky is falling and the end is near endlessly it seems too.I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit. The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not? I don't think magic is what we're talking about. One would not have any way of confirming a premonition of magic.I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching 'water shed moments' is very likely to be verifiable if they're real. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:56 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete? Phil Henshaw wrote: Does it just accelerate indefinitely, like the singularity guys propose?? Or does it reach some point of stabilization as a process, and a relative completion of the process of exploding rates of change? I feel that I am an anachronism, though I am probably not alone on this list. In reviewing the list of obsolete skills I find that I hold over half of them and actually practice half of those. For example: I still adjust the timing, gap the plugs and points, and clean the carbuerator on my 1949 ford truck. I cut my own firewood (often with handsaw and axe rather than chainsaw and logsplitter). I cook my meals on a wood cookstove which is my only heat other than the sun. I have built my own structures of mud and straw. I make my own charcoal and use it to forge my own iron and steel implements. I grow (some of) my own food. I have not owned a television for 20 years. I still own an operable manual typewriter. I was born just before Sputnik went up. I watched men walk on the moon. I've seen every square meter (literally) of the earth mapped from orbit. I've seen the surface of Mars via telepresence. I've watched global climate change go from a rough concept to a conspiracy theory to a widely accepted theory to an almost-directly experienced phenomena. The sunburn I got in NZ after 10 minutes on the beach at Sea Level helped to make the Ozone hole more real to me, for example. I have also personally experienced the accelerated advance of knowledge and technology. I have worked on some of the most advanced big physics, new biology, and advanced computing projects in the world. I was already a veteran user of the internet (NSFnet, ArpaNet, UUNet, etc.) when it was opened up to the world. I read Drexler's seminal nanotechnology-coining Engines of Creation while it was still only his master's thesis. I attended Feynman's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (first given the year I was born!) and Reversible Computing lectures. The list goes on. I am not unlike most of you on this list in this extreme contrast of experiences. Some here are at least a few years older than me, and many are much more well connected/embedded in the science and technology realm. Some here were born before the Manhattan Project. Many of you may even be mildly bionic (replaced hip or knee, pacemaker, etc.) and many of you will become moreso, possibly unto immortality. Singularian Rant We are perhaps at a unique cusp in time. I believe (but do not so much approve of) Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity up to the question of what it means to be *human*. If some of us do succeed in living forever, which almost requires replacing all of our meat, one piece at a time (like the Tin Man of Oz) or all at once (Kurzweil's upload), will we be the same person? Will we even be the same species? Would we even recognize ourselves? What is intelligence/cognition/self without embodiment? The turmoil in politics (last 8 years), economics (coming on hard as I type), and religion (fomenting for decades with possible more-acute symptoms any year now) may only be a mild tremor leading up to the extreme and abrupt changes we may be in for. Maybe I've read too much Science Fiction, too much Utopian/Dystopian fantasy. Maybe I am too easily fueled by Morbid Fascination. For better and/or worse, there are big changes afoot. Can Complexity Science help us to predict anything specific, help us to avoid any of the least desireable changes
[FRIAM] the most powerful force?
Einstein is reputed to have said the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. Lots of people think it is quite apt in any case. There are so many people who dont see it though, maybe some of you guys who are on the fence could point out what the uncertainty about it is.I see growing incremental change as a progression over time, the pattern of explosions, but many people dont seem to. How would I convey that to people who are not clear about it? Phil Henshaw Phil Henshaw AIA AAAS natural systems design science .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: http://www.synapse9.com/ www.synapse9.com it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] In Praise of Doubt, and ...
And the usual flaw being sure about how things would seem to have worked in the past, and possibly not notice them diverge over time.? Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Smith Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 4:21 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] In Praise of Doubt, and ... Well, I shouldn't even poke my head above the weeds in this one, because this thread has way too much energy for me, but I just couldn't resist. Think of this as a prosodic rather than a semantic reply... I think we are reaching the heart of the problem with human nature. We want to be correct and we want to be precise and we want to be sure. We are all aware of the branch of statistical learning theory known as PAC-learning, or Probably Approximately Correct -learning (?). One of the few ideas with which I can be completely comfortable. Eric FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] In Praise of Doubt, and ...
Yea, sort of like teaching creationism for science is teaching determinism for life.. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 12:37 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] In Praise of Doubt, and ... Good find Russ... Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying It is better to be wrong than vague When Juxtaposed with Feynman's It is perfectly consistent to be unsure I think we are reaching the heart of the problem with human nature. We want to be correct and we want to be precise and we want to be sure. Human nature, on the other hand, doesn't care and would generally rather have simple, easy, clear answers, even if they are dead wrong. On Modeling and Human Nature: In my own work with scientists and engineers and decision makers I constantly find them wanting me to help them find simple, clear, absolute answers and only the best of them are delighted when the find I can only help them with the simplest answer of all - it depends and then clarify (somewhat) with and this is what it depends on and how. I too feel Doug's pain (or chronic irritation) but mine extends beyond the bounds of fundamentalist religion to wide swaths of our population who are not religious and if they are to be called fundamentalist, their fundamentalism is in their unerring belief in things like their own privelige, their own entitlement, the rightness of the systems they participate in or perhaps the rightness in the ones they would replace the ones they are trying to tear down. It is easy to be a critic, an armchair quarterback. As a youth, I was attracted to Science for the open-minded inquiry it represented. I was attracted to technology for the miracles it could wring out of Science. I was attracted to Democracy for the implied social fairness and egalitarianism. I was attracted to free-markets for the opportunity afforded hard, smart work. I was attracted to capitalism for the seeming rightness (in an industrial economy at least) that capital resources facilitate productivity and those who create and maintain such resources should also be rewarded along with those who provide labor/talent/etc. On Liberal vs Conservative: There is an old saying which I cannot attribute: If you are not liberal when you are young, there is something wrong with you. If you are not conservative when you are old, there is something wrong with you. I think this is well motivated and intended but I find otherwise. At 51 many of you will find me still young but I only remember being younger and now feel quite old, and at least by today's terminology, find I am going the other way toward a more Liberal viewpoint. The point, however, is that in you youth I was quick to adopt idealisms which were happy and bright and promising which is where the Democrats/Liberals might tend to err, while over time and the enduring of hard-knocks, I have learned that the world is often somewhat less than cooperative with such idealism and pragmatism calls for a certain kind of pessimism or at least very careful optimism. This might in fact, be the basis of the prescribed swing from liberal to conservative with age, but in our current mapping of liberal (to Dems) and conservative (to Repubs), I have not been able to maintain this track so well. There is something amiss (or aright) here. I find myself more aligned *against* the Republicans than ever and more aligned *with* the Democrats than ever. On introspection, I think that education through experience helped me a lot. I think that I learned a lot about what *really* happens when you apply the ideals of either side to the real world. I still find all (most) politicians suspect of hypocrisy and Dems erring on the Pollyanna side but the neoCons at least seem to be nothing but a big ugly wad of hypocrisy and short-sighted selfish stupidity. I don't like the implied axis of Left/Right or Liberal/Conservative. I think that these can be applied roughly to social and economic issues ( I'm liberal socially, but conservative economically is a common statement in my circles ). The term Progressive has been used often in place of Liberal and in many ways it fits better. Progressives seem to be interested in looking for ways to change our society to improve the human condition while non-Progressives (Conservatives) can be seen to be trying to preserve the aspects of society which maintain the current better qualities of the human condition while trying to avoid the (un)intended consequences of progress. I am very sympathetic with both points of view however, I find a good deal of what we call progress blind faith that change is good with opportunists stirring change for changes' sake so they can take advantage. Similarly I find that resistance to change is often motivated by those holding power not wanting to risk trying to keep it in a shifting
Re: [FRIAM] Fundamentalist-based Republicanism
Marcus, Your example of our weird faith people have in trickle down economics points to a specific instance of magical thinking, in the usual form, that we think our stereotypes have causal value in physical systems of the world. The data reads to me as that globally increasing investment generally had the claimed effect, prior to 1970, and then largely stopped. That somewhat coincides with the rise in fanatical belief in the principle just when it no longer worked. The effect of believing your stereotypes means that changing the world is simply a matter of convincing others to have the other stereotypes... I think that's what I observe in most politics and why I'm nearly as disappointed in the level of insight into our problems by the republicans as by the democrats. They ALL have crazy fictions about how to change the complex systems of our world, that independently develop organization and behavior of their own almost no one happens to watch. We just give label with the latest news story stereotype and that settles it! I dont think education seems to fix that disease in the situation where everyone apparently has it. Phil Henshaw FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] how diminishing returns triggers investor flight collapse
Great questions ! 1) As a complex systems naturalist Ive found a number of particular kinds of constant relationships that are unusually strong predictors of change. Growth is one, whole system diminishing returns is another.Im trying to help people watch their world at ITs work. I had two ways in mind.The diagram points to the main categories of resources for growth, the means by which their investments are connected, and by that how the system balances its strains in relation to the discovered profitability of the earth.The reason the system behaves as a whole is important for understanding both how increasing resource uses run into natural limits at the same time, and why no one notices. It also shows why those connections get disconnected. 2)When the stock market is collapsing its like a house burning down.Theres a cascade process. That gives you an indicator connecting its particular parts. Connecting the parts lets you better see how it all works and ask how and when it began.When the banks and others began learning they had made bad bets they tried to sell their bad bets to someone else. A lot of people noticed the rush to the door and that precipitated the collapse of trust. Where that began was with both the process that built the false expectations in the first place and the process of small local failures of expectation precipitating the collapse. The whole event involves understanding both the pump that inflated the bubble (which nearly everyone celebrated at the time) and the sudden appearance of the wide variety of pin pricks of failed expectations all over that directly precipitated it. So far I seem to be the only person whos noticed that the inflation of the bubble was certain to create points of failure that could not be responded to, and so be the first and final cause its own collapse. One thing you see at the moment is that central banks providing a safe haven for money are themselves causing a major movement of investment to the central banks and disinvestment in the physical economy. That is actively dismantling the physical economy, the core problem causing the market to slide. This whole scenario of events is actually a natural direct consequence of our standard practice of planning on continuous growth from naturally diminishing assets, one of those seemingly unchanging general conditions that foretell enormous change. Does that help? Phil Henshaw From: Douglas Roberts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 3:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] how diminishing returns triggers investor flight collapse Ok, I'll bite. How does yet another everything is connected to everything diagram help anything? While we're on he subject, does that paragraph to the left of the Everything-Everything diagram say anything more prosaic than, People invest to make money, and when the stock market is melting down people aren't making money on their investments? -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Phil Henshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thought this diagram might help. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/ResourceNet.pdf How markets equalize investment returns for physical resources throughout a whole system also accelerates the flight to safety and collapse of the whole system too, when physical returns (ROI's) are diminishing below the financial expectations guaranteed by central banks... :-( Best, Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~ 212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 [EMAIL PROTECTED] it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] how diminishing returns triggers investor flight collapse
Thought this diagram might help. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/ResourceNet.pdf How markets equalize investment returns for physical resources throughout a whole system also accelerates the flight to safety and collapse of the whole system too, when physical returns (ROIs) are diminishing below the financial expectations guaranteed by central banks... :-( Best, Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~ 212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 [EMAIL PROTECTED] it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Glen, From a whole systems view 'peak oil' is part of 'peak everything'. 'Peak everything' is also synonymous with 'diminishing returns', or 'natural complications' or 'limits of development'. I think with the present collapse there is now more time to worry about global warming, sort of, and certainly less money. Thinking about whether growing as fast as we possibly can until we run into something to stop us means running into what will stop us as hard as we possibly can, may be more important. The phenomenon of natural limits is really about how our economic system as a whole can substitute nearly anything for nearly anything, and so... equalizes the resource pressures on everything. That's a very telling principle when you learn how to apply it. That's why the increasing difficulty of finding new core resources; food, fuel, water, space of every kind, is happening simultaneously. The problem with limits is *never* (well 'almost' never) the quantity. It's really the complications and the resulting increases in unit costs, their declining material ROI's. You can always find more resources for more effort, but there is a price level where there is no profit in it. You can cross that unexpectedly, say due to unexpected new complications, and trigger market flight. If you look at the commodities curve, for example, you see we first had a 20% per year increase in raw material costs for food and energy, for the past 6 years, and now have a collapse. You could ask why the physical system didn't respond to create supply to lower the price. There was some 'sticking point' and then the speculators jumped in because the needed increasing supplies were not materializing. Maybe the whole system reached the point where the physical complications reduced the total physical return on investment too far. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/92-08Commodities2-sm.pdf or .jpg That idea is not proved by the graph, just suggested. What is provable is that persistent declining ROI's (like how much water the effort to get water uses) as we now see for all resources will eventually cross the whole system profitability thresholds. Whether people see them coming or can explain it is not the first question. You just 'half answer' it at first, asking whether the kind of effect we should see fits the general picture of what we are seeing. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM: http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ I'm currently reading The Deep Hot Biosphere and Gold presents a pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal, ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels. I'm still too ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are [a]biogenic. But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would affect peak oil? On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of oil we can exploit would rise significantly. (And much of the peak oil problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the oil.) But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction technology. Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic? (I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance ... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for now, anyway.) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
You really have to wonder in a complexity science forum why taking on endless multiplying complications, as a standard planning concept, would not be quickly brought into question. The opening statement in on that CAS webpage is: Forget the financial crisis, the true global economic crisis will come in the next ten years. The end of cheap oil and the beginning of climate change are the first warning signs. We wont be able to stop increasing oil prices in the long term. And we wont be able to stop climate change and global warming. That's only true if the phrase true global economic crisis assumes we don't realize the error in endlessly multiplying the size and complexity of the system. Even without any physical resource limits of any kind the compounding complexity of continual growth makes any system completely unmanageable. You get learning demands that exceed the possible range of learning responses for the parts not changing. We're supposed to have learned by seeing the exploding complexity of the financial schemes as the core problem in the recent collapse. The central cause of that complexity was that they were built to maintain financial system growth in the absence of similar physical system growth. We should learn from experience. The problem of collapse is not with the pins that prick our bubbles but the pumps that pump them to the point of bursting. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 10:25 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come Did you know that 8 out of 10 from the biggest companies of the world live from oil or oil-consuming products? I think the true crisis is still to come, see http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Greenspan - Bad data hurt Wall Street computer models - NYTimes.com
Well, OK, bad data is a smoking gun for why the regulators didn't see it coming. One question is why it looks like people are finding so very many different smoking guns that show signs of having been just used to shoot ourselves in the foot. The common thread for me is our deeply mistaken common purpose and 'standard practice'. Everyone's objective was to offer, promise and insure the stability of continual multiplying returns.The big bit of bad data that spoils that is that the physical system that was needed to support that endless financial multiplication, was showing emerging diminishing returns. The data was actually plentiful, though, hidden only by the people who didn't see the question! Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 7:20 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Greenspan - Bad data hurt Wall Street computer models - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2008/10/23/23idg-Greenspan-Bad.html?scp= 2 http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2008/10/23/23idg-Greenspan-Bad.html?scp =2sq=greenspan%20tsunami%20modelsst=cse sq=greenspan%20tsunami%20modelsst=cse The two most fascinating paragraphs are below / its also fun to note the federal sentencing guidelines now take into account the financial impact amount of fraud which means our merry Quants could be doing multi lifetimes in the pokey But at a hearing http://www.idg.com/www/rd.nsf/rd?readformu=http://oversight.house.gov/stor y.asp?ID=2256 held today by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan acknowledged that the data fed into financial systems was often a case of garbage-in, garbage-out. Business decisions by financial services firms were based on the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts, supported by major advances in computer and communications technology, Greenspan told the committee. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades a period of euphoria. He added that if the risk models also had been built to include historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape today, in my judgment. It was unclear from Cox's testimony just what sort of regulatory changes he was suggesting. But he said that the SEC is now engaged in aggressive law enforcement -- Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures
Gosh, I don't know why it's so hard to convey, but it's important to understand. The error in planning on things working as if responding to a normal curve distribution (i.e. admirably designed for all the usual problems) is relying on it if there is a growing 'fat tail' of abnormal events (the black swan). That situation is sure to develop when trying to regulate a system for producing ever more unusual and complex events. That is precisely what we were, and have always been, and still are trying to do. A bubble pops at it's weakest point, not it's strongest. When the 'containment' is a regulatory design, the certainty is that the breach will occur at the most critical place that no one checked. By definition it's a small error that multiplies to an irreversible point before anyone quite realizes it. The CAUSE of that is not the rare event (the pin prick). It's not the weak point in the containment that no one checked (patches of poor design or regulation or greed, etc). It's not the size of the bubble (how big the gradient is from high to low). It's the pump. The cause is pumping the bubble of complications in an accelerating way that guarantees people will miss the problems developing. It's operating an growth system and making the first regulatory error, accepting the learning curve of exploding complication required to stabilize it forever. There are a lot of 'why' answers, and some of them circular. I think the correctable reason why is the common scientific error of reading the future in the past. We plan on the future behaving like the past by trusting old stereotypes and patterns for changing things. We plan on the future being like the past EVEN for systems we design for the purpose changing at continually multiplying rates. The solution is to notice the cognitive dissonance... you could say, and just ask the dumb questions. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Henshaw Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:06 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures Of course!, the reason they fooled everyone so completely was that they were designed to be completely sensible. That's what is meant by the black swan. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 12:11 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures This seemed to be a pretty sound analysis of the current crisis: http://techtv.mit.edu/file/1448/ In particular, I was surprised to see how reasonable several things I had thought to be bad were. For example, the securitization of mortgages arose from a very reasonable desire to smooth out risk. I hadn't understood their function before. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures
Ken Phil, You speak of causality and why answers as if they ought be deterministic in some scientific paradigm. Uncle Occam cautions that may be one assumption too many. [ph] Ah yes... but the value of deterministic answers does not remove the value of closely focused anticipatory questions. One needs to be careful not to waste one's time, but there really are some clear actionable signs of change that are every bit as useful as deterministic answers. Therefore, I sense that the underlying assumption in your observation is that science is supposed to be the search for truth from events of the past. I refer you to Henry Pollack's book Uncertain Science, Uncertain World, and Michael Lynton's observation that the purpose of science is to separate the demonstrably false from the probably true. [ph] Yes, and of course what science is is whatever scientists do and that's a quite broad spectrum of things. Some habits scientists consistently return to over and over, include coming up with new questions when the patterns of what we're looking at just don't fit... I'm just pointing to a better methodology for identifying that 'cognitive dissonance' in the environment that prompts the need for new questions. It's a way of scanning the environment for signs of impending systems change, and things like that. Relative to *that* point of view the purposes of science seem to be to describe only what is changeless, and to distract us from many of the exciting new questions all around us. I would add that probably true actually means probably not false, so even that logical state is approached asymptotically. This is an artifact (meaning a residual error or inaccuracy) from a Newtonian era paradigm of science that has long been shown erroneous yet still permeates most peoples thinking. [ph] Well, from an anticipatory science view probably true mean worth checking out, so even if past data is inconclusive at the moment, the progression observed may suggest future data will become so. As we build an ever more complex and rapidly changing world, the probably true expectation that the system will expose ever larger errors we didn't see is, in my estimate, worth looking into. The problem caused by planning on things working is what I call The Sunny Day Paradox - usually faced by those who believe in a deterministic scientific paradigm. In other words, in spite of successful surgery, the patient died. [ph] Well that is also aptly pointed out with the statistical world view of the turkey in the month before Thanksgiving... He's being treated unusually well and feeling fit as a fiddle... statistically speaking he has great prospects for a long life. One last point, by pump do you mean probabilistic wavefunction? [ph] No I don't mean equations. I mean a reciprocating process of accumulation. The simple handle pump for water in a farmyard or the spritzer of a lady's perfume are analogous in various ways to the complex processes that systems use to accumulate changes. If the spritzer worked the way a growth system does, starting with an almost imperceptible discharge and then using some output to multiply the output, a person patient and persistent enough to get it to operate at all is likely to be suddenly drenched with perfume and feint to the floor if they don't pay very close attention to just when to stop it. It's the relation between the doubling rate of the pump and lag time in the control system responses that displays the range of outcomes. The big lag time to watch, of course, is the time it takes to switch it off automatic. It's actually a quite useful question.The wonder to me is why science has not yet seemed to acknowledge that systems of change change things. Phil Ken -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Henshaw Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 8:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures Gosh, I don't know why it's so hard to convey, but it's important to understand. The error in planning on things working as if responding to a normal curve distribution (i.e. admirably designed for all the usual problems) is relying on it if there is a growing 'fat tail' of abnormal events (the black swan). That situation is sure to develop when trying to regulate a system for producing ever more unusual and complex events. That is precisely what we were, and have always been, and still are trying to do. A bubble pops at it's weakest point, not it's strongest. When the 'containment' is a regulatory design, the certainty is that the breach will occur at the most critical place that no one checked. By definition it's a small error that multiplies to an irreversible point before anyone quite realizes it. The CAUSE of that is not the rare event
Re: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures
Of course!, the reason they fooled everyone so completely was that they were designed to be completely sensible. That's what is meant by the black swan. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 12:11 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] MIT experts analyze financial crisis, debate cures This seemed to be a pretty sound analysis of the current crisis: http://techtv.mit.edu/file/1448/ In particular, I was surprised to see how reasonable several things I had thought to be bad were. For example, the securitization of mortgages arose from a very reasonable desire to smooth out risk. I hadn't understood their function before. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] New Journal
Well. that you then get a list of ten pages of new journals describing new fields for discussing the problems of new information complexity and overload. might be the point. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gus Koehler Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 1:11 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: [FRIAM] New Journal Those of you who are interested in modeling and autonomous agents should check out the first issue of the International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, Vol. No. 1, January-March 2009 at http://www.igi-global.com/journals/ Gus Gus Koehler, PhD., CEO www.timestructures.com 1545 University Avenue Sacramento, CA 95825 916.564.8683 Fax: 916.564.7895 Cell: 916.716.1740 www.timestructures.com http://www.timestructures.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Blinded By Science - When models FAIL taking all the humans
I sold enough for my own and my son's security for a time last Nov for what it's worth. I chose not to sell out to see how it felt to only 'cover my ass' and not act like leading the kind of 'flight to safety' that would bring whole systems down if copied. That did develop, of course, a few weeks ago. As I saw the wave building and crashing it constantly felt like I really should have sold more, and was glad I had not. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pamela McCorduck Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 4:03 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Blinded By Science - When models FAIL taking all the humans I found that Nature article disingenuous. It just so happened I sat down to dinner with a couple of bigtime modelers on Tuesday night--one models mathematically, one heuristically. They hadn't ever talked about it with each other, but they found out they'd done the same thing: they'd done the arithmetic, saw that whatever was happening in the markets was a bubble, and closed most of their positions within the last eighteen months. Is Nature asking us to feel sorry for people who couldn't do arithmetic? On Oct 17, 2008, at 12:32 PM, peggy miller wrote: Models don't replace ownership and smaller sized business responsibility...unless can figure out a model for Caring. When I was doing bank work in D.C. for Consumer Federation, I ended up with the position, due both to intuition, as well as hard facts from studies that were performed by Harvard and other fairly reputable places-- showing that good banking judgement becomes reduced (like with any management) as ownership is eliminated replaced by ever larger scale operations managed by non-ownership managers. Translation -- statistics and common sense verified that the larger the operation becomes, with noticeably poorer decisions happening at the size of business over $1 billion in profits, matched by replacement of ownership/manager with non-owner managers, judgment fails. Caring appears to be a part of ownership. Somethings counter this problem, like profit sharing -- giving workers part of profits - - but ownership of business and smaller size seems to be almost irreplaceable. Small banks and credit unions, owned locally, rarely fail. The owner's name, reputation and thus decisions are on the line. How many names of the managers of these large failed institutions do we know? a couple? and they get paid handsomely either way .. There was discussion of linking pay of all managers more directly to following of safety standards .. but I don't think that happened. Also .. just fyi .. when we went to have a hearing on this before Senate Banking Committee .. with the studies showing that size of institutions relates to poor management -- when you get over $1 billion, management quality noticeable deteriorates -- suddenly the group of professors and academics who performed the studies said they could not testify (they were silenced somehow.) Have a great day! Peggy Miller FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. Charlotte Bronte FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The Blunders that lead to the catastrophe - Humpty Dumpty's modeling school
Yes, there have been lots of blunders. We've also not been looking at how environment is becoming increasingly unresponsive, turning a great many of our assumptions about it upside down. :-o http://www.synapse9.com/issues/92-08Commodities2-sm.pdfThis is just one of many kinds of divergent in new complexities for development that we have no place to put in our models., and so leave them out of the analysis only because we don't know what to make of them. Things like this are signals of systemic physical system change. In this case, directly, that when the price went up more food and energy were not produced. That sort of thing could also lead to blunders, couldn't it?? :-) Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 10:50 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The Blunders that lead to the catastrophe - Humpty Dumpty's modeling school The main article ( : ( : pete Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com The blunders that led to the banking crisis * 25 September 2008 * From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe http://www.newscientist.com/subscribe.ns?promcode=nsarttop and get 4 free issues. * Rob Jameson http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926754.200print=true Printable version WHAT'S the quickest way to kill a bank? As recent events in the financial world have shown, the answer is to deny them access to ready cash. Over the past year, a string of banking institutions have found themselves in such a liquidity crisis: unable to convince the market they can honour their promises to pay back money they owe. The result has been a series of high-profile failures, from Northern Rock in the UK last year to Lehman Brothers last week. The crisis did not come without warning. Ten years ago this month, a giant hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management collapsed when it too suffered a liquidity crisis. Yet banks and regulators seem not to have heeded the lessons from this wake-up call by improving the mathematical models that they use to manage their risk. That raises two key questions. How did the risk modellers get it so wrong? And what can they do to prevent similar crises in future? Banks are vulnerable to liquidity crises because they borrow money that may have to be repaid in the short term, and use it to back up more lucrative longer-term investments. If depositors withdraw their money and other lenders refuse to lend the bank the funds they need to replace it, the bank ends up in trouble because it can't easily turn its long-term assets into cash to make up the shortfall. Banks pay enormous sums to lure researchers away from other areas of science and set them to work building complex statistical models that supposedly tell the bankers about the risks they are running. So why didn't they see what was coming? The answer lies partly in the nature of liquidity crises. By definition they are rare, extreme events, so all the models you rely on in normal times don't work any more, says Michel Crouhy head of research and development at the French investment bank Natixis, and author of a standard text on financial risk management. What's more, each liquidity crisis is inevitably different from its predecessors, not least because major crises provoke changes in the shape of markets, regulations and the behaviour of players. Liquidity crises are rare, extreme events, so all the models you rely on in normal times don't work any more On top of this, banks wrongly assumed that two areas of vulnerability could be treated in isolation, each with its own risk model. When the two areas began to affect each other and drive up banks' liquidity risk there was no unifying framework to predict what would happen, explains William Perraudin, director of the Risk Management Laboratory at Imperial College London. False assumption The first set of models covers the bank's day-to-day trading. These models typically assume that market prices will continue to behave much as they have in the past, and that they are reasonably predictable. Unfortunately, while this assumption may hold for straightforward financial instruments such as shares and bonds, it doesn't apply to the complicated financial instruments which bundle up different kinds of assets such as high-risk mortgages. What's more, information about the market prices of these products usually goes back only a few years, if it is available at all. Statistical models based on short time series of data are a terrible way to understand [these kinds of] risks, says Perraudin. The models also assumed that the bank would be able to sell problematic assets, such as high-risk sub-prime mortgages, and this too turned out not to be true. It's the combination of poor price risk modelling and being unable to sell out of the position that has produced the nightmare scenario, Perraudin says.
Re: [FRIAM] Selection, Reproductive rate, and Karrying Kapacity.
Russ Nick, Regarding multilevel selection, aren't there multi-level systems involved? Certainly a change in cell behavior affects the organism, and the local pack, and larger population, and the local ecology too. But you also have reverse effects in that the larger scale orders greatly alter what each lower order differences will make a difference. Then there's the interesting aspect that some kinds of complex systems overlap in lots of ways, like complexly varied ecosystems with many intersecting levels, and so a simple hierarchy is not what is operating either. What can, if you follow it through, straighten all that out is considering systems as individual exploratory networks. Then you can still have independent ones that overlap and they still work fine, and all of them can have a role in mediating selection for all the others. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]explorations: www.synapse9.com it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Selection, Reproductive rate, and Karrying Kapacity.
Russ, That's a good example about the difference between breeding for the best bird vs. the best bird environment, but they don't immediately seem to address whether variation is developmental or random. It's tricky to find the hard evidence, but I don't know of anyone saying they could show statistically that random variation would be constructive either. My hint is that the organizational processes we can observe the workings of generally do exhibit developmental variation, like we use in any programming or other design process. Once you think of the first part in the design, the process that seems to work better for people is adding a second related part, *if the first seemed to work*, and that way extending variations from prior variations experimentally, rather than randomly.It takes some effort to imagine how genetic variation could be 'tree like' instead of helter skelter. but there a number of ways. What you need is for competitive advantage to multiply related variations. In any case individual organism growth and development is clearly a branching process, and speciation seems to clearly be an extension of a prior branching process. Maybe speciation occurs by a branching process too.In speciation the form of the organism appears to extend its developmental trees as whole, all at once, something that a tree like variation process could do and a random variation process very likely not. So that's what I think would be sensible to look for. Besides, tree-like development could do one thing that random variation can't, produce developmental step changes that begin and end. That's what is apparently displayed by my little plankton. I'd really love to have the $'s to do a photo animation of how the smooth to then bulgy shapes on it's shell changed through the dips and turns of it's dramatic changes in size from one to another stable form. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 5:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Selection, Reproductive rate, and Karrying Kapacity. One of my favorite books of the year is David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone. Wilson has been arguing for multi-level selection for quite a while -- and as far as I'm concerned he makes very good points. The fundamental insight is that everything is both a group and an individual. And hence virtually anything can evolve at the individual level -- even if it's a group. Wilson likes talking about religions (or religious groups united by religious practices) as an example of a group that competes evolutionarily. He argues that religious that promote hard work, support of fellow members of one's religious community, etc. tend to succeed. He also tells the story of the experient in which groups of hens were allowed to evolve. It was done in two ways. 1. Start with (say) a dozen cages, each with a certain number of hens. At the end of a given time, the best egg-layer in each cage were bred to create a second generaation of cages. Continue for a certain number of generations. 2. Start the same way, but after each generation, breed the best cage, regardless of how its individual members performed. Continue for a certain number of generations. The result: breeding cages was much more successful than breeding individuals. In this case it turns out that breeding individuals produced macho hens who pecked each other to death. Breeding cages produced cooperative hens who lived happily with each other and produced lots of eggs. The larger lesson is that groups often embody structures that support the group's success. To enable those structures the group needs members who play various roles. Simply selecting the most productive members of a group and rewarding them breaks down the group structure. -- Russ On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Nicholas Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: All, Here are some comments on various comments. I succumb, reluctantly, to the community norm about caps. [grumble, grumble] Glen Said The idea of expansion and contraction is interesting: rapid expansion of populations (when selection is relaxed) vs. rapid contraction of populations (when selection is intensified). The human population went indeed through a phase of rapid expansion in the last decades while natural selection was released through cultural and technological progress. Seed Magazine has an article about human evolution and relaxed selection, too http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php === Nick Replies === I think this is a confusion between carrying capacity and selection. When, for some reason, carrying capacity is increased, the whole population can expand, but this does not stop selection. It may change the nature of selection from tracking how well individuals
Re: [FRIAM] Selection, Reproductive rate, and Karrying Kapacity.
I agree with most of Nick's hesitations (except re: all caps.. :-)) Population expansion would increase the variety of individuals to be selected from, though.I think that was the idea behind Terry Deacon's theory, still with variation being random and constant, and using the same old tautology that change is caused by what survives. That there are several levels of (mostly unexplained) organization and the need for selection to somehow differentiate between them, and to do so differently for every organism in the environment, has always been a problem for me in seeing selection as the primary hand of 'design'. When I build things that way it never works.Still, if there are times of great variety in emerging designs and generous environmental capacities for all to flourish, one of the newbies may be the one that survives when the tide turns to drought and famine. That's sure how it works in economies, and ecologies are indeed natural economies. One thing I don't see addressed by changing selective pressures to vary rates of evolution is the possibility of, and apparent need for, 'mutations' that have low rates of destroying the whole organism.Punctuated equilibrium seems to imply that there are rare periods when the success rate of diverse interrelated mutations is a lot higher than the rest of the time. That there is some kind of switch that turns whole system malleability on and off. If you just had a little greater likelihood of mutations at the periphery of the genome's design, whatever that is, in preference to it's central structures, it would produce a lot more variation in functional design in proportion to dysfunctional design. In that plankton paper of mine I also broadly speculate on particular mechanisms for that. That seems to be the same issue Kirschner and Gerhart are getting at when subtitling their book resolving Darwin's dilemma and by some of the other EvoDevo models I keep hearing about where variation trees rather than random disruptions are the key to inventing new things that work . Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 2:18 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Selection, Reproductive rate, and Karrying Kapacity. All, Here are some comments on various comments. I succumb, reluctantly, to the community norm about caps. [grumble, grumble] Glen Said The idea of expansion and contraction is interesting: rapid expansion of populations (when selection is relaxed) vs. rapid contraction of populations (when selection is intensified). The human population went indeed through a phase of rapid expansion in the last decades while natural selection was released through cultural and technological progress. Seed Magazine has an article about human evolution and relaxed selection, too http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php === Nick Replies === I think this is a confusion between carrying capacity and selection. When, for some reason, carrying capacity is increased, the whole population can expand, but this does not stop selection. It may change the nature of selection from tracking how well individuals can make use of limited resources to how fast they can reproduce when times are flush, but there is no reason to think that raising the carrying capacity should relax selection. Russell Wrote === Any extinction event is a collapse of the food web. And selection only proceeds by means of extinction. So I'm not really quite sure what you're trying to nuance here. Nick Replies === OK. Here is where we disagree, I think. Let's worry this a bit, before we talk about anything else, because it seems absolutely central: When talking about selection, at what level of organization are we speaking? Gene, individual, small group, deme, species, ecosystem? etc. I grew up under the influence of George Williams who argued that no entity above the individual could serve as a level of selection and of Richard Dawkins, who argued that no entity above the level of the gene could serve as a level of selection. So, in my world, species level selection is not a powerful cause of evolution. Indeed, on some definitions, species, by definition, cannot compete. Now, in the last decade, I have thrown off Williams' shackles and started to talk about selection at the level of the small group. And, indeed, I do know that some others have started talking about species-level selection. But species level selection has not become the received view, has it If not, the statement above must be EXTREMELY [whoops, _extremely_] controversial. Let's pause here and see what others say. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting
Well, maybe their environment is less rich than some, but is then just what they CAN explore, and have different ways to respond to. I guess you let them eat each other or leave each other along. Maybe they could also attach different tags to each other to identify 'good guys' from 'bad guys' to be recognized by others maybe, or other things. In nature a major complication is that organisms rely on others of different kinds for their resources and so competitive advantage is generally unstable if anyone 'wins' the 'competition'. Maybe you could have 'poison' that is toxic to all produced and slowly dissipate if any one organism dominates or something, and see what strategy variations might regulate their discovery of how to maximize the community without that happening. Phil -Original Message- From: Russell Standish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 7:20 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 01:54:45PM -0400, Phil Henshaw wrote: Russ, You say: I'm trying a slightly different tack with Tierra, of artificially inducing mass extinctions every now and then. I have also tried reducing parsimony pressure from time to time (I'm not sure what would be the biological world equivalent of this - possibly variation in background radioactivity or cosmic rays)... If your 'organisms' in Tierra were organized around feedback loops that developed by exploring their environments, might you experiment with have them be variably exploratory? Phil Tierran organism are much simpler than that. They basically just reproduce until they die. Some manage to parasitise the resources of others. But there is little in the way of environment for them to explore (which is a criticism levelled at these experiments to be sure). -- --- - A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au --- - FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO what is data anyway
Peter, Nice, That's definitely very poetic, making clear why one needs to learn how to read beyond the facts and the data, as we are all taught never to do.! Still it seems to omit some of the tension within analysis which allows that to happen, and that Cousins and Whitehead both seem likely to have been interested in too. The best part of facts is when they add up to dissonances, overlapping 'almost logics', that require new questions, and how one of the easiest things to do with analysis is to treat whatever upsets old questions as noise.;-) Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 5:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; 1st-Mile-NM Subject: [FRIAM] S what is data anyway On the quest of how truth / morality and honesty drive data ( or not ) I came across this priceless quotation which I though I would share. Call me nuts but it makes so much sense QUOTATION: There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced. ATTRIBUTION: Norman Cousins (1912-1990), U.S. editor, author. Freedom as Teacher, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, Norton (1981) ( : ( : pete -- Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness and blind spots Was: Self-awareness
Steve, Good, so if we're only to create a similarly huge number of unconsidered regions by acknowledging that some systems are both highly systematic and completely out of control, let's pick it apart a little. It is indeed sad that we seem to need such dramatic demonstrations as having our whole economic world vaporize to get our attention. The Missouri mule problem I guess, a little something to spark our attention. My take, for many years, is that standard procedure is the problem, systematically transferring earned incomes to unearned incomes, by accumulative %'s. In a physical world that's the only cause needed.So I think that's what we're seeing snap back this week, the elastic links between limitless and limited things, as I and others have said would be the direct consequence of continuing to use that procedure while waiting to see what would happened. After a rubber band has snapped there's less one can do, of course, but still worth having strategies reflect an understanding of the problem. I think there are several kinds of uncontrolled systems. Some appear uncontrolled but actually represent continuing unaltered regular processes, like random walks, chaotic systems, bifurcation and ABM systems where all the parts follow the same unchanging rules.That sets a kind of odd partition, as these all seem to be logical systems.The ones that don't have rules to follow, and display systematic behaviors that come and go are generally found to be individual physical systems. Of course that's sort of begging the question, since it's saying that all mathematical control is 'imaginary' and has to work through individual physical systems that are uncontrolled, but that's one of the weird walls (categorical differences) I think you naturally run into. One of the most interesting groups of uncontrolled phenomena are the temporary divergent processes, maybe looking like a kind of 'tunneling' through potential barriers, that may be rather quick but you can often catch a glimpse of.Energy transfer by fluid convection begins like that, as when warm air is under cool air and needs to have a 'hole' in the barrier layers above develop to make the energy flow channel. The little run-aways that start that process don't seem to have precedents or to be responding to any influence from what will disrupt them later, but to propagate freely for a short period.That separation between things that will collide but can't respond to approaching collision till it happens. is a key characteristic. Another more personal example would be your own quick smile in waving to a friend that carries no pretense of the grimace, when in your exuberance, your hand accidentally clips the person you're sitting with. I did that this week!!Those kinds of systems that are part of happening wouldn't work at all the same way if there wasn't space and time gaps between them, their beginnings, ends and collisions, etc. Whether predictable or not, individual events often start with events that have no past and then as they develop, shuttle back and forth between being divergent from everything around them and then achieving behavior quite close to some equilibrium.That when they run into things that have no past for them they are disrupted and change form in locally emergent ways puts the same big ? at the end of the chain too. It's not that one couldn't perhaps develop a 'God's eye view' of local circumstances and devise some equation that could imitate recorded measures, and get a reasonable single circumstance emulation. Modeling artificially controlled conditions has worked extremely well for lots of things. The larger operational definition of 'uncontrolled' then is all the stuff which that method and interest in control hasn't worked for, and then throw in all interests other than control we might have asked about. The trick for exploring the divergent processes in my view is that the parts that are interacting don't have the option to know the unknown, nor a place to store such a formula, or any ways to follow one.They have to act without knowing what they're going to run into. That makes the theory of endless compound multiplying economies, guaranteed to never run into anything, seem more ironic than any irony scale could possibly measure. Yet it made perfect sense to so very many! The most useful identifier I found was that the continuity of events requires every systemic change in behavior to begin with a little bang, a divergent eruption of behaviors having no direct precedent. Where those little bangs are evident or implied the uncontrolled systems they initiate I call independent, in that their beginnings have no precedent causes that the later developed system could have had any information about. Too bad about the several hundred trillion we blew this week. but maybe it'll turn out to be well worth it.It's a little like getting our first peek
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting
Nick, I think I agree with you. You say So whether relaxed selection produces 'exploration of morphology space' will depend on the structure and stability of the environment in terms of size and longevity of the species. If the evidence, that S J Gould brought to everyone's attention, is that speciation occurs typically by a rapid spurt of evolutionary change, or alternately in a confined ecology, or both, a time space confinement, that describes bounds within which the genetic mould is somehow relaxed and resolidified. The question is if it occurs maybe once in a period of a million years for each species... and for just one of perhaps thousands of species in the same environment at a time, what would be required to do that?? Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:37 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting Russell Standish offered the following question: What do you think of relaxed selection ? My inexpert response: Well, I am uneasy about the concept. When I used to be a teacher of these things, students LOVED the idea that some ages and places are harsh and some are mellow, and that selection is relaxed in the latter. The metaphor is drawn, I assumed, from human economics, where some decades can be easy and some difficult. But the metaphor is dangerously misleading ... [thompson loves metaphors but he loves some metaphors a whole lot less than others, and this one is a terrible one.] The metaphor is terrible because the time-scale of oscillations of good and bad times in economics is WAY too short for the reproductive capacity of the species to respond. So the times are sort of independent of the reproduction of the species. But in the evolutionary time scale, whether times are good and bad is determined not by how lush the environment but by whether the environment has been lush long enough for the reproductive potential of the species to catch up and de-lush it. So rather than think about good times in evolution, I would tend to think of periods of rapid expansion of populations (when selection is relaxed) and rapid contraction of populations (when selection is intensified) and periods of stability (when selection is intermediate.) One of your respondents seemed (sorry, too lazy to go back and look) to confound this issue with the question of how bushy or trunky the evolutionary tree is. I dont think... that the two are related. Bushy phylogenies ... like that of australopithecines (the bipedal apes that were around as genus homo was coming into being) would seem to be generated by the distribution of the species over a spatially variant but temporally invariant landscape. Trunky phylogenies are produced by the distribution of the species over temporally variant and a spacially invariant landscape. This latter pattern characteried the evolution of the genus homo. The attributions of variance and invariance, of course, have to be made in terms of the longevity of the species and its tendancy to move accross the landscape. So whether relaxed selection produces exploration of morphology space will depend on the structure and stability of the environment in terms of size and longevity of the species. That's what I think of relaxed selection. Apologies if I have been reading carelessly. NIck Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) * FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting
Marcus, Well, epigenetics is important to understand and maybe looked at another way helps narrow the real question. We could consider the vast variation in canine breeds and the fact that breeding selection as an extreme form of epigenetics has not apparently altered the species they all belong to. Perhaps the question is how environmental pressures and experience may clearly influence genetics, but be insufficient to originate the kind of somehow deeper genetic change that creates new forms of life. Among other things it points to a distinct difference between 'shallower' and 'deeper' genetic change indicating that some form of structure other than noisy aggregations may be present. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 12:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting Nicholas Thompson wrote: The metaphor is terrible because the time-scale of oscillations of good and bad times in economics is WAY too short for the reproductive capacity of the species to respond. So the times are sort of independent of the reproduction of the species. Perhaps not.. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11326195 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting
Russ, You say: I'm trying a slightly different tack with Tierra, of artificially inducing mass extinctions every now and then. I have also tried reducing parsimony pressure from time to time (I'm not sure what would be the biological world equivalent of this - possibly variation in background radioactivity or cosmic rays)... If your 'organisms' in Tierra were organized around feedback loops that developed by exploring their environments, might you experiment with have them be variably exploratory? Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russell Standish Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 1:16 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting One should not confuse economics with biological selection. It would seem plausible that good economic times might lead to rapid evolution of economies, such as during the recent Internet bubble for instance, but not that it would have any influence on us at the genetic level. The sort of idea that David Green was proposing was that ecosystems (aka foodwebs) would cycle between a chaotic and a stable phase. My take on this is that immediately after a mass extinction, just about any foodweb is stable, because there are not enough connections to make it chaotic. Selection under such circumstances would be fairly relaxed. As evolution proceeds, the foodweb becomes more complex until such a time as chaotic behaviour sets in. Extinction becomes increasingly likely, and corresponding selection becomes fierce. Cycles of mass extinction followed by species radiation _may_ be a driving cause of ecosystem complexity. I'm trying a slightly different tack with Tierra, of artificially inducing mass extinctions every now and then. I have also tried reducing parsimony pressure from time to time (I'm not sure what would be the biological world equivalent of this - possibly variation in background radioactivity or cosmic rays). But currently my simulation code is broken, so I haven't got too far with this to date :( Cheers FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed Selection, a b-level posting
Marcus says: Phil Henshaw wrote: We could consider the vast variation in canine breeds and the fact that breeding selection as an extreme form of epigenetics has not apparently altered the species they all belong to. Selection from breeding would mostly be constrained genetics, i.e. a big and a small dog could be discriminated by, say, an insulin allele, say (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5821/112). However in epigenetic case we are talking about an inherited but non-genetic change. [ph] On looking up a couple definitions I find the word distinguishes between heritable gene expression from heritability in general. I suppose there are a variety of ways gene expression might be inherited, and I was falling into the common presumption that it's all in the genes... :~( Perhaps the question is how environmental pressures and experience may clearly influence genetics, but be insufficient to originate the kind of somehow deeper genetic change that creates new forms of life. Among other things it points to a distinct difference between 'shallower' and 'deeper' genetic change indicating that some form of structure other than noisy aggregations may be present. Seems to me that everything from epigenetic gene regulation changes to horizontal gene transfer is happening at the bacterial level.. What is the question? [ph] There may be so many different kinds of inheritance if you open it up like that, I would just start to differentiate by balling them all up into one, since we really don't yet seem to have a way to distinguish what does what and just recently discovered all that 'junk' DNA we can't map has some other kinds of functions we can't map. The question I was alluding to is the argument about whether organisms have any structures at all, or are just statistical distributions that record statistical interferences (that turn out to be extremely different for every species). I believe that is the usual bottom line dispute between those who think speciation represents a change of state and those who think it represents only statistical drift. The generalization of that is the question of whether any system in nature actually has any structure of its own, or if all form is just a statistical aggregation of random environmental perturbations. I think it's real obvious that systems have internal designs independent of their environments because you can watch how their internal loops emerge without determinant cause and develop locally to become resilient and independently responsive, as well as having intricately organized unique functional designs. I do understand there are a number of issues of causation it leaves unanswered, but just because they're unanswered doesn't explain how systems have such unfathomably complex and concentrated multi-faceted organization without some kind of organizational development process. I think the root problem is one of perception, that most explanations seem to try explain systems as being poked by their environments with sticks or pushed with pressures, and leave it at that. That leaves out how the internal threads of systems are pulled with either trails of crumbs or puddles of honey. There's certainly a lot that goes on at the interface between system and environment, but it's both push and pull, and I think when you start asking it's both push and pull from both inside and out. The usual idea that there's no way to cause things but to pry or whack them with a stick, seems to be missing at least 3/4 of what could be happening at any real complex system interface. It certainly seems to give me great productive questions to be open to that regarding complex system events in general. Do you ever look at systems and their environments as actively interacting, each taking advantage of each other in part, instead of just one pushing the other around? Phil FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness
On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Phil Henshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Russ, Oh, just that scientists appear to be one of the main violators of your self-awareness principle. Scientists tend to describe the physical world as if they are unaware that science constructs descriptive models of things far too complex to model, that might behave differently from any kind of model we know how to invent. That has us spending a disproportionate amount of time looking into our theories for the behavior of the world around us (under the streetlight for the keys lost in the alley) and letting our skills in watching physical systems atrophy. Do you see the connection?Is it partly accurate? Phil Henshaw From: Russ Abbott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 4:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness I'm sorry, Phil, I'm missing your point. How does your comment relate to my argument that self-awareness is a primary good and a possible way around the difficulty most people have with critical thinking? -- Russ On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Phil Henshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well Russ, what if a group of scientists were to acknowledge that science actually just seems to be descriptive after all..., and looking through the holes one seems able to actually see signs of a physical world after all! Than sort of 'emperor's new clothes' moment might be enough to turn everyone's attention to value of self-critical thinking wouldn't it?!;-) Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 10:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:39 PM, glen e. p. ropella [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So the first step is for each individual to accept their responsibility to think/speak critically at every opportunity. The next step is to package such critical thinking inside an infectious wrapper so that it spreads across all humanity. Yes, if it worked it would be wonderful. I'm cynical enough to doubt that it would succeed. (1) I doubt that we can find a wrapper infectious enough and (2) even if we did, I doubt that the population as a whole is capable of the level of critical thinking that we need. (That's elitism, isn't it.) Demagoguery almost always seems to succeed. Can anything be done about that? More discouraging is that advertising is cleaned up demagoguery. And advertising will always be with us. Just to be sure I knew what I was talking about (critical thinking?) I just looked up demagoguery: impassioned appeals to the prejudices and emotions of the populace. Prejudice and emotion will always be with us -- even the least prejudiced and least a prisoner of their emotions. Besides, without emotion, we can't even make decisions. (That's clearly another discussion, but it's worth noting.) So can we really complain about superficial prejudice and emotion when we are all subject to it at some level? Perhaps the need is for self-awareness -- and even more for having a high regard for self-awareness -- so that one can learn about one's prejudices and emotions and stand back from them when appropriate. Can we teach that? (It helps to have good role models. Obviously we have had exactly the opposite in our current president.) Actually, though, a high regard for self-awareness might be easier to teach than critical thinking. So perhaps there is hope. But the danger there is to fall prey to melodrama. It's not easy. I'll nominate Glen as a good role model, though. How can we make your persona more widely visible? -- Russ _ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Orlando Leibovitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.orlandoleibovitz.com Studio Telephone: 505-820-6183 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance)
Glen, No, taking on impossible tasks is what true stupidity is about, not expertise, and the best way to hire a stupid expert is to hire people ready to do it. Come on... heading into impenetrable walls of complexity is the stupidest thing any 'expert' could possibly recommend but we've gone and hired an entire world full of so called 'experts' doing exactly that. It ain't gonna work. You say: There's no reason to avoid relying on historically successful patterns of control. You just have to accumulate enough momentum while successful to survive the black swans. Momentum is what is causing you to be blind sided by them, not what will let you barrel through them. It's not 'bumps in the road' to crash through but true ends of the road that go unseen. The trick is that when experts sell themselves to you, they tend toward optimism (and underestimate the risks) because they don't eat their own dog food ... they won't really suffer the consequences the customer will suffer when their expertise fails. They _tend_ to promise what they really can't deliver ... or they're extremely vague about what they promise so they can hold up whatever they happen to deliver as a refined version of what they promised ... like politicians and outsource code shops. Right, but totally inconsistent with your first statement just hire an expert. In contrast, if your skin is in it, then you tend to be a bit more pessimistic (and conservative) with what you promise. Right, but inconsistent with how mistaken self-interest by the experts has spread so far and wide that our global life-support system becomes fragile enough to collapse. What I've been trying to point out is that nature is full of signals for when patching up the old model will soon fail. The hunt for the new one can be the fun you need to replace our natural disappointment that nature has wriggled out of our feeble grasp yet again!! If we don't look out for change, change will surely not look out for us. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 8:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance) Thus spake Phil Henshaw circa 10/07/2008 12:15 PM: Well, the reliance on competence is relative to the difficulty of the task. As our world explodes with new connections and complexity that's sort of in doubt, isn't it? Isn't Taleb's observation that when you have increasingly complex problems with increasingly 'fat tailed' distributions of correlation then you better not rely on analysis? Anyone who takes that job is probably running into 'black swans' aren't they? Of course more complex processes mean more difficulty in handling them. But that's what expertise is all about. The more difficult the handling, the more one needs expertise. The simpler the processes, the more one can rely on yokels or algorithms. So, I think the opposite of your conclusion is justifiable: The more complex the processes, the more powerful the skill set sales pitch becomes because the customers are aggressively hunting for expertise. But even in a very complex domain, regular, somewhat predictable patterns of observation/manipulation can yield success, despite the occult possibility of unexpected wonky trajectories. And people who have those patterns of observation/manipulation down pat are also experts. They just run the risk of being wrong when/if the system does happen to take a wonky trajectory. There's no reason to avoid relying on historically successful patterns of control. You just have to accumulate enough momentum while successful to survive the black swans. The trick is that when experts sell themselves to you, they tend toward optimism (and underestimate the risks) because they don't eat their own dog food ... they won't really suffer the consequences the customer will suffer when their expertise fails. They _tend_ to promise what they really can't deliver ... or they're extremely vague about what they promise so they can hold up whatever they happen to deliver as a refined version of what they promised ... like politicians and outsource code shops. In contrast, if your skin is in it, then you tend to be a bit more pessimistic (and conservative) with what you promise. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance)
Glen, Oh, I read it wrong then, sorry! What about the other stuff, like we have an unusually large number of experts taking on, and not letting on about, ever increasingly complex problems. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:20 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance) Thus spake Phil Henshaw circa 10/09/2008 04:48 AM: Right, but totally inconsistent with your first statement just hire an expert. You must be confusing me with someone else. I've been arguing _against_ just hire an expert the whole time. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Origami metaphor (Level b)
Glen says, The idea was that math is just the transformation of one set of sentences into another set of sentences by a particular grammar. This is (weakly) analogous to the transformation of a piece of paper from one shape to another. But then the idea driving you to do that is your own inspiration, the image of the swan, or the special one-to-one mapping, or whatever. How it fits into your own world of ideas and experience is what actually guides the direction in which you look for things to prove. It could be that in constructing math to be meaningful to mathematicians it's just a social convention that is being mapped, and not intrinsic forms of the universe, or that quite other intrinsic forms of the universe would be explored by others with different experience could they master the technique and get into the club. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 7:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Origami metaphor (Level b) Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10/08/2008 04:13 PM: Glen said (I think it was glen) It's just like folding a piece of paper. Someone hands you a piece of paper and you fold it into an origami swan. Did you _discover_ the swan? Or did you invent the swan? And Nick replies ... You all know by now how I feel about metaphors. Nick thinks being serious about metaphors is REALLY IMPORTANT ==rude shouting! So, when I say what I am about to say, I am not just nit-picking. I hope. Isnt the metaphor backwards? Given the uniqueness of the solution, isnt it more like you had been handed the swan and discovered that it was just a square piece of paper? Well, it wasn't really a metaphor. It's a simile and/or an analogy. [grin] But, no, it's not backwards any more than it's forwards. The analogy I intended to make was between paper folding and math, not between an origami swan and a solution to a sudoku puzzle. Sorry for not being clear. The idea was that math is just the transformation of one set of sentences into another set of sentences by a particular grammar. This is (weakly) analogous to the transformation of a piece of paper from one shape to another. To make an analogy between the solution to a puzzle and a particular shape, one would have to add more constraints to the shape being sought. One might then be able to determine the uniqueness of a particular shape given those constraints. But such an analogy would be even weaker and wouldn't help explain Wittgenstein's position, I don't think. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness
Steve, Well, might you also say science is self-organized to be 'robustly' avoiding the subject of uncontrolled systems too?? If something doesn't come to your attention because you're only looking for something else, it could seem to not exist. How do you explain the very large variety of complex systems that take care of themselves somehow, sharing environments with very low specific variety corresponding to their evident highly complex internal designs and internally coordinated behaviors? Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:48 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is relatively robust and self-healing. Russ Abbott wrote: Richard Feynman said that Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. To the extent that it achieves that goal, science works even without individual self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have created a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without having to depend on individual subjective honesty. For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written that, it seems to me that honesty with oneself is not a bad definition of self-awareness. Another way of putting it is that self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition. Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways science is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be known about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest -- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest. There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected. I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein
Or. another angle. Proofs represent discoveries about the invented grammar they use, with the proviso of so far as we can see? The way we define grammars changes to suite our intentions occasionally, but we're generally trying to identify things inherent in nature, for grammars drawn as conclusively as we know how to make them. They might not show us about the aspects of nature that are inconclusive, of course, but we still would like to know if our constructs are at least pointing to something real. What I find interesting is that every proof seems to imply and therefore I can't think of anything else a conclusion based on a lack of imagination. That point to proof as an acceptance of adding a branch to a constructed tree, I think? If the 'tree' itself at least reflects something that exists in nature when the grammar surely didn't is the puzzle. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John F. Kennison Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 1:01 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein I would like to respond to Wittgenstein's idea that a mathematical proof should be called an invention rather than a discovery. When solving a Suduko puzzle, I often produce a logical deduction that the solution is unique. It seems clear to me that I discovered that there is only one solution. I don't see how to make any sense of the idea that I invented the fact that there is only one solution. Wittgensteins technique was not to reinterpret certain particular proofs, but, rather, to redescribe the whole of mathematics in such a way that mathematical logic would appear as the philosophical aberration he believed it to be, and in a way that dissolved entirely the picture of mathematics as a science which discovers facts about mathematical objects . I shall try again and again, he said, to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention. There was, on his view, nothing for the mathematician to discover. A proof in mathematics does not establish the truth of a conclusion; if fixes, rather, the meaning of certain signs. The inexorability of mathematics, therefore, does not consist in certain knowledge of mathematical truths, but in the fact that mathematical propositions are grammatical. To deny, for example, that two plus two equals four is not to disagree with a widely held view about a matter of fact; it is to show ignorance of the meanings of the terms involved. Wittgenstein presumably thought that if he could persuade Turing to see mathematics in this light, he could persuade anybody. Turing apparently gave up on W. a few lectures later. I have to admit the distinction that W. is making here does not move me particularly. It seems to me as much of a discovery to find out what is implied by the premises of a logical system as to find out how many electrons there are in an iron atom, and since logic is always at work behind empirical work, I cannot get very excited about the difference. Perhaps because I am dim witted. No response necessary. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E
To add to that, there seems to be a large institutional push for business and political funded mercenary scientific research to create uncertainty about legitimate science. A comment on David Michaels' in book Doubt is their product is in the 9/27 Science News sums it up. It's 1100 references and other resources are on the SKPP website www.defendingscience.org. I also got a note from regarding the equally suspicious bloging of 'peer reviewed' papers reported on in The Economist User-generated science Sep 18th 2008 print edition on Web 2.0 tools for it as a new horizon for of speedy (and maybe thoughtless) research. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 1:50 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E Steve Smith wrote: The point of my talk of ignorance (willful and otherwise) is that to the extent we are complicit in our own problems, we *do* have the ability to retrieve some of our power from those we have given it to out of our own *willful ignorance*. Good rant. :-) I''ll only add that power is not claimed by not being snowed by the misrepresentations of those having power. It's also necessary to organize resources to influence those in power. Folks like Sarah Palin recognize that information is a weapon (e.g. see her recent incredible remarks about Bill Ayers), but don't otherwise need to be limited by whether information is true in context. Similarly corporate lobbyists are effective at influencing government, but that too is about action first and truth second. Marcus -- It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. -- Mark Twain FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E
Well, where do you put inherited 'willful ignorance'? That kind is sort of 'built in'. There are two of these that my work repeatedly runs into and I fail to find a way around.One is the evident fact that the active parts of nature develop locally and have their own local reactions to intruding impacts from other active parts of nature, and that that just does not correspond with the concept of everything being determined by its environment. Yet most scientists still remain focused on the inherited fascination with explaining what the determinants are. The other is how everyone who has it pointed out seems to acknowledge that a system for endless multiplication of wealth is a threat to everything people need and care about, but then say they're trying to ignore it to try to get along.. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 10:52 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E Dale - I think you're being too generous. I'm afraid that many fall into a category I'll call Maliciously aware. Willful Ignorance, in my vernacular is a dual of Malicious Awareness. Just as most good physical comedians and rodeo clowns have to be really, really good, to be that bad, Willful Ignorance is grounded in Malicious Awareness. Greenspan *had* to know that he was presiding at a series of dedications of a house of cards (Willfully pretending ignorance). Here you seem to agree that true ignorance may not be the issue. Again, I use Willful Ignorance in the same sense (mod subtleties) as you use Maliciously Aware. The difference is that it is the *affectation of ignorance* that makes it work. We have a system where certain players can reap short-term gains without being held accountable for long-term losses. I'm sure there are individuals on this list with more game-theory or behavioral-incentive knowledge that could elucidate the mechanisms better than I. Yes, and it is not surprising that we would evolve personality types to fill this niche. I think we've had such in our midst at least as long as we've not been nomadic. My personal belief is that survival units of wandering tribe are at least selected for enlightened self interest at the band level. At the scale we currently operate, I think it is at least (very) very hard for us to recognize enlightened self interest, much less be motivated to act on it. The most frustrating part is that I simply don't know what can be done about it and how I can help. I can choose to act in what I believe is a more moral way, guided by enlightened self-interest, but that doesn't have much effect on the system as a whole. I (and many here I am sure) share this frustration. I certainly don't have any answers but I do have a few caveats: I believe that much of the power of the worst offenders in our ruling class (political, economic, religious) comes directly from an abuse of this very frustration in the rest of us. I believe that we have two basic operating modes, Willfull Ignorance and Enlightened Awareness. We ourselves, can be willfully ignorant. We willfully seek out leaders who will promise us what we want to hear, what feeds our greed and salves our fears, even when we know better. Willful Ignorance, IMHO, is driven by the two great motivators of Greed and Fear. We constantly allow ourselves to be stampeded from one unsustainable/untenable position to another because it suits the interest of those who can extract profit from the massive movements (bull markets, bear markets, war, etc.) This is why our two party system doesn't really work. They can play good cop/bad cop with us over and over again and we never notice. All the while, if something turns out badly they claim how could we have known? but if it turns out well, they scream See! I told you so! And until it all falls down on our heads, we lap it up like cream from a saucer. I was at a lecture by Noam Chomsky several years ago. He was speaking on some topic related to NAFTA and the packed house hung on his every word. It was held at UNM and the audience was about 30% students and 70% yuppies. During the question and answer session, some poor schmuck stood up and asked. Can you recommend any 'Socially Responsible' Investments? Chomsky paused for maybe 5 seconds which was an eternity as the audience all leaned forward in their seats, held their breath, cocked their ears. When he finally spoke, a loud gasp went up. Socially Responsible Investment is a contradiction in terms. I took his point to mean that wielding and hoarding resources in an abstract form (stocks, bonds, commodity futures, currencies, etc) is always fundamentally irresponsible. The point of an investment is to increase in value relative to the market... to get ahead, and it is quite possible that this type of getting
Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E
The Matt Taibbi quote is an amazingly clear description of the dilemma of minds that make sense of things by plugging in stereotypes of the real world and so creating an imaginary one lacking internal conflicts. The error common to all such confusions seems to be discussing things in terms of pictures in our heads without a reliable way of referring to any independent reality people might consider. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 2:08 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E It was a good rant, wasn't it... Since Steve saw fit to bring up willful ignorance, and Marcus, Sarah Palin: what do you want to bet that McCain's creationist-the-world-is-6,000-years-old gun-toting-I-can-see-Russia-from-my-window sidekick garners approximately 50% of the vote next month? As Matt Taibbi said in his 'The Lies of Sarah Palin' interview with Rolling Stone Magazine earlier this week: Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin' picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. You want to talk about willful ignorance? Take a good look around you. -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Marcus G. Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve Smith wrote: The point of my talk of ignorance (willful and otherwise) is that to the extent we are complicit in our own problems, we *do* have the ability to retrieve some of our power from those we have given it to out of our own *willful ignorance*. Good rant. :-) I''ll only add that power is not claimed by not being snowed by the misrepresentations of those having power. It's also necessary to organize resources to influence those in power. Folks like Sarah Palin recognize that information is a weapon (e.g. see her recent incredible remarks about Bill Ayers), but don't otherwise need to be limited by whether information is true in context. Similarly corporate lobbyists are effective at influencing government, but that too is about action first and truth second. Marcus -- It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. -- Mark Twain FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E
Well Russ, what if a group of scientists were to acknowledge that science actually just seems to be descriptive after all..., and looking through the holes one seems able to actually see signs of a physical world after all! Than sort of 'emperor's new clothes' moment might be enough to turn everyone's attention to value of self-critical thinking wouldn't it?!;-) Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 10:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Willfull Ignorance - Satisfies NickCriteria E On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:39 PM, glen e. p. ropella [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So the first step is for each individual to accept their responsibility to think/speak critically at every opportunity. The next step is to package such critical thinking inside an infectious wrapper so that it spreads across all humanity. Yes, if it worked it would be wonderful. I'm cynical enough to doubt that it would succeed. (1) I doubt that we can find a wrapper infectious enough and (2) even if we did, I doubt that the population as a whole is capable of the level of critical thinking that we need. (That's elitism, isn't it.) Demagoguery almost always seems to succeed. Can anything be done about that? More discouraging is that advertising is cleaned up demagoguery. And advertising will always be with us. Just to be sure I knew what I was talking about (critical thinking?) I just looked up demagoguery: impassioned appeals to the prejudices and emotions of the populace. Prejudice and emotion will always be with us -- even the least prejudiced and least a prisoner of their emotions. Besides, without emotion, we can't even make decisions. (That's clearly another discussion, but it's worth noting.) So can we really complain about superficial prejudice and emotion when we are all subject to it at some level? Perhaps the need is for self-awareness -- and even more for having a high regard for self-awareness -- so that one can learn about one's prejudices and emotions and stand back from them when appropriate. Can we teach that? (It helps to have good role models. Obviously we have had exactly the opposite in our current president.) Actually, though, a high regard for self-awareness might be easier to teach than critical thinking. So perhaps there is hope. But the danger there is to fall prey to melodrama. It's not easy. I'll nominate Glen as a good role model, though. How can we make your persona more widely visible? -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Willful Ignorance
Robert, You complain about the dominance of money??How about adding a way to cap the compounding of unearned income somewhere below infinity.? I can only model the negative image of that, what can't happen if that's not done, though. Very few people are exploring the consequences of making money finite and sustainable that way. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Cordingley Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 3:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Willful Ignorance Someone wanted to know what we could do. Well, to break the connection between money and power which I think is a core problem, nationwide, I'd start with: Influence peddling: * Ban all Special Interest Groups. Elected officials will have to listen to their electorate for guidance. SIGs limit freedom of speech of the person in the street and are non-democratic so can be declared unconstitutional. * Ban jiggory-pokery with redistricting, use geography and population densities * Eliminate term limits: find a good guy keep a good guy, vote the others out. * Require Federal funding of campaigns (as has been suggested) and State * Reduce the number of elected officials to those that count for political purposes: make the rest civil service career positions appointed by non-partisan processes. You are a Judge because you know the law not the power brokers. You are a Chief of Police because you've achieved great crime reduction goals etc. Side benefit: short ballot papers and elections are more relevant to the voter. On voting rights and polling * Register everyone to vote when they get a driving license. You drive a lethal weapon: you vote. You vote in the district of your current DL address. OR * Register everyone to vote when they submit their tax return. You file taxes: you vote. You vote in the district of your current tax return. * Registered party members are not allowed to vote in primaries of other parties. Unregistered party members voting in primaries of a party become registered in that party for the next x months. * Make it illegal not to vote, punishable with $50 fine or, give everyone $50 when they vote. The rich can afford not to vote. * Use school bus routes and drivers to get everyone that has no transport to the polls. Make polling-day a day-off-school or on a weekend. Use schools as polling stations - give everyone one regular school meal for their time and their voting receipt! Side benefit: all parents see something about the local schools. * Open and close polling stations at the same universal time, for one 24 hour period. * Make it illegal for polling officials to be party officials. and it probably goes on ... We might need a national voter registration database (o...tricky) and way more cooperation between different arms of government than we probably now have (ever more tricky). Quick questions: What political animal does this make me? How do I get started? Can someone model all this to see if it would make a difference? Robert C FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Relaxed selection
Jochen, That concept of alternating opportunistic and constrained developmental phases, 'relaxed' then 'fierce' selection regimes, sounds like a statistical version of the behavioral model that growth begins from minute beginnings in an environment without constraint except itself. When that kind of growth exhausts its initially unlimited opportunities and runs into constraints then integrating with an environment becomes the selective test. That switch from just freely expanding on the past to adapting in relation to emerging future constraints corresponds to immature growth followed by maturation at climax (¸¸.´¯¯) and their very different selection regimes. The behavioral 'trick' needed to make that statistical idea into a functional description of a new mode of evolution is letting the system be active partner and the environment a passive one. If the system actively explores its environment, just like you see virtually all living things are visibly doing whenever they're not sleeping, then the form of the system doesn't need to be present in the environment before the system develops. That's always been the real undiscussed problem with the normal Darwinian model. It's that individual exploratory habit of a system that makes opportunistic development such as Deacon describes physically possible. That's what my plankton paper shows is happening with G. tumida, a series of progressive evolutionary spurts and collapses on the way to the stabilization of a new form, clear active individual behavior in a passive environment. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 3:34 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Relaxed selection One of the things I am interested in is how nature creatures complex things. The latest New Scientist (from 27 Sep. 2008) has an article named As if from nowhere about the topic of relaxed selection, a concept invented by Terry Deacon. Terry Deacon is an anthropology professor at Berkeley. According to Deacon, relaxed selection is a special form of natural selection, where the selection pressure and the competition is low (i.e. where natural selection itself is nearly absent), and the variety of traits which are able to survive and reproduce is high. When the selection pressures lift, genomes go wandering and new, unexpected traits may arise. I think if there is a relaxed selection, then one can also speak of a fierce selection: a natural selection with fierce competition when the climate is harsh and the food is sparse. Under this conditions only the best, well adapted individuals survive. Does natural selection occurs in different degrees? During relaxed selection, the system enters an exploration phase: the chances of finding new configurations, traits and features are higher. The selection pressure for a species to remain in the corresponding niche is lower. During fierce selection, the system enters an exploitation phase: chances of optimizing existing configurations, traits and features are higher. The selection pressure for a species to remain in the corresponding niche is higher. What do you think of relaxed selection ? Is Deacon onto something? -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Oh surely Nick, I'm sorry.I can't seem to tell when I should explain, as I'm writing, that a kind of 'dripping' irony is intended. If you think of 'making sense' making a self-consistent explanation, my question is whether that automatically requires you to misunderstand things that work because of their inconsistencies, like environments. When you only look at information from the past that isn't going to change, in your own mind where there are no alternate perspectives or differing value judgments to deal with, the illusion of 'making sense' of everything often does appear work. Sometimes I catch myself and think of it as a lot of 'patches' to hide the inexplicable parts. and even try to look back under them. It would be nice to aim for think inclusively rather than exclusively, and find what all the points of view have in common rather than only the last one standing after severe criticism.One thing that pushes me in that direction is noting when things can be expected to *become* inconsistent, and diverge on some presently unobservable path, for either general or specific reasons. Perhaps this exchange is an example of 'talking past each other'. in making the same point.The mental machine does such a deceptively good job of rendering snap judgments the seem to make so much sense to be conclusive, pure satisfying certainty, maybe that itself should be thought of as inexplicable too! I guess what I've been trying to raise as a subject is the kinds of evidence in a system that signal that it is about to become in a way that is inconsistent with itself. and that's the systems issue that growth induced collapse is a small part of, the prior signs of approaching change, that I find interesting. Phil From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 12:30 AM To: Phil Henshaw; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? PH wrote I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself NT replies: Oh good lord! I cannot allow myself to go along with this statement. First, as a behaviorist, I am not sure what it means to talk to oneself. Second, I have no idea what the validator of such a statement would be. No, I think that only people who have been understood by [some] others can claim to have made sense. Otherwise, made sense to whom? That is why it is so maddening to speak and not be understood. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Original Message - From: Phil Henshaw mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning mailto:friam@redfish.com Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 10/2/2008 8:18:37 PM Subject: RE: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Yes,. such is the disappointment of life! However. we do, I believe, have words that would be quite meaningless even to ourselves without some sort of experience in common. I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself. but am still also driven to explore those subjects which I can only really understand by way of the give and take of examining the physical world people seem to experience in common.Since nearly everything in my mind makes complete sense, as I make it so, anything that doesn't seems to have a good chance of being something not in my mind.That's sort of a technique. I also find a consistent predictability to not being able to make very good sense of anything that grows exponentially. I see loops of events that get somewhere that I can't trace, and have found that very helpful in identifying things that are 'out of body' in that sort of actual physical sense, but lead me to think about the distributed networks of things they connect which I can't make much sense of.However, they still seem to be of the kind of thing not located in my mind, but located in the physical world of common experience, identifiable, but not explainable?Does that work, is that right ? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Phil Henshaw Hath Spoken Thus: ==Look, I know this audience is not made of fools, and not deaf and dumb, and probably not disinterested in change, so I have to figure your inability to connect with my approach to constructing a science of change for natural complex systems must be that you find no door between your methods and mine. == Phil, Nick Thompson hath replied: I have struggled to understand you over the years and just can't. Others have said the same of me. Perhaps connection is too high a standard. Certainly AUDIENCE is too high a standard. We are not all here
Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Maybe it would then be clearer to say diverging from apparent past behavior, on the assumed belief that the future would continue to be a replication of the past rather than diverging from assumptions. With natural phenomena the 'generator' is actually the phenomenon in its environment itself, so the physical thing is the one and only place where the design of the process is recorded. So, no, for physical system emergence I see no reasonable way to make sense of examining a complex map between generator and phenomenon as you would when interpreting a set of coded instructions and the various runs of the instruction set on a computer. So still, the question is what are the physical system signals that would tell you that you're observing entirely new phenomena or emerging forms of behavior (and need a new model)? Sometimes I've also interpreted that to mean evidence of 'permanent' or 'irreversible' system change as a way to narrow down what 'emergence' means. I'll be away from keyboard for a bit...fyi Phil -Original Message- From: glen e. p. ropella [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 9:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Thus spake Phil Henshaw circa 10/02/2008 08:41 PM: [ph] Yes models would likely show signatures of how they are built, These are not necessarily signatures solely indicating how a model was _built_. In fact, since the same model can be built in many different ways, measuring the model decidedly does not measure the way it was built. The measurements of the models do show signals that characterize divergence over time. but I'm asking about the physical phenomenon displaying signatures of diverging from the assumptions that had once been valid and according to which a model had been built. How would you tell if there is emergence is what I'm after. I use divergence appearing to have all derivatives of the same sign. You can't get signatures of diverging from assumptions. Assumptions aren't actual things with actual effects. You can only see divergence from an actual object. Hence, for _models_, you have to build a working model in order to measure divergence. If by emergence, you mean a complex map between generator and phenomenon, then the way you measure emergence is by parallax with a population of models instantiating different mappings from generator to phenomenon. The divergence of the various phenomena exhibited by the models from that exhibited by the referent is, then, the way to measure emergence in the referent. But if you mean something else by emergence, then I don't understand what you mean. -- glen e. p. ropella, http://ropella.name/~gepr FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Maybe I could reword that principal principle of systems steering as a statement of the basic evidence of order in the universe. Conserved change appears to have verifiable but unexplainable complex organization behind it you can usually observe developing and also break by pushing it to over-develop. Look, I know this audience is not made of fools, and not deaf and dumb, and probably not disinterested in change, so I have to figure your inability to connect with my approach to constructing a science of change for natural complex systems must be that you find no door between your methods and mine. Please respond. Our world is changing dangerously. Our common terms of explanation still contain lots of old errors, so are leaving us out of control. Phil Re: 10/1 Observing how the present diverges from the past should be useful, both for becoming better able to control or capitalize on how nature works, but also for better controlling ourselves to stop repeating past choices that would be in error. I'm trying to share something of my experience and verifiable knowledge of that, that is of some importance. Some only see a fine line between learning someone's tricks for making your own discoveries, and repeating back the words they use to describe their own discoveries, but there's a world of difference, of course. I don't want to hear my empty words back, I want to hear your full words reflecting your having made some of the same observations. Words are only meaningful if they represent shared experience. I think science can help us compare notes on our independent observations of the divergent processes in nature, and to really learn something by that. Growing rates and kinds of learning occur within relationship networks as they multiply their organizational scale and complexity. That applies to projects that start small at home or work, to software, building plans or businesses, industries, societies, etc, that get endlessly bigger in scale and incorporate changes in kind ever faster. I observe that when a complex multiplication of relationships like that runs into an unexpected rush of complications, it's often just before serious widespread failures occur. It looks to me to be a signal that marks crossing a line toward unmanageability for the system as a whole, marking an internal 'breaking point'. Do any of you notice that rush of complications as a signal of self-controls becoming, overextended, unresponsive and systems about to go out of control, like over driving the slop in your steering system? It's also a little like a juggler being thrown just one too many balls to keep in the air all at once, and not dropping just the one but nearly all of them. I think it's a general property of divergent learning systems. Do you guys recognize any cases where organizational instability arises due to exceeding the learning responses of the parts? If there were such a property of instability in growth, and if you considered cybernetics to be the science of control, a principle of self-control to avoid pushing learning responses out of control could be called its principal principle, i.e. don't overshoot. That's what I dubbed it anyway, the prudent choice to not push the learning demands of a system beyond the responsiveness of its parts. Does that make any sense in terms of what you observe? Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: http://www.synapse9.com www.synapse9.com it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein
Ken, To make that divergent math work, your 2 + 2 = n + d is just the kind of dilemma with modeling the emerging divergent systems of nature that not studying divergent sequences distracts us from. There's a solution. Can you guess? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kenneth Lloyd Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein Nick, First, 2 + 2 does not equal 4 in base 3. Second, equality only works in equilibrium. What if our mathematics rule stated for every day d that passed, 2 + 2 = n + d? The mathematics would be linearly dynamic. There are subtle cultural assumptions being imbued upon mathematics that may not hold. Mathematics is designed to communicated the least false concept with the least information content at some maximum entropy. Thus 2 apples + 2 oranges does not equal 4 orapples, but 1 fruit basket, yet generally 2 + 2 = 4 (in equilibrium). Ken _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 11:18 PM To: Friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein I have put the following material in an email message because is suspect it would fascinate some of you., and given that you are mostly people with real jobs and given that the information comes from the guts of a 700 page book, I suspect that many of you would be unlikely to stumble on it on your own. I have, as I have said, been reading Monk's biography of W. In it we learn many weird things, for instance, that W. turned up at Russell's door in Cambridge in 1911 or so, an callow Austrian lad, who had graduated from a technical school and got a job making kites in Manchester. Within a year, Russell was ruminating about whether he should turn his entire project in the foundations of mathematics over to W. and do something else himself. By 1937, W. had developed enormous contempt for the whole foundationalist project. As luck would have it, both he and Turing were giving relevant lectures at Cambridge and Turing came to hear W. talk. W. (never a particularly nice man) took the occasion to beat on Turing about the absurdity of the foundationalist project Here is a quote from Monk, p. 418. Wittgensteins technique was not to reinterpret certain particular proofs, but, rather, to redescribe the whole of mathematics in such a way that mathematical logic would appear as the philosophical aberration he believed it to be, and in a way that dissolved entirely the picture of mathematics as a science which discovers facts about mathematical objects . I shall try again and again, he said, to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention. There was, on his view, nothing for the mathematician to discover. A proof in mathematics does not establish the truth of a conclusion; if fixes, rather, the meaning of certain signs. The inexorability of mathematics, therefore, does not consist in certain knowledge of mathematical truths, but in the fact that mathematical propositions are grammatical. To deny, for example, that two plus two equals four is not to disagree with a widely held view about a matter of fact; it is to show ignorance of the meanings of the terms involved. Wittgenstein presumably thought that if he could persuade Turing to see mathematics in this light, he could persuade anybody. Turing apparently gave up on W. a few lectures later. I have to admit the distinction that W. is making here does not move me particularly. It seems to me as much of a discovery to find out what is implied by the premises of a logical system as to find out how many electrons there are in an iron atom, and since logic is always at work behind empirical work, I cannot get very excited about the difference. Perhaps because I am dim witted. No response necessary. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein
Yes, many possibilities.Often times one solves an 'insolvable' problem by taking an approach that was not contemplated in the initial definition, like change the rules. For example when you have a divergent sequence as a starting point in time there's not much to go on for what could happen to it. With mathematics it's quite hard to define an environment such as the divergences one might observe emerging in nature would run into, but it is possible to go back and forth between the two. As a mathematician trying to guess what terms in a divergent sequence might be changed one could look to divergence displayed by 'in physico' systems, and see the range of new implied equation terms produced by the conditions in its environment. That's the general class of solution approaches I was referring to, switching back and forth between interpreting mathematical system representations and their physical representations to have a better idea how the divergence is changed by things outside its original definition.Of course, mathematics may be much more free to experiment, and do so, but perhaps still learn something from the variety of 'crash tests' that divergent processes in physical systems readily display. Does that make any sense? Phil From: Kenneth Lloyd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein Phil, There are many solutions* to the problem as written. By focusing on A solution, we lose sight of alternative, perhaps equally valid solutions - which was the point of my post. For example, d may be a complex number (say, representing day.ergs), not the assumed integer. I have just finished writing a book on modeling complex systems. In it I cite Dennett and Kinsbourne's** studies of perception between what they call the Cartesian Theater model and the Multiple Drafts model. When one views a model, or when one views a mathematical relationship, there are resonances caused by consonance and dissonance in the understanding of the symbology. These resonces are the source of emergent concepts from the Multiple Drafts. You speak of divergence. I see this more as a process of entanglement - leading to what Prigogine refers to as a dissipative system, or Large Poincare System. Until the model is realized, the temporal symmetry is not broken and you can have do-overs or reversibility. Once the model has been physically realized, having been realized in time, it cannot be totally reversed in configuration space-time - so-called Arrow of Time. *Possibly infinitely many. **Time and Observer http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/time http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/timeobs.htm obs.htm Ken _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Henshaw Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 8:34 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein Ken, To make that divergent math work, your 2 + 2 = n + d is just the kind of dilemma with modeling the emerging divergent systems of nature that not studying divergent sequences distracts us from. There's a solution. Can you guess? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kenneth Lloyd Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein Nick, First, 2 + 2 does not equal 4 in base 3. Second, equality only works in equilibrium. What if our mathematics rule stated for every day d that passed, 2 + 2 = n + d? The mathematics would be linearly dynamic. There are subtle cultural assumptions being imbued upon mathematics that may not hold. Mathematics is designed to communicated the least false concept with the least information content at some maximum entropy. Thus 2 apples + 2 oranges does not equal 4 orapples, but 1 fruit basket, yet generally 2 + 2 = 4 (in equilibrium). Ken _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 11:18 PM To: Friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein I have put the following material in an email message because is suspect it would fascinate some of you., and given that you are mostly people with real jobs and given that the information comes from the guts of a 700 page book, I suspect that many of you would be unlikely to stumble on it on your own. I have, as I have said, been reading Monk's biography of W. In it we learn many weird things, for instance, that W. turned up at Russell's door in Cambridge in 1911 or so, an callow Austrian lad, who had graduated from a technical school and got a job making kites in Manchester. Within a year, Russell was ruminating about whether he should turn his entire project in the foundations
Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
Yes,. such is the disappointment of life! However. we do, I believe, have words that would be quite meaningless even to ourselves without some sort of experience in common. I too also find I make my best sense when talking to myself. but am still also driven to explore those subjects which I can only really understand by way of the give and take of examining the physical world people seem to experience in common.Since nearly everything in my mind makes complete sense, as I make it so, anything that doesn't seems to have a good chance of being something not in my mind.That's sort of a technique. I also find a consistent predictability to not being able to make very good sense of anything that grows exponentially. I see loops of events that get somewhere that I can't trace, and have found that very helpful in identifying things that are 'out of body' in that sort of actual physical sense, but lead me to think about the distributed networks of things they connect which I can't make much sense of.However, they still seem to be of the kind of thing not located in my mind, but located in the physical world of common experience, identifiable, but not explainable?Does that work, is that right ? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? Phil Henshaw Hath Spoken Thus: ==Look, I know this audience is not made of fools, and not deaf and dumb, and probably not disinterested in change, so I have to figure your inability to connect with my approach to constructing a science of change for natural complex systems must be that you find no door between your methods and mine. == Phil, Nick Thompson hath replied: I have struggled to understand you over the years and just can't. Others have said the same of me. Perhaps connection is too high a standard. Certainly AUDIENCE is too high a standard. We are not all here, quietly attentive, waiting for ANYbody's message. There is no we here. The older I get, the rarer communication between actual human beings seems to be. We talk to our gods; we talk to our college mentors; we talk to our long dead parents, we reproduce the values of those who have tortured us in our past. However, talking to EACH OTHER is pretty unusual. And hearing one another is rarer still. Take care, nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Original Message - From: Phil Henshaw mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: The Friday Morning mailto:friam@redfish.com Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 10/2/2008 5:56:08 AM Subject: or more simply, is there order? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order?
'The Black Swan' was mentioned this AM on the radio in NY and I ordered a copy. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=si3_rdr_bb_author?index=booksfield%2dauthor%2d exact=Nassim%20Nicholas%20Taleb Nassim Taleb seems like a prolific writher and fascinating guy. The other author mentioned on the segment was Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions maybe worth looking at too. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 7:19 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] or more simply, is there order? My daughter, an urban planner in Bruxelles, recommended that I read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I did look it up and found it might be pertinent to this string. Has anybody read it? Paul ** Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall0001) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] then... how DO you tell the difference?
One of the cool things about ordinary differential equations is that if you found one in nature, and all you had was a very very short segment, you could still theoretically obtain the entire future and past behavior of the curve from it.There are lots of events in nature something like that, say planetary motion for example, where theres no particular beginning or end. Then theres the other kind, like a car on the highway for which the limits and behavior depend on local steering. For steering a car there may be no evidence in the cars behavior that it is about to hit a tree, except perhaps that the driver is asleep.Similarly there is no evidence of lightning or other opportunistic behaviors until after they happen, etc Ive been talking about that kind of behavior, where the system and the environment have high degrees of independence and not getting much response from you guys.Maybe I just dont know what method you use to distinguish between systems that operate IN the environment and subject discovering their limits and constraints and systems that effectively express all their past and future constraints all the time? Do you recognize that as a difference between how things?If so, how do you define or make the destinction? Best, Phil Henshawwww.synapse9.com .·´ ¯ `·. ~ 212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 [EMAIL PROTECTED] it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] This Economy Does Not Compute - and the fix
Another way to say why there is a phase transition to instability there is that it is inherent in pushing learning tasks to exceed their response times. Becoming incoherent in response is a kind of system failure that leads to systems to collapse for any critical part. That is part of that learning theorem I presented graphically 30 years ago. http://www.synapse9.com/pub/theInfiniteSoc.pdf It's now more simply stated as just that the limit of learning is unexpected complications, an environmental signal you can not include in your plan, model or theory. It's particularly useful as the corollary that growth processes will lead to collapse unless the way they are changed by running into limits is by developing stability instead. The fix? Learn when to expect complications and how to see them coming. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 11:29 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: [FRIAM] This Economy Does Not Compute http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html?_r=3ref=opin ionoref=sloginoref=sloginoref=slogin -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] This Economy Does Not Compute - and the fix
Oh yes... how the fix for the need for a Goldilocks magic in setting the price for unmarketable assets. It's very simple. Just use your best realistic guess. You don't worry about putting the tax payer on the hook by including the provision that the costs of stabilizing a system brought down by a tragedy of a commons caused by people excessively profiting from it, will be born by the people who profited, once it can be decide how to measure that sometime later... --- Another way to say why there is a phase transition to instability there is that it is inherent in pushing learning tasks to exceed their response times. Becoming incoherent in response is a kind of system failure that leads to systems to collapse for any critical part. That is part of that learning theorem I presented graphically 30 years ago. http://www.synapse9.com/pub/theInfiniteSoc.pdf It's now more simply stated as just that the limit of learning is unexpected complications, an environmental signal you can not include in your plan, model or theory. It's particularly useful as the corollary that growth processes will lead to collapse unless the way they are changed by running into limits is by developing stability instead. The fix? Learn when to expect complications and how to see them coming. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 11:29 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: [FRIAM] This Economy Does Not Compute http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html?_r=3ref=opin ionoref=sloginoref=sloginoref=slogin -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] the purpose of science
Observing how the present diverges from the past should be useful, both for becoming better able to control or capitalize on how nature works, but also for better controlling ourselves to stop repeating past choices that would be in error. I'm trying to share something of my experience and verifiable knowledge of that, that is of some importance. Some only see a fine line between learning someone's tricks for making your own discoveries, and repeating back the words they use to describe their own discoveries, but there's a world of difference, of course. I don't want to hear my empty words back, I want to hear your full words reflecting your having made some of the same observations. Words are only meaningful if they represent shared experience. I think science can help us compare notes on our independent observations of the divergent processes in nature, and to really learn something by that. Growing rates and kinds of learning occur within relationship networks as they multiply their organizational scale and complexity. That applies to projects that start small at home or work, to software, building plans or businesses, industries, societies, etc, that get endlessly bigger in scale and incorporate changes in kind ever faster. I observe that when a complex multiplication of relationships like that runs into an unexpected rush of complications, it's often just before serious widespread failures occur. It looks to me to be a signal that marks crossing a line toward unmanageability for the system as a whole, marking an internal 'breaking point'. Do any of you notice that rush of complications as a signal of self-controls becoming, overextended, unresponsive and systems about to go out of control, like over driving the slop in your steering system? It's also a little like a juggler being thrown just one too many balls to keep in the air all at once, and not dropping just the one but nearly all of them. I think it's a general property of divergent learning systems. Do you guys recognize any cases where organizational instability arises due to exceeding the learning responses of the parts? If there were such a property of instability in growth, and if you considered cybernetics to be the science of control, a principle of self-control to avoid pushing learning responses out of control could be called its principal principle, i.e. don't overshoot. That's what I dubbed it anyway, the prudent choice to not push the learning demands of a system beyond the responsiveness of its parts. Does that make any sense in terms of what you observe? Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]explorations: www.synapse9.com it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Economic Disequilibrium or How Complexity Science nearly killed America
That's a good example of the way models fail as I've been describing. We make models as projections of how things made sense in the past and not to have any awareness of the future except their own failure. That's where my method kicks ass. I don't have the fancy tools others do, but I watch the environment for the divergent processes that are emerging and ask the dumb questions, like what will they run into and how will they be changed by it. One thing that happens when growth system collide with their limits is that their independent parts run into each other.I pegged this whole thing 16 months ago (and 30 years ago as well) and spotted the collision between the growth centers of energy and food (evident in the global price war bio-ethanol was part of touching off) and how that started a series of unexpected changes in direction.I called it the beginning of the big crunch and the control system misbehavior fishtailing. If people want to know what to do to reduce the level of the calamity even at this point they should ask. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; 1st-Mile-NM Subject: [FRIAM] Economic Disequilibrium or How Complexity Science nearly killed America http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol15/?pg=173 Here is a beautiful article by George Dyson that is truly one of the clearest examples of the current problems with complexity theory especially its relationship to economics , what it is trying to do and what it actually did with the mess created on wall street it should make every every CTO and CEO sit up and shudder. Basically the credit models created by complexity science geniuses, that are the foundation of most high flying arbitrage financial houses, created there own version of reality that had very little relevance to the real world. These same geniuses made enormous amounts of money by designing this fake world and convincing there neophyte non tech masters they should be paid millions for its discovery conveniently forgetting that its roots were firmly built in fiction Someone shouts the Emperor has no clothes and presto the whole house comes tumbling down The FBI is also apparently digging into this cesspool so expect to see a large number of these bright software phds entering federal prison in the not to distant future It also has relevance to the scary statement by Janet Wing at the institute when she said that future computer models need not be grounded in reality but could create there own. Think also on the connection that not only are these complex models non verifiable but so are most databases and agent modeling systems. Without easy verifiability I would submit they are worse than useless As Dyson points out the tally sticks stocks that where used in the 13th century are far superior to the billions of dollars of hardware and software used today. A stick Stock lived in the real world and was verifiable at the lowest level of inspection. Sadly today our complex system have proved to be totally non verifiable with the associated collapse of trust. Its also a stark example to our 1st mile friends about the higher relevance of what goes into the pipe rather than the pipe itself and why hi speed verification of what is happening in the real world is so much more important The quicker we realize that the raison d'etre of the digital world is to improve the quality of life and include some moral directives in our work based in reality the more we will be able to sleep at night ( : ( : pete -- Peter Baston IDEAS http://www.ideapete.com/ www.ideapete.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] well we did finance
Marcus, Thanks for acknowledging that there at least might be some process behind the buzz words being used in the pop culture discussion of events. The so called 'sub-prime crisis' is referred to using a stereotype for ancient and long discredited people and practices. I think it's inadequate as a label for our whole society's double mass hysterias in switching from perceiving the potential value of real-estate as near infinite to being near zero. That's a bigger process than a single stereotype explains. From our present hind sight the stereotype of a greedy lender fooling a foolish borrower is so crystal clear, and covered with so much of our own chagrin for it not having seen it clearly before, it's a wonder no one asks why it wasn't. What I think would bring the larger process to people's attention is recognizing who profited from it (who offering the addict their drug) and then ask why the same people pulled their funds out of risk when the wealth hysteria they fed seemed in the process of collapse. NOW the same people want to use those profits to come back into the market and be white nights and buy up all the devalued assets at a bargain. What adds even further to the irony, of course, is that, not seeing how it was done, the same people plan on using the same method to just do the same thing all over again the next time they get a chance, and everyone approves! If offering opportunity for mischief isn't a direct physical cause in this very one sided kind of case, then tell me why it's so extremely profitable. If I can't interest anyone in effective methods for investigating how these kinds of whole system phenomena operate, and why they run into consequential physical self-conflict, how about suggesting an appropriate stereotype for any of the damn fool players in the larger tragedy? Phil Phil wrote: By 'things', of course I mean physical systems rather than theoretical ones, and by 'multiplying' I mean allowing them to operate only if they produce a surplus you can use to expand them by %'s. Given the subprime mortgage crisis, I kind of wish that were the case! Credit worthiness, not consistent surplus, is what keeps families, companies, and our government running. Investment is commonly done on credit (in various forms). Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] well we did finance
Yes, it goes to the 'many world's' feature of social and economic systems. Each world may be living in what seems to be an entirely different world. You can see them at a distance, but moving from one to another is particularly different. Then you get things like the world of the press, which is largely it's own fabrication of favorite discussion topics that only describe the subjects we'd be interested like sweat left in the boxing ring after the fighters are gone. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2008 1:24 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] well we did finance Phil Henshaw wrote: If offering opportunity for mischief isn't a direct physical cause in this very one sided kind of case, then tell me why it's so extremely profitable. Funny how AIGFP could have been allowed to insure $300 billion in debt in private, but the whole company (300 times larger than this division) couldn't manage to post $15 billion collateral on this division's screwups (which we had to loan them), all while giving the ~400 people at AIGFP _all_ million dollar salaries. Talk about dumb risk models. Meanwhile, they've had their credit rating downgraded twice since 2005 before they went crying to the Federal Reserve. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] data opportunity
Our fascination in physics with colliders shows that large data sets of things banging into each other is a potential gold mine of complex systems data. The big non-linear colliders in the economic system are producing a storm of data on fishtailing control mechanisms at the present, and a potential gold mine of complex system reaction phenomena if its collected and preserved. Much of it may not be being collected. Best, Philip F HenshawAIA AAAS¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸ _ in the last 200 years the amount of change that once needed a century of thought now takes just five weeks HDS Complex System Design Science www.synapse9.com 212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 [EMAIL PROTECTED] FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] For the physicist geeks in the group
What about the bigger non-linear real world colliders?I think they're magnificent complex processes that matter enormously to understand.Did you all decide they're just equations we'll never understand or something, or that what looked like a major collapse of our life-support system was just an illusion or something? Why the silence? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:41 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] For the physicist geeks in the group I thought they had renamed this project LRC (Large Rodent Collider). It's so difficult to keep up with all the advances in today's modern physics community. -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Jochen Fromm [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The LHC is out. The GAS is in http://www.bbspot.com/News/2008/09/squirrel-smasher.html -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] well we did finance....
As a question then, does trying the multiply things without limit cause them to be limited by failure? By 'things', of course I mean physical systems rather than theoretical ones, and by 'multiplying' I mean allowing them to operate only if they produce a surplus you can use to expand them by %'s. Phil -Original Message- From: Carl Tollander [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1:16 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] well we did finance Doubtless, but since ignoring it we are, knowing of it we do not. Evidence alone won't find it (no matter how well or variously or repetitively presented). You have to ask a right question. Punctuation may help too; maybe some hyphens. Phil Henshaw wrote: Is there anything else around we can ignore the pump it till it quits problem for? pfh - --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] well we did finance....
Is there anything else around we can ignore the pump it till it quits problem for? pfh FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] For the physicist geeks in the group
Hmmm. I got a black hole appearing in the middle of the device that consumed it. Are any of you still there??? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 1:22 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] For the physicist geeks in the group A live webcam from the LHC http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] the real reason growth ends in sorrow
This perspective comes from a mix of common sense and a new understanding of growth systems as made of many kinds of independent agents, just as it appears.Looking at the world that way violates the scientific principle of determinism, however, considering all systems as having independent responses to their environments, something sort of like free will. But hey, that things have minds of their own is exactly what were trying to explain, isnt it? Why not hear out someone who has studied it carefully from a direction others have passed up for years? The economic multiplier, using profits to multiply profits, is what we should look at. It turns out that if no one makes any of the mistakes we see as responsible for the current collapse of expectations, maintaining the multiplier will create conditions where some other ones will emerge. Thats an important catch. Everyone mistakenly sees the multiplier as a way to multiply their own rewards, and doesnt see that it as also multiplies their neighbors risks. The real problem is that there is no way to turn it off when the risks get out of control. Best, Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~ 212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 [EMAIL PROTECTED] it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies
Ken, Phil, I disagree re: ignoring the complexities of the system. All extant complexities are manifest in synthesis and appear in realization. [ph] what, you hypothesize that because nature somehow takes care of every individual thing by her exceedingly complicated and unobserved way, that somehow any impression we have will incorporate everything about it?I some how sense a little 'reaching' in that.. Consider what actual complexities are manifest in a closed system at absolute zero or Bose-Einstein Condensate state. The only energy left is potential energy in the mass. I don't know what happens to the binding energy - gluons - but there is nothing that could perturb the particles out of their state, or am I wrong? So the energy left at thermodynamic equilibrium seems to be that of the residual strong force, which would look a lot like either gravity, or closeness by habitually being close [ph] well, simpler case, what about what's going on in the back of your own fridge? What perturbs it 'out of state' always seems to be a surprise at the time when I discover it, and it's not from my not knowing the formula. In either case - modeled as an LPS (large Poincare system) wouldn't the mesoscopic resonance (heat motion - zitterbegwegung) approach zero except for possibly the gluon resonance - and maybe even that, too? [ph] If you're imagining that theories are their own environments, so they fit perfectly in their worlds and never develop interactions that alter their own design in fundamental ways bye themselves, then you have a self-consistent model. Environments aren't self-consistent though. They overflow with processes that reinvent the discards of one thing into key ingredients for others. What the math says about that is hard to tease out of it, as Robert Rosen who spent much of his effort attempting to do that found out. The trick is math has no environment, so it's hard to make it say anything about what happens in environments. I made a nice clean revision of my attempt to do so, restating my principle of continuity divergence, nick naming it a theory of little bangs. http://www.synapse9.com/drafts/ContPrinciple08_09.09.pdf The simplicity of the solutions to complex problems is that it is an ensemble - a bundle of entangled solution trajectories. It doesn't matter which particular path it takes, so long as it resolves. This holds for n-body problems or shocking a heartbeat back into a sinus pattern. They are not solved analytically, one problem at a time - they are solved all at once. [ph] Yes, So long as the whole problem is inside the formula then there's no problem. As soon as you put a formula inside an environment, though, there's a curious formal gap of disconnection all around it, it seems to me. phil Ken _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Henshaw Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 1:15 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies You guys all seem to be missing the difference between the value of reducing your solution and the error of ignoring the complexities of your problem. I find it's often going out of my way to trace the complexities of the problem to see where they lead that leads me out of my blinders and gives me the simpler solution in the end. I mean, like if you can't hear the radio a solution is to keep absent mindedly turning up the volume, but if the complication is someone else with another radio in the room and you're both turning up the volume. it would be simpler to solve the problem some very different way. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 11:17 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies Ken - Reductionism has its place in the analytical phase at equilibrium. Analysis is normally a study of integrable, often linear systems, but it can be accomplished on non-linear, feed-forward systems as well. Well said... The synthesis phase puts information re: complex behavior and emergence back into the integrated mix and may be analyzed in non-linear, recurrent networks. It is the synthesis/analysis duality that always (often) gets lost in arguments about Reductionism. There are very many useful things (e.g. linear and near-equilibrium systems) to be studied analytically, but there are many *more* interesting and often useful things (non linear, far-from-equilibrium, complex systems with emergent behaviour) which also beg for synthesis. This is actually a probabilistic inversion of analysis as described in Inverse Theory. I'll have to look this up. Bayesian refinement cycles (forward - inverse) are applied to new information as one progresses through the DANSR cycle. This refines the effect
