Owen,
Complexity science (the study of objective complexity) is only complex
(subjectively complex) if you don't understand how it works. There are a
series of mappings from natural language, through graphical language, to
mathematical languages that help folks understand how complexity works.
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,
If the whole world could have voted 60 years ago, Hitler would have been
Chancellor of England.
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 10:14 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Is this a Godwin's law violation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Frankly, I don't think 1948 would have been a good election year for Hitler,
being 3 years dead and all that.
-- rec --
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:49 AM, Kenneth Lloyd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If the whole world could
Kenneth Lloyd wrote:
If people will run a mile
to avoid something that presents a little difficulty - or that doesn't
pre-exist in their toolbox of universal knowledge - then complex systems
will forever remain out of reach.
He's lost it. Now he's making derogatory remarks about running!
from Rob Axtell:
http://krasnow.blogspot.com/2008/09/goldilocks-on-wall-street.html#links
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:29 AM, glen e. p. ropella
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html?_r=3ref=opinionoref=sloginoref=sloginoref=slogin
--
glen e. p.
On another mailing list that I frequent, there is a small core of
Republicans who *insist* that is was the DemoCRAPS[sic] who caused our
current economic crisis.
I sent the following message to them yesterday, after finding the nice,
short informative article in Time (link below). I find that it
Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 10/01/2008 06:04 AM:
On Oct 1, 2008, at 1:02 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
Can't be complexity scientists - the math is too hard. Show your
average
ABMer a partial differential equation and he'd run a mile.
Robert
I have to agree. The pendulum really needs to
Excellent article!
As complexity wonks, most of us understand that static models are woefully
incomplete, and that dynamical systems modeling is one of the precursors to
understanding complexity. This implies the study of systems at some
distance from equilibrium.
Hopefully, we can encourage
Doug,
I think it's a poor move to use a model--did the Officers use a model
for their article in Time?--to fix blame with such confidence
especially when the thing to blame is a vague collective identity.
Granted, sometimes it seems that such fixing is needed because we need
to reaffirm our own
Mathew:
The Time article I referred to had nothing to do with modeling; it described
the reality of how the money was lost.
*Follow the money. Average Joes and Janes are not the holders of the other
side of complicated, over-the-counter derivatives contracts. Rather, hedge
funds are the main
Ever since I first came to Santa Fe, and joined the extensive computation
culture here, I felt I have detected in the software people here something
equivalent to the physics- envy that we psychologists are prone to: let's
call it math-envy. Math-Envy seems to be that while programming is
Right on Ken
Thats the major issue --- we inside of the industry understand that the
non dynamic non world related models are SIMULATIONS but to most people
these are wizard visions of actuality and bluntly our marketing to them
fudges this whenever a contract or money comes up.
For
I see it as Doug sees it. This week's Economist has the most incoherent
leader I have ever seen in twenty years of reading that journal. I'm
not an economist, but I do know my way around my mother tongue, and in
essence they're saying, Don't cap executive salaries because this is
our best
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10/01/2008 10:01 AM:
Ever since I first came to Santa Fe, and joined the extensive computation
culture here, I felt I have detected in the software people here something
equivalent to the physics- envy that we psychologists are prone to: let's
call it
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
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
Excellent points -- although they sidestep Nick's issue -- which I take to
be that some software people (although not you or I) wish that software were
as apparently definitive as mathematics. Mathematics has an aura of
certainly -- even the certainty about uncertainty seems certain. Software is
Nick,
Is programming a mathematical formalism? No. I know that when I'm cranking
out Python scripts I am not doing any math. Is computer science a
mathematical formalism? Yes. When I'm trying to work out whether my
algorithm scales as N**2 or N.log.N, I'm doing math.
For an enlightening (and more
WOW trust the Brits that means Bob Mugabe from Zimbabwe will be a dead
cert for our next president
( : ( : pete
Peter Baston
*IDEAS*
/www.ideapete.com/ http://www.ideapete.com/
Owen Densmore wrote:
div class=moz-text-flowed style=font-family: -moz-fixedKinda nifty:
Thus spake Robert Holmes circa 10/01/2008 11:29 AM:
Is programming a mathematical formalism? No. I know that when I'm cranking
out Python scripts I am not doing any math.
Just to be clear, programming is the _act_ of constructing a program.
As an act, it is not a formalism. However, the
Is catching/throwing a ball math? A robot would do these things using math.
But we don't, and we don't prove the result. We just check out the result
against reality. So why call it math? Or if you wouldn't call it math, how
does it differ from writing a program, which also produces a
Thus spake Russ Abbott circa 10/01/2008 11:56 AM:
Is catching/throwing a ball math? A robot would do these things using math.
But we don't, and we don't prove the result. We just check out the result
against reality. So why call it math?
I would not call that math.
Or if you wouldn't call
I would liken a syntax error to tripping while going after a ball. Neither
is really what we are talking about. It's the semantics of the intended
action if actually carried out. No?
-- Russ
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:05 PM, glen e. p. ropella
[EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote:
Thus spake Russ Abbott
On projects - Especially all the google apps are great at solving the
dilemma - You cannot manage what you do not measure and you cannot
measure what you do not see but what happens when it sees something
the client does not like ?
We are using several of the toolsets from the google world
Actually there is a version of truth in the democrap diatribe but not
where the article points
The Glass Siegel act forbade most of the business activities that are
the root of many of todays financial issues outside of the modeling muckup.
The man who was instrumental in getting Glass
Thus spake Russ Abbott circa 10/01/2008 12:23 PM:
I would liken a syntax error to tripping while going after a ball. Neither
is really what we are talking about. It's the semantics of the intended
action if actually carried out. No?
I disagree. Tripping on approach is not a syntax error;
Thus spake Robert Holmes circa 10/01/2008 12:44 PM:
Hmmm not sure about that Glen. Seems to me that your formalism can be
pretty freely applied. So give me a specific example - when I'm coding
Python what is the specific formalism that I am using? Please feel free to
use equations.
It is
Russell Standish wrote:
Actually a robot would probably do it the same way we do - trial and
error with some kind of feedback loop.
Excuse a side remark on ABM toolkit stuff.
I hadn't played with Breve (http://breve.sf.net) until recently. Some
relevant features:
1) 3d with collision
Russell,
You are absolutely right. BioDynamic's Big Dog learned to walk over uneven
ground using evolutionary neural networks. So are ANN's math? Well, yes (my
answer) and no. Actually, it depends on your concept of math - which I
sense is rather rigidly defined within this discussion. ANN's
Sorry, that was Boston Dynamics. My bad.
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kenneth Lloyd
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 5:15 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Is programming a
Nick: I'm a bit confused about what you'd like from this.
Paragraph 1: The observation that there may be Math-envy amongst
programmers.
Paragraph 2: A reference to the prior threads on the philosophy of
math along with a correct observations on silos .. or possibly a depth/
breadth contrast.
Just a quick Thanks to Glen, Matthew, and Doug for the great pointers.
-- Owen
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
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
Nick,
Leave us not conflate clarity, concision and expressiveness. One may
make tradeoffs, for example one may choose one computer language for its
large number of libraries and ability to say a great many things in many
ways, at the expense of concision and clarity.
As to envy, I think
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
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