Fwd: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

[Pamela McCorduck]

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

I didn't see your earlier post, Pamela, but it seems to be that in addition to the lure of money are (1) the shift to biological rather than physics research, perhaps because we are destroying the planet; and (2) government money for anything useful is a thing of the past.

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merlelefkoff

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Grant Holland]

Pamela,

I am personally very disturbed as well. I see the trend that you are pointing out as an instance of a much larger trend. I can't quite yet characterize, or even scope, it yet. However, short-term thinking and various versions of trying-to-get-something-for-nothing seem to accompany most versions of it.

The first expression of this trend that I noticed decades ago was the loss of respect, and insistence, for a "liberal education" (in the John Henry Newman vein) within our culture at large and within STEM in particular. The second expression of this trend that I noticed was in my profession of software engineering. Here, I saw the devolution of mathematics as a driving force. I got into the profession in the late sixties when the names and works of the mathematicians of the forties (who essentially invented computers) were fresh on our lips. I worked for some of the best computer companies around over the next many years (Univac,  Sun Microsystems, (with) Seymour Cray, others) and saw nothing but a steady decline in the centrality of mathematics. I have admittedly exploded your topic beyond the govenment-to-private-sector issue, but do suspect somehow the same forces are at work.

Grant

On 3/3/14, 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[David Eric Smith]

Pamela, hi

I actually thought it was extremely interesting, but have no knowledge of my own to contribute.

Somebody you might like is a Swedish economist (now emeritus) named Gunnar Eliasson, wwho has spent much of his career studying the detailed planning and mechanics by which government-sponsored research can either support a strong transition to a private sector or can essentially leave no progeny.

This is not exactly to the center of your question about relative priorities in the two as separate entities, but it has seemed to me that the initial conditions and seeding that publicly funded research creates can have a significant period of influence on what the private sector is able to do with it.  

In any case, Sweden is an interesting example, because they do a limited set of things, but have done several of them quite well, and they are not afraid to talk about either the public or the private sector as a relevant player.

I don't have electronic links ready at hand on Gunnar, but he has written a lot, including some books, which should be possible to find.  

All best,

Eric 

On Mar 3, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Owen Densmore]

Could you forward your earlier email?  I don't seem to have it, and I don't believe it was part of the current thread, right?

I'm interested in this because of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program that has a couple of projects here in Santa Fe, one of which Redfish is working on.

  http://www.sbir.gov/about/about-sbir

In a sense, SBIR is the "excluded middle".

   -- Owen

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 8:18 AM, Grant Holland <[hidden email]> wrote:

Pamela,

I am personally very disturbed as well. I see the trend that you are pointing out as an instance of a much larger trend. I can't quite yet characterize, or even scope, it yet. However, short-term thinking and various versions of trying-to-get-something-for-nothing seem to accompany most versions of it.

The first expression of this trend that I noticed decades ago was the loss of respect, and insistence, for a "liberal education" (in the John Henry Newman vein) within our culture at large and within STEM in particular. The second expression of this trend that I noticed was in my profession of software engineering. Here, I saw the devolution of mathematics as a driving force. I got into the profession in the late sixties when the names and works of the mathematicians of the forties (who essentially invented computers) were fresh on our lips. I worked for some of the best computer companies around over the next many years (Univac,  Sun Microsystems, (with) Seymour Cray, others) and saw nothing but a steady decline in the centrality of mathematics. I have admittedly exploded your topic beyond the govenment-to-private-sector issue, but do suspect somehow the same forces are at work.

Grant

On 3/3/14, 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 3/3/14, 8:18 AM, Grant Holland wrote:

I worked for some of the best computer companies around over the next many years (Univac,  Sun Microsystems, (with) Seymour Cray, others) and saw nothing but a steady decline in the centrality of mathematics.

It seems to me what matters is not the centrality of mathematics in computer science but its absolute activity over time (even if it is becoming more dilute in the larger `craft' population of workers).  For example, here's a graph of papers received vs. accepted  from the federated conference on computer science.

https://fedcsis.org/resources/reports/FedCSIS_2013_raport_en.pdf

Not all of the sub-conferences at that meeting would be on formal methods.  These meetings would be more formal than, say, an Apple or Microsoft Developer conference.


Marcus

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

I commented, and I'm utterly somebody, dear Pamela.

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merlelefkoff

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[Arlo Barnes]

Perhaps apropos to this thread, perhaps not, is the following piece by Paul Graham (who you may know as that guy who says inflammatory things and clarifies them later, or that guy who worked at Yahoo!); the piece itself covers a larger scope, but part of it seems relevant to 'the role of mathematics in computer science'.

Revenge of the Nerds (excerpt):

Catching Up with Math

What I mean is that Lisp was first discovered by John McCarthy in 1958, and popular programming languages are only now catching up with the ideas he developed then.

Now, how could that be true? Isn't computer technology something that changes very rapidly? I mean, in 1958, computers were refrigerator-sized behemoths with the processing power of a wristwatch. How could any technology that old even be relevant, let alone superior to the latest developments?

I'll tell you how. It's because Lisp was not really designed to be a programming language, at least not in the sense we mean today. What we mean by a programming language is something we use to tell a computer what to do. McCarthy did eventually intend to develop a programming language in this sense, but the Lisp that we actually ended up with was based on something separate that he did as a theoretical exercise-- an effort to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing Machine. As McCarthy said later,

Another way to show that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal Lisp function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the Lisp function eval..., which computes the value of a Lisp expression.... Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be used to express Lisp programs in practice.

What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition ofeval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp interpreter.

This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it later in an interview:

Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program thiseval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today....

Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.

So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.

There is one other language still surviving from the 1950s, Fortran, and it represents the opposite approach to language design. Lisp was a piece of theory that unexpectedly got turned into a programming language. Fortran was developed intentionally as a programming language, but what we would now consider a very low-level one.

Fortran I, the language that was developed in 1956, was a very different animal from present-day Fortran. Fortran I was pretty much assembly language with math. In some ways it was less powerful than more recent assembly languages; there were no subroutines, for example, only branches. Present-day Fortran is now arguably closer to Lisp than to Fortran I.

Lisp and Fortran were the trunks of two separate evolutionary trees, one rooted in math and one rooted in machine architecture. These two trees have been converging ever since. Lisp started out powerful, and over the next twenty years got fast. So-called mainstream languages started out fast, and over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, until now the most advanced of them are fairly close to Lisp. Close, but they are still missing a few things....

What Made Lisp Different

When it was first developed, Lisp embodied nine new ideas. Some of these we now take for granted, others are only seen in more advanced languages, and two are still unique to Lisp. The nine ideas are, in order of their adoption by the mainstream, [EDIT: trimmed for length, follow the link for explication]

1. Conditionals.
   
   
2. A function type.
   
   
3. Recursion.
   
   
4. Dynamic typing.
   
   
5. Garbage-collection.
   
   
6. Programs composed of expressions.
   
   
7. A symbol type.
   
   
8. A notation for code using trees of symbols and constants.
   
   
9. The whole language there all the time.

When Lisp first appeared, these ideas were far removed from ordinary programming practice, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. Ideas 1-5 are now widespread. Number 6 is starting to appear in the mainstream. Python has a form of 7, though there doesn't seem to be any syntax for it.

As for number 8, this may be the most interesting of the lot. Ideas 8 and 9 only became part of Lisp by accident, because Steve Russell implemented something McCarthy had never intended to be implemented. And yet these ideas turn out to be responsible for both Lisp's strange appearance and its most distinctive features. Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures.

Expressing the language in its own data structures turns out to be a very powerful feature. Ideas 8 and 9 together mean that you can write programs that write programs. That may sound like a bizarre idea, but it's an everyday thing in Lisp. The most common way to do it is with something called a macro.

The term "macro" does not mean in Lisp what it means in other languages. A Lisp macro can be anything from an abbreviation to a compiler for a new language. If you want to really understand Lisp, or just expand your programming horizons, I would learn more about macros.

Macros (in the Lisp sense) are still, as far as I know, unique to Lisp. This is partly because in order to have macros you probably have to make your language look as strange as Lisp. It may also be because if you do add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only a new dialect of Lisp.

I mention this mostly as a joke, but it is quite true. If you define a language that has car, cdr, cons, quote, cond, atom, eq, and a notation for functions expressed as lists, then you can build all the rest of Lisp out of it. That is in fact the defining quality of Lisp: it was in order to make this so that McCarthy gave Lisp the shape it has.

I do not know anything about Lisp myself, but found it interesting that he claims languages are becoming more Lisp-like.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

> Macros (in the Lisp sense) are still, as far as I know, unique to
> Lisp. This is partly because in order to have macros you probably have
> to make your language look as strange as Lisp. It may also be because
> if you do add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim
> to have invented a new language, but only a new dialect of Lisp.
Haskell has real macros like Lisp, but is statically typed.  I'm still
fond of Lisp because it is so easy to make programs write programs, as
the syntax is so simple.  nVidia (they say) have a language called NOVA
that combines some of the essential properties of Haskell with Lisp.  
nVidia would have a long way to go to match mature implementations of
either.

Marcus

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[Pamela McCorduck]

Merle, I missed your comment and you are certainly somebody to me!!!!

P.

On Mar 3, 2014, at 11:12 PM, Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

I commented, and I'm utterly somebody, dear Pamela.

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merlelefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Steve Smith]

Pamela -

I think there are *many* valid arguments up one side and down the other of this topic, just as the (false?) dichotomy between Art and Craft.

I also think that while there are arguments for the deep pockets of government, there are also arguments against it. I can't find a transcript yet but I remember Freeman Dyson giving one of his (anti) Big Science talks at LANL decades ago.   It moved me, especially since he was NOT preaching to his choir at LANL.   Actually, he had many acolytes for Tolstoyan vs Napoleonic Science (as I remember him describing the difference in funding) at LANL but they were individual (often young) researchers trying to pursue one dream or another, not the rank and file of mid-career scientists cum engineers/craftsmen nor especially the administration.

I also agree that the advent of computers, for all the wonderful things they have done (I came to LANL to build computerized control systems for the Proton storage ring and went on to eventually build VR systems to support scientific investigation into measured as well as simulated phenomena) have also changed the game in some not so good ways.  They've changed the way people (including practicing scientists) think about science, sometimes for the better, often for the worse.

My daughter is a Virologist who fights *every day* with her boss/mentor and almost all of the other staff at her institution to stay on track with "science" while they are all listening to the siren song of drug discovery... she is working on characterizing many things regarding the mechanisms of viral invasion of cells (Dingue and West Nile) while her bosses and peers are trying to divert her work (they have already diverted their own) to simple drug discovery...   because they will get both rich and famous from that, but will *rarely* advance the understanding or the science a single whit.   Oh well!

- Steve

Merle, I missed your comment and you are certainly somebody to me!!!!

P.

On Mar 3, 2014, at 11:12 PM, Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

I commented, and I'm utterly somebody, dear Pamela.

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merlelefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Steve Smith]

I apologize for getting a little off topic from the original point being made here:

My rail is against two things, UberScale Science and the loss/limitation/coopting of Government Funding of Science.

While the free market has some magic to it, there are times when an entity charged with improvement of the commons (Government?) can add a qualitative and important difference to the pursuit of knowledge (Scientific or otherwise).  I think today that there may be plenty of Government funding for science if so much of it wasn't one flavor of Pork or another.

Pamela -

I think there are *many* valid arguments up one side and down the other of this topic, just as the (false?) dichotomy between Art and Craft.

I also think that while there are arguments for the deep pockets of government, there are also arguments against it. I can't find a transcript yet but I remember Freeman Dyson giving one of his (anti) Big Science talks at LANL decades ago.   It moved me, especially since he was NOT preaching to his choir at LANL.   Actually, he had many acolytes for Tolstoyan vs Napoleonic Science (as I remember him describing the difference in funding) at LANL but they were individual (often young) researchers trying to pursue one dream or another, not the rank and file of mid-career scientists cum engineers/craftsmen nor especially the administration.

I also agree that the advent of computers, for all the wonderful things they have done (I came to LANL to build computerized control systems for the Proton storage ring and went on to eventually build VR systems to support scientific investigation into measured as well as simulated phenomena) have also changed the game in some not so good ways.  They've changed the way people (including practicing scientists) think about science, sometimes for the better, often for the worse.

My daughter is a Virologist who fights *every day* with her boss/mentor and almost all of the other staff at her institution to stay on track with "science" while they are all listening to the siren song of drug discovery... she is working on characterizing many things regarding the mechanisms of viral invasion of cells (Dingue and West Nile) while her bosses and peers are trying to divert her work (they have already diverted their own) to simple drug discovery...   because they will get both rich and famous from that, but will *rarely* advance the understanding or the science a single whit.   Oh well!

- Steve

Merle, I missed your comment and you are certainly somebody to me!!!!

P.

On Mar 3, 2014, at 11:12 PM, Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

I commented, and I'm utterly somebody, dear Pamela.

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]> wrote:

Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from government led innovation to private sector led innovation was interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have consequences.

From: John Day <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email], [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists

Scott,

You have hit the nail on the head.  We are not doing fundamental research.  The sciences are turning into craft.  Lee Smolin first brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book, "The Trouble with Physics."

In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar.  I also think to some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from science.'  We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.

The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.

The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.  See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree, Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.  (By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)

By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were losing knowledge.  Needham says that it is because merchants (capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap.  The government power structure controlled everything.  I also believe it is because there was no Euclid.  There was no example of an axiomatic system.  The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to geometry.  Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of proof.  Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes, algorithms; but not proof.  Proof is at the root of building theory.  Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.  The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.

Needham didn't live to see it.  But we now have the example of how the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation.  That drive is fine for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next one.  And we have seen the example of that as well.

And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS.  One sees the same the same papers on about a 5 years cycle.  The "time constants" have changed but they are the same papers.

Early CS was much more scientific.  We went about things much more methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding the fundamentals than just building something that worked.  (BTW to your comment:  We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET.  We had many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc.  However, we never saw it as the future.  We had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't moved anywhere.  The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and bigger.  You are right.  We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing,  and never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)

You are right.  We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid it gets disheartening.  We have 30 years of conditioning the field toward everything else but.  I don't see many who even when they say we need to do it, know how to do it.  We have selected against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and professors) have trouble with abstraction.  For a field that one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.

Take care,

John Day

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merlelefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[glen ropella]

FWIW, I thought you were spot on re: the topic.  It seems to me that it
doesn't matter whether the big money is from the government or the
private sector.  Big money implies things like big returns, cutting
patients to fit tables, etc.  Regardless of who employs the bureaucrat,
their @ss is on the line if the money is deemed wasted.  And if the
money is _big_, then the risk is high.

What I tried to do with my comment that innovation is actually funded by
the individuals who do the work... my point was that big money is a
corrupting thing, no matter what the source.  What some see as copycat,
lack of genuine, innovation in privately funded "innovation", I see a
similar (perhaps worse) copycat, lack of genuine, innovation in publicly
funded "innovation".  My opinion has grown worse the more exposure I
have to "R21" research grant reviews.
<http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/r21.htm>

Were I King, I would mandate public and private funding to be smaller,
with faster iterations, muchmuchmuch less time spent reviewing
applications, and a focus more on upstream innovation.  The trouble is
estimating who will benefit from any rewards that ensue from supporting
some upstream thing?

In some ways, it's akin to giving money to homeless people you meet on
the street versus tithing to, say, the United Way.  Do you like your
philanthropy organic or institutionalized?  Do you have stultifying
expectations when you give away your dollar?  Or do you give it away and
think of it as a _gift_?

Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from
the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.  Of course,
it does bring out a few j@ck@ss3s who, in a hard-core way, expect to get
something in exchange for the $20 bucks they "donated" ... kinda like
expecting that tote bag when you give money to NPR.


On 03/04/2014 08:31 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> I apologize for getting a little off topic from the original point being
> made here:
>
> My rail is against two things, UberScale Science and the
> loss/limitation/coopting of Government Funding of Science.
>
> While the free market has some magic to it, there are times when an
> entity charged with improvement of the commons (Government?) can add a
> qualitative and important difference to the pursuit of knowledge
> (Scientific or otherwise).  I think today that there may be plenty of
> Government funding for science if so much of it wasn't one flavor of
> Pork or another.

--
⇒⇐ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
> Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from
> the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth
doing, and that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to
get them done.   With government funding and venture capital, the money
is mostly controlled by certain types of people with certain types of
values.   Those kinds of people won't pursue the diversity of possible
innovations, and they aren't the `best' in any absolute sense nor
`deserve' the control they have.   They are just fit for their
environment.   So to me it's no more generosity than donating to a
political campaign, it's just that these technical campaigns actually
might modify the world slightly, should they succeed.

Marcus





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[Steve Smith]

> On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
>> Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit
>> from the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
> To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth
> doing, and that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to
> get them done.   With government funding and venture capital, the
> money is mostly controlled by certain types of people with certain
> types of values.   Those kinds of people won't pursue the diversity of
> possible innovations, and they aren't the `best' in any absolute sense
> nor `deserve' the control they have.   They are just fit for their
> environment.   So to me it's no more generosity than donating to a
> political campaign, it's just that these technical campaigns actually
> might modify the world slightly, should they succeed.
>
> Marcus

I've done a little bit of work with crowdfunding... I've supported a few
projects (pre-bought a few items?) and agree that, at least for me, it
is a "vote" for an idea, a creative person, a technology, a product.  
My current interest is in "regional" crowdfunding... of helping
neighborhoods/cities/regions collect both $$ and emotional/intellectual
support for projects.

I'll probably trigger Marcus again if I suggest collecting funds to
build a neighborhood park, but that *is* the idea... not just
encouraging neighbors to show up to build/maintain their park but also
to purchase the materials, rent the equipment, hire the contractors,
whatever.   I'm not *literally* interested in *this* example, but
thought I'd bring out a dead horse for another whack.

The point of this type project is to measure or demonstrate or even
generate community support for an idea or project.   It is one thing to
gather up petition signatures from folks in a city/county/whatever but
another to get them all to kick in $5 or even $100 to make something
happen.    County/City/State officials are presumably more swayed by a
project to say... build a skate park..  when locals have thrown down
$100K to do it (even if it is projected to cost $1M)...   I believe it
makes politicians and bureaucrats alike take it more seriously...

As an entrepreneur of various sorts, I am enamored of the idea of having
the *market* for an idea/product pre-qualified by pre-purchasers...  
this feels like it could apply to public projects as well.

I don't know if it can scale to not-so-big Science ... but maybe...   I
think people stepped up for SETI-at-home, and I've seen a few
Kickstarters for CubeSat projects... so maybe this is a place to put our
money where our mouth is?

- Steve

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 3/4/14, 1:12 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I'll probably trigger Marcus again if I suggest collecting funds to
> build a neighborhood park
Can we make it the Glowing Plant park? http://www.glowingplant.com/

Marcus

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[Pamela McCorduck]

Perhaps it was just incredibly fortunate for us that those people—Licklider, Kahn, Cerf and others—were in a position at a special time to make a dream come true. They had the ways and means to spend money, and spent it pretty wisely. Everything the pioneers did wasn’t successful—a big, expensive time-share project at MIT/Bell Labs fizzled. But like commercial ventures, what was successful was spectacularly so.

Perhaps the founding of the Internet was something like the founding fathers of this country, the constellation of minds formed at just the right moment, with just the right sensibilities. Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with which kind of organization, commercial or governmental, is the midwife.


On Mar 4, 2014, at 2:50 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
>> Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
> To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth doing, and that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to get them done.   With government funding and venture capital, the money is mostly controlled by certain types of people with certain types of values.   Those kinds of people won't pursue the diversity of possible innovations, and they aren't the `best' in any absolute sense nor `deserve' the control they have.   They are just fit for their environment.   So to me it's no more generosity than donating to a political campaign, it's just that these technical campaigns actually might modify the world slightly, should they succeed.
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
>
>
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[glen ropella]

On 03/04/2014 11:50 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
>> Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from
>> the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
>
> To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth
> doing, and that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to
> get them done.

I can't help but notice you edited out giving money to the homeless...
Don't you think hanging out on the street drinking cheap wine is
inherently worth doing? [*]






[*] Yes, I know this is a callous, unfunny, joke, indicative of my
old-white-man prejudices ... but I couldn't help it.  It's a problem.
I'll have to bring it up with my therapist.

--
⇒⇐ glen

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[Grant Holland]

Pamela,

Shrewd observation.

Going back 25+ years earlier than those people, the Cybernetics movement
was a global intellectual effort that was ultimately interested in a
"science of mind". Most of its participants were probably academics, and
it included a broad array of passions - not only mathematicians like
Wiener, Von Neumann, Ashby and McCulloch, but also the likes of Margaret
Mead (sociology) and Gregory Bateson (psych).

"Fortunately", WWII "happened" and these folks answered the
call-to-arms. Its quite reasonable to argue that the computer revolution
sprang from these folks at those times. The first commercial computer
was arguably the Univac I, which was developed at the U. of Pa. A
commercial company was formed around it in 1947 (Univac). IBM entered
the computer business in 1953 (I believe).

Intellectual interests by a bunch of academics seems to have been the
compelling driver. War turned it into engineering. Post-war turned it
into business.

FWIW, Grant


On 3/4/14, 1:48 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

> Perhaps it was just incredibly fortunate for us that those people—Licklider, Kahn, Cerf and others—were in a position at a special time to make a dream come true. They had the ways and means to spend money, and spent it pretty wisely. Everything the pioneers did wasn’t successful—a big, expensive time-share project at MIT/Bell Labs fizzled. But like commercial ventures, what was successful was spectacularly so.
>
> Perhaps the founding of the Internet was something like the founding fathers of this country, the constellation of minds formed at just the right moment, with just the right sensibilities. Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with which kind of organization, commercial or governmental, is the midwife.
>
>
> On Mar 4, 2014, at 2:50 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> On 3/4/14, 11:33 AM, glen wrote:
>>> Although I haven't participated, I think we can learn quite a bit from the outright generosity shown by Kickstarter participants.
>> To me it is important to believe there are things inherently worth doing, and that there is someone that wants to do them and a means to get them done.   With government funding and venture capital, the money is mostly controlled by certain types of people with certain types of values.   Those kinds of people won't pursue the diversity of possible innovations, and they aren't the `best' in any absolute sense nor `deserve' the control they have.   They are just fit for their environment.   So to me it's no more generosity than donating to a political campaign, it's just that these technical campaigns actually might modify the world slightly, should they succeed.
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -
>> I'll probably trigger Marcus again if I suggest collecting funds to
>> build a neighborhood park
> Can we make it the Glowing Plant park? http://www.glowingplant.com/
Very Kewl... but way too creepy to me.   Despite the assurances my own
PhD Molecular Biologist daughter gives me about these kinds of things,
it just seems like a disaster (of some kind) waiting to happen.

I love this stuff in Science Fiction (day after tomorrow stories of
various genres) such as the Nicholas Van Rjin character in Poul
Anderson's portfolio or the StarFarers of Vonda McIntyre... but...
well... I think we could be out-driving our headlights on a cliffside
road overlooking a dark and stormy ocean.

Well found!
  - Steve

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