IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

[Steve Smith]

Yes, I suppose that one could say that Nick is the best kind of Troll here...  I always appreciate his (deliberately) naive questions and hair splitting even when it IS the hair on my own chinny chin chin!

On 6/8/17 4:08 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

No, my troll comment was meant for Nick's OP. Not in an unkind way, but ...

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

I think you and I on the same page.  My first thought (before the concept-mapping tools) was to collaboratively develop an ontology so that we could all talk about the same things.  But my guess is that would just cause even more hemming and hawing over terms.  Regardless of tools, someone needs to run point.  If there's a lead author and the other participants can "get behind" that author's objective, then it would work.


On 06/08/2017 03:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).
>
> I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..
>
> My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.
>
> I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.
>
> Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.
>
> This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.
>
> I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!
>
> I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

--
☣ glen

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

Steve:

I think the mind mapping developer you are thinking of is Ron Newman -- [hidden email]

TJ

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Owen, 

 

This would all be a lot easier if you would just say what you think. 

 

What was the “unkind way” that your message was “not in” ?

 

And what the dickens is an O.P.?  

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

No, my troll comment was meant for Nick's OP. Not in an unkind way, but ...

 

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

 

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody,

 

If only because of my despair concerning the current state of our national political discourse, mind mapping tools are of great interest to me. Some of us briefly considered using such tools to moderate conversation between people who disagree.   Would such a tool help to determine whether you-all are using complexity terms in roughly the same way or whether, in the interest of keeping the conversation going, you are letting slide fundamental differences in what you take complexity to be?

 

In any case, don’t let this thread die.

 

Nick   

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 7:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

Steve:

I think the mind mapping developer you are thinking of is Ron Newman -- [hidden email]

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Dear All,

 

I wonder the extent to which you would all agree that there is a bit of a complexity bubble: i.e., if you know the lingo, then you can understand the questions; if you don't know the lingo, then you can't understand what complexity people are on about.  So, one kind of project a group like us could work on is breaking out of the bubble.  That would require putting the complexity problem in a form that any ordinary mortal can understand.   Here’s my attempt:  I think what you are up to is coming up with a general theory of creation, more general even than natural selection.  You want to offer a theory that accounts for the emergence of complex structures (sensu Thompsoni) in the universe.  Now that’s a program that anybody outside the bubble could understand.

 

How wrong am I about that? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 6:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

 

I think you and I on the same page.  My first thought (before the concept-mapping tools) was to collaboratively develop an ontology so that we could all talk about the same things.  But my guess is that would just cause even more hemming and hawing over terms.  Regardless of tools, someone needs to run point.  If there's a lead author and the other participants can "get behind" that author's objective, then it would work.

 

 

On 06/08/2017 03:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

>

> I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

>

> My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

>

> I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

>

> Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

>

> This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

>

> I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

>

> I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

 

--

☣ glen

 

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[Russ Abbott]

Complex system and emergence reached their hype peak around 2,000. The bubble burst for emergence, but complex system seems to be hanging on. Unfortunately, Google's NGram viewer only goes up to 2008.

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 6:17 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear All,

 

I wonder the extent to which you would all agree that there is a bit of a complexity bubble: i.e., if you know the lingo, then you can understand the questions; if you don't know the lingo, then you can't understand what complexity people are on about.  So, one kind of project a group like us could work on is breaking out of the bubble.  That would require putting the complexity problem in a form that any ordinary mortal can understand.   Here’s my attempt:  I think what you are up to is coming up with a general theory of creation, more general even than natural selection.  You want to offer a theory that accounts for the emergence of complex structures (sensu Thompsoni) in the universe.  Now that’s a program that anybody outside the bubble could understand.

 

How wrong am I about that? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 6:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

 

I think you and I on the same page.  My first thought (before the concept-mapping tools) was to collaboratively develop an ontology so that we could all talk about the same things.  But my guess is that would just cause even more hemming and hawing over terms.  Regardless of tools, someone needs to run point.  If there's a lead author and the other participants can "get behind" that author's objective, then it would work.

 

 

On 06/08/2017 03:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

>

> I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

>

> My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

>

> I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

>

> Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

>

> This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

>

> I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

>

> I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

 

--

☣ glen

 

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

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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

Hi, Glen,

Missed this the first time.  

Late, here, so I will just say a little.  According to the scientific metaphor game I understand, we would now start to cash out the onion metaphor.  Does the relation between the layers in an onion REALLY capture what you are after.  I would guess not, because (I am holding an onion now) the layers in an onion have relatively little to do with one another.  You can slide one with respect to the other.  I am guessing that you are looking for a metaphor in which one layer interacts with another.  (Ugh.  I have to go wash my hands.)  Remember, you can make a metaphor to an abstract onion.  A model has to have its own reality beyond it’s use to represent your notion of layer.  

Nik

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 12:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?


You seem to be asking for people other than me to respond.  But I doubt anyone will try to explain a troll like me. >8^)

I don't have any idea what you mean by "a kind of hen".  So, I'll let that go.  Stratum is a good word, but like level, it implies a direction, namely up-down ("something laid down").  I do mean something very much like level and stratum, except without implying a (constant) direction.  Onion is a better analog than, say, genus or battalion.  There's still a symmetry in the directions from the center of the onion.  But at least you can vary the direction without changing layers.  More complicated layering would be something like doping a silicon chip or spray painting a complicated surface ... or perhaps sand blasting something, where you turn it within the directional gradient.

It's important to graduate from the naive concept of levels to the more sophisticated concept of layers because, e.g. in Russ' urban systems, there are all different types of flows and ebbs, gradients of different speeds, directions, types, etc. that "paint" things on the system in varied ways.  It's not a singular hierarchy in any sense.

If you grok the poverty of the concept of the "landscape" in evolution, then you should grok the poverty of the concept of "level" in cumulative structures.

That's the best I can do to explain it.  Sorry for my inadequacy.

On 06/07/2017 06:32 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Here is Glen's thoughtful post of January 20, reborn. To be honest, I don’t understand it.  Not a bit.  I am hoping that perhaps one or more of the rest of you can help me get it.  Let’s start with one baby step.  What is meant by LAYER in this text? The possible meanings open to me are, (1) a kind of hen; (2) a stratum in a substance; or (3) a level in a hierarchical descriptive scheme.  So, “genus” is a level as is “battalion”. Are any of these meanings relevant to Glen’s post?  

--
☣ glen

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[Steve Smith]

Yes!  thanks!

The tool is IdeaTreeLive and attempts to address *some* of the issues discussed here.   If Ron is still live on this list, I trust he will weigh in.  He's clearly thought a lot about these issues (as several of us obviously have) but with a commercially viable tool perspective rather than a fairly academic or research perspective (speaking for myself).

- Steve

On 6/8/17 5:17 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:

Steve:

I think the mind mapping developer you are thinking of is Ron Newman -- [hidden email]

TJ

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

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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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Glen writes:

"But at least you can vary the direction without changing layers.  More complicated layering would be something like doping a silicon chip or spray painting a complicated surface ... or perhaps sand blasting something, where you turn it within the directional gradient."

Why does there need to be any spatial property?  Why not a graph?

Marcus
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[Steve Smith]

Nick -

My read is that Owen was teasing you... by all understandings I have of teasing, it is always oblique.

My read on "not unkind" was that he was suggesting that your post was perhaps deliberately provocative, which I also think it was, but in a positive way which adds to the quality of the discussions here.  

O.P. is an acronym for "Original Post".

- Steve

On 6/8/17 6:53 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Owen, 

 

This would all be a lot easier if you would just say what you think. 

 

What was the “unkind way” that your message was “not in” ?

 

And what the dickens is an O.P.?  

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

No, my troll comment was meant for Nick's OP. Not in an unkind way, but ...

 

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

 

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

I share your concern about the current place of political (and generally public?) discourse.  I am heartened by the work of Krista Tippet and her many interviewees in what she calls "The Civil Conversation Project" with a psuedo abstract of:

Speaking together differently in order to live together differently.  

The Civil Conversations Project seeks to renew common life in a fractured and tender world. We are a conversation-based, virtues-based resource towards hospitable, trustworthy relationship with and across difference. We honor the power of asking better questions, model reframed approaches to entrenched debates, and insist that the ruptures above the radar do not tell the whole story of our time. We aspire to amplify and cross-pollinate the generative new realities that are also being woven, one word and one life at a time.

This plug aside, I understand your interest in mind or concept mapping software to help identify and perhaps illuminate for others differences in language and maybe more fundamentally, values?   I'm curious how you feel about the use of the term "mind" in this case rather than "concept"?   It seems like with your background (evolutionary psychology?) that you would find THOSE terms to have very specific meaning and while "mind mapping" is catchy and colloquial, do you *really* think such tools actually map anything significant about the mind?  As Glen suggested, perhaps this kind of hair-splitting is what pollutes threads to the point they die?  If you think so, feel free to ignore the question and proceed. I think *I* am OK to make the translation on the fly if I need to.

In any case, if sfX were still standing, or if you were in SFe right now, I'd offer to join you in an interactive session of this kind at SimTable with a projector and mouse and maybe a few other locals to shout out directions at whomever was "driving" in the moment.  I believe it might be at least interesting if not actually more productive than the kinds of banter we have all exchanged here on the topic(s).

Maybe when you return from the swamp?

- Steve

On 6/8/17 7:05 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, everybody,

 

If only because of my despair concerning the current state of our national political discourse, mind mapping tools are of great interest to me. Some of us briefly considered using such tools to moderate conversation between people who disagree.   Would such a tool help to determine whether you-all are using complexity terms in roughly the same way or whether, in the interest of keeping the conversation going, you are letting slide fundamental differences in what you take complexity to be?

 

In any case, don’t let this thread die.

 

Nick   

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 7:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

Steve:

I think the mind mapping developer you are thinking of is Ron Newman -- [hidden email]

 

TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists 
Check out It's The People's Data

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
============================================

 

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.


On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

I feel that I have been "there" from (near) the inception of the Complexity Bubble you refer to. 

I'm not sure if you are mixing a metaphor here...  though it does seem that the source domain is the same in both metaphors:   1) A bubble like a housing or tulip bubble which just keeps expanding until it bursts from it's own unsustainable expansion; 2) A bubble like the kind that we put children with no immune system inside of.

I wonder if this concise paragraph you offer here isn't what you are mostly getting on about with circular definitions?  I DO think that Complexity Science (if there is such a thing in reality) has the properties you speak of:  "If you understand the lingo then you understand the questions and if you don't then you don't."  

My own memory/opinion is that Complexity Science grew up out of various existing fields such as Nonlinear Physics and Dynamical Systems theory.  The colloquial term "Chaos" has a fairly decent description on Wikipedia:

    Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focused on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. 'Chaos' is an interdisciplinary theory stating that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

I don't believe that anyone invoked the Wikipedia entry for Complex Systems which I find on the whole fairly reasonable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems

which seem a bit overlapping and redundant to me (In Wikipedia?  Never!)

Sadly, I think an earlier quote (from Marcus) that said roughly "nobody understands mathematics, they just get used to it" might apply a bit to Complex Systems/Science.

I realize this may not be helpful, and I appreciate your frustrations.  I also seem to remember that Owen(?) gave a pointer to Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity Explorer"  course on "Intro to Complexity": https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/74-introduction-to-complexity-spring-2017 which I *think* can actually be taken out of sync with the group that started in April.  

I DO think that one of the more interesting points of Complexity Science is to get at the basic nature of Emergence as you suggest.   Perhaps that is "creation itself" or at least "life itself"?

Mumble,

 - Steve

On 6/8/17 7:17 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Dear All,

 

I wonder the extent to which you would all agree that there is a bit of a complexity bubble: i.e., if you know the lingo, then you can understand the questions; if you don't know the lingo, then you can't understand what complexity people are on about.  So, one kind of project a group like us could work on is breaking out of the bubble.  That would require putting the complexity problem in a form that any ordinary mortal can understand.   Here’s my attempt:  I think what you are up to is coming up with a general theory of creation, more general even than natural selection.  You want to offer a theory that accounts for the emergence of complex structures (sensu Thompsoni) in the universe.  Now that’s a program that anybody outside the bubble could understand.

 

How wrong am I about that? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 6:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

 

I think you and I on the same page.  My first thought (before the concept-mapping tools) was to collaboratively develop an ontology so that we could all talk about the same things.  But my guess is that would just cause even more hemming and hawing over terms.  Regardless of tools, someone needs to run point.  If there's a lead author and the other participants can "get behind" that author's objective, then it would work.

 

 

On 06/08/2017 03:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

>

> I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

>

> My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

>

> I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

>

> Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

>

> This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

>

> I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

>

> I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

 

--

☣ glen

 

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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
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

Heh, you're so rife with premature registration!  You _leap_ to thinking about the strength of the onion analogy without seeming to listen to what I'm saying at all.  8^)  That's OK.  I'm used to it.  But to be clear, my point was about _direction_, not the extent to which layers are coupled.  I also mentioned spray painting and sand blasting.  Those are even better than onions, given Russ' target of urban systems.

But on with the onion!  Surely you don't believe your own statement that an onion's layers have relatively little to do with one another.  That would be akin to rejecting the concept of a population _relaxing_ into a landscape.  Literally, the very shape of the outer layers is determined by the shapes of the inner layers.  And since the onion analog (not metaphor) is about space, the shapes matter a great deal to the structural analogy.

More importantly, the thickness of an onions layer has much to do with the gradients it's being painted by.  So, this analog is actually a pretty good one for making my point that layer is a more generically useful term than level.


On 06/08/2017 09:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Late, here, so I will just say a little.  According to the scientific metaphor game I understand, we would now start to cash out the onion metaphor.  Does the relation between the layers in an onion REALLY capture what you are after.  I would guess not, because (I am holding an onion now) the layers in an onion have relatively little to do with one another.  You can slide one with respect to the other.  I am guessing that you are looking for a metaphor in which one layer interacts with another.  (Ugh.  I have to go wash my hands.)  Remember, you can make a metaphor to an abstract onion.  A model has to have its own reality beyond it’s use to represent your notion of layer.  


--
␦glen?

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[gepr]

Because, as Steve rightly pointed out with that Joslyn paper, the point is the extent to which the system submits to ordering.  A strict hierarchy (levels, like I think EricS drew) submits to a total order, whereas a brranching hierarchy (still levels) submits to a partial order.  Graphs work, but not as analogy, per se ... more like exact representations.  The kinds of graphs I'd like to talk about don't (necessarily) submit to ordering, even partial ordering. (no levels) It would be more complete to say that any "ordering" would be more complicated than simple relations like ≥ or ≤.

On 06/08/2017 09:48 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Why does there need to be any spatial property?  Why not a graph?


--
␦glen?

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[Owen Densmore]

Re Troll & OP, like Steve said.

Re discussions amongst people who disagree: I just read that analysis of voice & speech patterns could reveal concussion related brain damage far before normal methods.

Possibly, like IdeaTree, analysing the structure, grammar, word choice, etc of a conversation, not simply what is said, could also reveal hidden intent and feelings.

Re complexity as language: Merle has been using complexity concepts and language for years .. let's get her to chat about it. 

   -- Owen 

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, glen,

Great!  I am learning stuff.  I am happy to learn more about onions.   In fact, now wish I knew more.  It seems like onions develop from the inside out, right?  The outside layer is just the first inside layer grown large.  I think if one examines the whole onion plant, one finds that each layer of the onion proper is connected to its own onion leave.  But mostly my interest is in playing the metaphor game rigorously, which you are doing with admirable precision.  

I stipulate that a bump in one layer of an onion will enforce itself on the layers around it, so the layers are not entirely independent of one another.  Do you stipulate that each layer of an onion is essentially an independent plant wrapped in the earlier layers grown larger?  

At some point, in the metaphor game, we return to the thing we are trying to explain and map the elements of the metaphor (the "analogs") onto the explanandum.  But not yet.  This is too much fun.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ?glen?
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2017 11:01 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

Heh, you're so rife with premature registration!  You _leap_ to thinking about the strength of the onion analogy without seeming to listen to what I'm saying at all.  8^)  That's OK.  I'm used to it.  But to be clear, my point was about _direction_, not the extent to which layers are coupled.  I also mentioned spray painting and sand blasting.  Those are even better than onions, given Russ' target of urban systems.

But on with the onion!  Surely you don't believe your own statement that an onion's layers have relatively little to do with one another.  That would be akin to rejecting the concept of a population _relaxing_ into a landscape.  Literally, the very shape of the outer layers is determined by the shapes of the inner layers.  And since the onion analog (not metaphor) is about space, the shapes matter a great deal to the structural analogy.

More importantly, the thickness of an onions layer has much to do with the gradients it's being painted by.  So, this analog is actually a pretty good one for making my point that layer is a more generically useful term than level.


On 06/08/2017 09:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Late, here, so I will just say a little.  According to the scientific metaphor game I understand, we would now start to cash out the onion metaphor.  Does the relation between the layers in an onion REALLY capture what you are after.  I would guess not, because (I am holding an onion now) the layers in an onion have relatively little to do with one another.  You can slide one with respect to the other.  I am guessing that you are looking for a metaphor in which one layer interacts with another.  (Ugh.  I have to go wash my hands.)  Remember, you can make a metaphor to an abstract onion.  A model has to have its own reality beyond it’s use to represent your notion of layer.  


--
␦glen?

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[gepr]

On 06/09/2017 09:41 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> It seems like onions develop from the inside out, right?


Heh, I don't know.  Nor do I care because my analogy is not intended to be anything more than an analogy. >8^D


>The outside layer is just the first inside layer grown large.  I think if one examines the whole onion plant, one finds that each layer of the onion proper is connected to its own onion leave.  But mostly my interest is in playing the metaphor game rigorously, which you are doing with admirable precision.


There our purposes diverge.  My interest is in demonstrating that the concept of levels is inadequate to describe the layers involved in complexity.


> I stipulate that a bump in one layer of an onion will enforce itself on the layers around it, so the layers are not entirely independent of one another.  Do you stipulate that each layer of an onion is essentially an independent plant wrapped in the earlier layers grown larger?


Not in the slightest.  I only stipulate that the concept of levels is inadequate when examining onions.


> At some point, in the metaphor game, we return to the thing we are trying to explain and map the elements of the metaphor (the "analogs") onto the explanandum.  But not yet.  This is too much fun.


Unfortunately, perhaps because I simulate things for a living, I don and doff analogs more frequently than you don and doff hats or shoes.  So, I'm ready to abandon the near-spherical onion and move on to more complicated surfaces and the layers that accrete from within or without.

--
☣ glen

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[Nick Thompson]

 Glen,

But wait a minute!  Holding a side the mathematical meaning of model for a minute, what is the difference between a model and a metaphor?  I assume you take your models seriously, right?  I don't know what it means, "Just an analogy".  Either your layers are onion-like or not, right?  In which case, don't we get to examine which features of an onion you have in mind?  If your notion of an onion is just a project of your notion of levels of complexity, then how does it help to say that levels of complexity (or whatever) are onion-like?  

Remember, I am the guy who thinks that a lot of the problems we have in evolutionary science arise from failing to take Darwin's metaphor (natural selection) seriously enough.  

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2017 12:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

On 06/09/2017 09:41 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> It seems like onions develop from the inside out, right?


Heh, I don't know.  Nor do I care because my analogy is not intended to be anything more than an analogy. >8^D


>The outside layer is just the first inside layer grown large.  I think if one examines the whole onion plant, one finds that each layer of the onion proper is connected to its own onion leave.  But mostly my interest is in playing the metaphor game rigorously, which you are doing with admirable precision.


There our purposes diverge.  My interest is in demonstrating that the concept of levels is inadequate to describe the layers involved in complexity.


> I stipulate that a bump in one layer of an onion will enforce itself on the layers around it, so the layers are not entirely independent of one another.  Do you stipulate that each layer of an onion is essentially an independent plant wrapped in the earlier layers grown larger?


Not in the slightest.  I only stipulate that the concept of levels is inadequate when examining onions.


> At some point, in the metaphor game, we return to the thing we are trying to explain and map the elements of the metaphor (the "analogs") onto the explanandum.  But not yet.  This is too much fun.


Unfortunately, perhaps because I simulate things for a living, I don and doff analogs more frequently than you don and doff hats or shoes.  So, I'm ready to abandon the near-spherical onion and move on to more complicated surfaces and the layers that accrete from within or without.

--
☣ glen

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[gepr]

Ha!  I don't know if this is fun or not.  But you are making me giggle.  So that's good. 8^)

On 06/09/2017 11:54 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> But wait a minute!  Holding a side the mathematical meaning of model for a minute, what is the difference between a model and a metaphor?


I recently made an ass of myself arguing this very point with Vladimyr and Robert.  But to recap, "model" is too ambiguous to be reliable without lots of context.  Onions are definitely not metaphors.  When you bit into one, your body reacts.  To the best of my knowledge, no such reaction occurs when you bite into a metaphor.


>In which case, don't we get to examine which features of an onion you have in mind?


The feature I care about is the 3 dimensional near-symmetry and the fact that the concept of levels is less useful in such a situation.  We could also use Russian dolls instead of onions, if that would be clearer.


>If your notion of an onion is just a project of your notion of levels of complexity, then how does it help to say that levels of complexity (or whatever) are onion-like?


Sheesh.  I'm trying to stop you from using the word "level".  That's all I'm doing.  Maybe you're too smart for your own good.  I don't care about ANYTHING else at this point, simply that the word "level" sucks.  Stop using it.


> Remember, I am the guy who thinks that a lot of the problems we have in evolutionary science arise from failing to take Darwin's metaphor (natural selection) seriously enough.  


Yes, I know.  That's why it baffles me that you can't see my point that layer is better than level.


--
☣ glen

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