(advice needed!)

[Tom Vest]

On Mar 22, 2010, at 5:06 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

> Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10-03-22 04:58 PM:
>> Yes.  I am sorry. That was my fault.   There was a bit of a slipup between
>> the "provost" and the professor.  
>
> No worries!  It looks like a great book and I expect I'll enjoy it when
> I pop it off the queue.
>
>> Byers main point is that it is AMBIGUITY that makes maths great!  But its a
>> subtle argument because what he is really saying is ironic:  as
>> mathematicians strive to reduce amibiguity they inevitably generate more,
>> and thus, against their feverish and futile resistance, does math progress.
>
> Very interesting.  If there's one conviction I'm actually guilty of,
> it's believing that irony (or, more accurately, paradox) is the ultimate
> teacher.  And ambiguity is closely coupled with paradox.  (Warning: the
> broken record begins again.)  That's why I'm so fond of "Vicious
> Circles" by Barwise and Moss.  It's the closest body of math I've found
> that tries to explain how cycles impact the definiteness of math.
>
> But it's wrapped in other stories, too.  I remember once looking up
> "impredicative definition" in the index of some overly large math
> reference book in some library somewhere.  (I lose track sometimes. ;-)
> It told me to look at a particular page.  That page made a vague
> reference to the term "vicious circle".  So, I looked up "vicious
> circle".  It took me to another particular page, which made a vague
> reference to "impredicative definitions".  If it hadn't been such a
> large book, it would have been funny.  Instead, I learned a valuable lesson.

Interesting mix of interests! Glen I wonder if you've ranged even further afield, and come across a book by Richard Rorty called Contingency, Solidarity, and Irony (1989) -- or maybe Rorty's first, fame-making book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)? Rorty was a modern American School pragmatist (a tradition which he broadly defined to include William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, as well as WVO Quine and Donald Davidson), and most of his life's work focused on debunking (or if that was not possible, discrediting) all sorts of perceived impediments to inter-subjective communication and coordination -- prerequisites for the social/political goals (e.g., understanding, cooperation) that he was more open about in his final years. One nice quote from Contingency about his own disciplinary labors, which could easily be applied to the current context:

"Interesting [field of study]  is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... This sort of  [discipline-specific research] does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holistically and pragmatically." (p. 9)

While this observation seems a bit exaggerated to me (i.e., narrow, stepwise analysis often accompanies the broader contest between rival paradigms), this actually sounds quite a bit like the work I'm participating in this week, at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Los Angeles (esp. the Routing Research Group, which is trying to develop a consensus recommendation for a new Internet architecture to be developed over the next couple of years).

Sadly, it also reminds me of an old grad school benefactor (whom you may actually remember Glen -- he sponsored my mid-1990s participation in the Swarm conferences where we met once or twice, and later spent a summer there as a visiting fellow -- the results of which were later memorialized in one of Simon Fraser's chatterbots). Sometimes those "vague promises of great things" on the other side of the next disciplinary fence can be so compelling that the lure of serial fence-hopping displaces the much more challenging but enduring work of fence removal and field integration. I learned may valuable (and ironic) lessons from that particular association...

Regards all,

TV







============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Steve Smith]

Eric -

Excellent anecdote.   It has been a theme in my life, trying to understand the "space between the lines", or to the point here  "what cannot be translated directly".   I am very lucky to have met Dr. Pennington and to be even a small part of her work in this area.

I believe that there is something about "emergent properties" involved.  Not in the language (so much) as in the topics of discourse/study.   When a culture/ecosystem is rich enough (which I think by definition includes all cultures/ecosystems) there are emergent phenomena which are unique to that system/culture.  This may not guarantee (convergent evolution?) that said phenomena is unique at some level of consideration, but it does often seem to be the case that every culture/ecosystem has a plethora of unique phenomena worthy of it's own language or at least nuances on the language. 

"Traditional" Science (whatever that means) has a reductionist bent which often leads us to study the similarities, not the differences.

- Steve

Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:

There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in several hard-won and highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.

If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it, but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck!

Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context,

Eric

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith [hidden email] wrote:

siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the 
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly 
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally 
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things 
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things, 
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!

For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM 
on this very topic...  a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF 
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending 
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of 
"the Science of Collaboration".   Central to this work is the notion 
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct 
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand 
and share their work.    One of the tools to be developed is a 
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts 
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.

We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and 
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in 
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.

We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent 
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling.   It did not address the problem 
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of 
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for 
expressing and exploring simulations.     Of course, within the context 
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when 
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)

Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that 
provides the expressiveness and the leverage.  If you constrained 
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful 
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government.   Things 
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


    

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Nick Thompson]

Eric, Steve,

 

I am trying to reconcile my agreement with the spirit of your correspondence with my largely failed attempts to work toward a common language in our conversations about complexity on this list and on Friday mornings.  I, too, was trained in many traditions.... comparative psychology, ethology, zoology, some physical anthropology, quite a lot of english literature,  and even a little meteorology.  And some of my best friends are mathematicians.  But perhaps unlike Eric (?) (who was my last [postdoctoral] student, by the way, and my great intellectual benefactor) I am convinced that the effort to communicate amongst perspectives is valuable.  And I cannot see how communication is possible without some attention to and adjustments of the use of specialized languages.  It bothers me still, for instance, that two members of our community can use words like "system" or "information" in entirely contradictory ways and yet fancy that they are communicating with one another. 

 

I think this is where an analogy to the paradox of mathematics that Byers highlights might be useful.   The struggle over  language is worthwhile but only because it fails.  No man struggles in order to fail, but still,  failure is the wet edge of science. 

 

What do you think?

 

Nick

 

PS, to Eric:  "The wonderful feature of the New Realism’s metaphor is that it honors our separate points of view without giving up on finding a point of view that integrates them. Two blind New Realists groping an elephant: “OK, I’ll follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree toward the sound of my voice and we’ll see what we feel along the way.” PAUSE. Together;

 “My God, it’s an ELEPHANT!”"  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Cc: [hidden email]

Sent: 3/23/2010 6:20:41 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] multiple tool kits [was (advice needed!)]

Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:

There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in several hard-won and highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.

If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it, but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck!

Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context,

Eric

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the 
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly 
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally 
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things 
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things, 
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!

For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM 
on this very topic...  a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF 
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending 
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of 
"the Science of Collaboration".   Central to this work is the notion 
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct 
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand 
and share their work.    One of the tools to be developed is a 
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts 
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.

We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and 
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in 
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.

We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent 
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling.   It did not address the problem 
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of 
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for 
expressing and exploring simulations.     Of course, within the context 
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when 
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)

Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that 
provides the expressiveness and the leverage.  If you constrained 
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful 
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government.   Things 
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Nick Thompson]

Tom,

Thanks for supplying this quote.  To my shame, I have never read Rorty.

"Interesting [field of study] is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... "

 

What I have been unable to sort out is which category "complexity babble" belongs to.  Is there such a thing as a half-formed new vocabulary that has become a nuisance? 

 

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

> [Original Message]
> From: Tom Vest <[hidden email]>
> To: glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]>
> Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 3/23/2010 8:47:01 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (advice needed!)
>
>
> On Mar 22, 2010, at 5:06 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
>
> > Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10-03-22 04:58 PM:
> >> Yes.  I am sorry. That was my fault.   There was a bit of a slipup between
> >> the "provost" and the professor. 
> >
> > No worries!  It looks like a great book and I expect I'll enjoy it when
> > I pop it off the queue.
> >
> >> Byers main point is that it is AMBIGUITY that makes maths great!  But its a
> >> subtle argument because what he is really saying is ironic:  as
> >> mathematicians strive to reduce amibiguity they inevitably generate more,
> >> and thus, against their feverish and futile resistance, does math progress.
> >
> > Very interesting.  If there's one conviction I'm actually guilty of,
> > it's believing that irony (or, more accurately, paradox) is the ultimate
> > teacher.  And ambiguity is closely coupled with paradox.  (Warning: the
> > broken record begins again.)  That's why I'm so fond of "Vicious
> > Circles" by Barwise and Moss.  It's the closest body of math I've found
> > that tries to explain how cycles impact the definiteness of math.
> >
> > But it's wrapped in other stories, too.  I remember once looking up
> > "impredicative definition" in the index of some overly large math
> > reference book in some library somewhere.  (I lose track sometimes. ;-)
> > It told me to look at a particular page.  That page made a vague
> > reference to the term "vicious circle".  So, I looked up "vicious
> > circle".  It took me to another particular page, which made a vague
> > reference to "impredicative definitions".  If it hadn't been such a
> > large book, it would have been funny.  Instead, I learned a valuable lesson.
>
>
> Interesting mix of interests! Glen I wonder if you've ranged even further afield, and come across a book by Richard Rorty called Contingency, Solidarity, and Irony (1989) -- or maybe Rorty's first, fame-making book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)? Rorty was a modern American School pragmatist (a tradition which he broadly defined to include William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, as well as WVO Quine and Donald Davidson), and most of his life's work focused on debunking (or if that was not possible, discrediting) all sorts of perceived impediments to inter-subjective communication and coordination -- prerequisites for the social/political goals (e.g., understanding, cooperation) that he was more open about in his final years. One nice quote from Contingency about his own disciplinary labors, which could easily be applied to the current context:
>
> "Interesting [field of study]  is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... This sort of  [discipline-specific research] does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holistically and pragmatically." (p. 9)
>
> While this observation seems a bit exaggerated to me (i.e., narrow, stepwise analysis often accompanies the broader contest between rival paradigms), this actually sounds quite a bit like the work I'm participating in this week, at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Los Angeles (esp. the Routing Research Group, which is trying to develop a consensus recommendation for a new Internet architecture to be developed over the next couple of years).
>
> Sadly, it also reminds me of an old grad school benefactor (whom you may actually remember Glen -- he sponsored my mid-1990s participation in the Swarm conferences where we met once or twice, and later spent a summer there as a visiting fellow -- the results of which were later memorialized in one of Simon Fraser's chatterbots). Sometimes those "vague promises of great things" on the other side of the next disciplinary fence can be so compelling that the lure of serial fence-hopping displaces the much more challenging but enduring work of fence removal and field integration. I learned may valuable (and ironic) lessons from that particular association...
>
> Regards all,
>
> TV
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Tom Vest]

I think that's my job description!

TV

On Mar 23, 2010, at 10:26 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Tom,
>
> Thanks for supplying this quote.  To my shame, I have never read Rorty.
>
> "Interesting [field of study] is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... "
>  
> What I have been unable to sort out is which category "complexity babble" belongs to.  Is there such a thing as a half-formed new vocabulary that has become a nuisance?
>  
> Nick
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> Clark University ([hidden email])
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
>
>
>
>
> > [Original Message]
> > From: Tom Vest <[hidden email]>
> > To: glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]>
> > Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> > Date: 3/23/2010 8:47:01 AM
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (advice needed!)
> >
> >
> > On Mar 22, 2010, at 5:06 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> >
> > > Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 10-03-22 04:58 PM:
> > >> Yes.  I am sorry. That was my fault.   There was a bit of a slipup between
> > >> the "provost" and the professor.  
> > >
> > > No worries!  It looks like a great book and I expect I'll enjoy it when
> > > I pop it off the queue.
> > >
> > >> Byers main point is that it is AMBIGUITY that makes maths great!  But its a
> > >> subtle argument because what he is really saying is ironic:  as
> > >> mathematicians strive to reduce amibiguity they inevitably generate more,
> > >> and thus, against their feverish and futile resistance, does math progress.
> > >
> > > Very interesting.  If there's one conviction I'm actually guilty of,
> > > it's believing that irony (or, more accurately, paradox) is the ultimate
> > > teacher.  And ambiguity is closely coupled with paradox.  (Warning: the
> > > broken record begins again.)  That's why I'm so fond of "Vicious
> > > Circles" by Barwise and Moss.  It's the closest body of math I've found
> > > that tries to explain how cycles impact the definiteness of math.
> > >
> > > But it's wrapped in other stories, too.  I remember once looking up
> > > "impredicative definition" in the index of some overly large math
> > > reference book in some library somewhere.  (I lose track sometimes. ;-)
> > > It told me to look at a particular page.  That page made a vague
> > > reference to the term "vicious circle".  So, I looked up "vicious
> > > circle".  It took me to another particular page, which made a vague
> > > reference to "impredicative definitions".  If it hadn't been such a
> > > large book, it would have been funny.  Instead, I learned a valuable lesson.
> >
> >
> > Interesting mix of interests! Glen I wonder if you've ranged even further afield, and come across a book by Richard Rorty called Contingency, Solidarity, and Irony (1989) -- or maybe Rorty's first, fame-making book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)? Rorty was a modern American School pragmatist (a tradition which he broadly defined to include William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, as well as WVO Quine and Donald Davidson), and most of his life's work focused on debunking (or if that was not possible, discrediting) all sorts of perceived impediments to inter-subjective communication and coordination -- prerequisites for the social/political goals (e.g., understanding, cooperation) that he was more open about in his final years. One nice quote from Contingency about his own disciplinary labors, which could easily be applied to the current context:
> >
> > "Interesting [field of study]  is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things... This sort of  [discipline-specific research] does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holistically and pragmatically." (p. 9)
> >
> > While this observation seems a bit exaggerated to me (i.e., narrow, stepwise analysis often accompanies the broader contest between rival paradigms), this actually sounds quite a bit like the work I'm participating in this week, at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Los Angeles (esp. the Routing Research Group, which is trying to develop a consensus recommendation for a new Internet architecture to be developed over the next couple of years).
> >
> > Sadly, it also reminds me of an old grad school benefactor (whom you may actually remember Glen -- he sponsored my mid-1990s participation in the Swarm conferences where we met once or twice, and later spent a summer there as a visiting fellow -- the results of which were later memorialized in one of Simon Fraser's chatterbots). Sometimes those "vague promises of great things" on the other side of the next disciplinary fence can be so compelling that the lure of serial fence-hopping displaces the much more challenging but enduring work of fence removal and field integration. I learned may valuable (and ironic) lessons from that particular association...
> >
> > Regards all,
> >
> > TV
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

Eric, Steve,

 

I am trying to reconcile my agreement with the spirit of your correspondence with my largely failed attempts to work toward a common language in our conversations about complexity on this list and on Friday mornings.

I think this is a relevant and worthwhile exercise.

I, too, was trained in many traditions.... comparative psychology, ethology, zoology, some physical anthropology, quite a lot of english literature,  and even a little meteorology.  And some of my best friends are mathematicians.

So you probably appreciate both personally and professionally that the gap between people speaking/thinking from these traditions is not merely quantitative, but qualitative... there are fundamental differences in perspective across them.

  But perhaps unlike Eric (?) (who was my last [postdoctoral] student, by the way, and my great intellectual benefactor) I am convinced that the effort to communicate amongst perspectives is valuable.  And I cannot see how communication is possible without some attention to and adjustments of the use of specialized languages.  It bothers me still, for instance, that two members of our community can use words like "system" or "information" in entirely contradictory ways and yet! fancy that they are communicating with one another.

I think you are correct that understanding that the same terms mean different things is critical to (beginning to) understand.  What I find highly suspect, however, is that these differences could ever be reduced to a small (even finite?) translation.

 

I think this is where an analogy to the paradox of mathematics that Byers highlights might be useful.   The struggle over  language is worthwhile but only because it fails.  No man struggles in order to fail, but still,  failure is the wet edge of science. 

 

What do you think?

I think this last paragraph gestures in the direction of a lot of truth.   I think you (Byers?) has captured a facet of what I am trying to point out.   It is not just the romance of trying and failing that makes it so, but also concepts like "the map is not the territory" and "to name it is to destroy it" or "the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon" play in.

"The wonderful feature of the New Realism’s metaphor is that it honors our separate points of view without giving up on finding a point of view that integrates them. Two blind New Realists groping an elephant: “OK, I’ll follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree toward the sound of my voice and we’ll see what we feel along the way.” PAUSE. Together;

 “My God, it’s an ELEPHANT!”"

I think this *also* gestures in the direction of some relevant and useful concepts that we are struggling with here.   But to the extent that the guys on both ends of the elephant understand that neither of them is actually holding a snake or a tree at the beginning, they might also concede that when they discover that in fact they are fondling an elephant, that this  too may be it's own relative "illusion".  By this, I mean, that just as the trunk of an elephant might be mistaken for a fat snake and the leg a tree trunk, it seems nearly as plausable that our definition of "elephant" is as relative/contingent as our definition/apprehension of "snake" and "tree". 

Sadly, I know this has gotten a bit to philoSophistical for much of our audience, so I'll try to stop here:  Just because we have names for things doesn't mean that there are things in more than a practical-working-knowledge sense.

- Steve

  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Cc: [hidden email]

Sent: 3/23/2010 6:20:41 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] multiple tool kits [was (advice needed!)]

Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:

There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in severa! l hard-won and highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.

If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it, but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck!

Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context,

Eric

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith [hidden email] wrote:

siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the 
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly 
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally 
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things 
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things, 
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!

For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM 
on this very topic...  a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF 
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending 
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of 
"the Science of Collaboration".   Central to this work is the notion 
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct 
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand 
and share their work.    One of the tools to be developed is a 
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts 
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.

We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and 
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in 
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.

We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent 
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling.   It did not address the problem 
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of 
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for 
expressing and exploring simulations.     Of course, within the context 
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when 
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)

Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that 
provides the expressiveness and the leverage.  If you constrained 
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful 
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government.   Things 
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


      

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Victoria Hughes]

Just when I was getting into it....

On Mar 23, 2010, at 3:05 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Nick -

Eric, Steve,

 

I am trying to reconcile my agreement with the spirit of your correspondence with my largely failed attempts to work toward a common language in our conversations about complexity on this list and on Friday mornings.

I think this is a relevant and worthwhile exercise.

I, too, was trained in many traditions.... comparative psychology, ethology, zoology, some physical anthropology, quite a lot of english literature,  and even a little meteorology.  And some of my best friends are mathematicians.

So you probably appreciate both personally and professionally that the gap between people speaking/thinking from these traditions is not merely quantitative, but qualitative... there are fundamental differences in perspective across them.

  But perhaps unlike Eric (?) (who was my last [postdoctoral] student, by the way, and my great intellectual benefactor) I am convinced that the effort to communicate amongst perspectives is valuable.  And I cannot see how communication is possible without some attention to and adjustments of the use of specialized languages.  It bothers me still, for instance, that two members of our community can use words like "system" or "information" in entirely contradictory ways and yet! fancy that they are communicating with one another.

I think you are correct that understanding that the same terms mean different things is critical to (beginning to) understand.  What I find highly suspect, however, is that these differences could ever be reduced to a small (even finite?) translation.

 

I think this is where an analogy to the paradox of mathematics that Byers highlights might be useful.   The struggle over  language is worthwhile but only because it fails.  No man struggles in order to fail, but still,  failure is the wet edge of science. 

 

What do you think?

I think this last paragraph gestures in the direction of a lot of truth.   I think you (Byers?) has captured a facet of what I am trying to point out.   It is not just the romance of trying and failing that makes it so, but also concepts like "the map is not the territory" and "to name it is to destroy it" or "the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon" play in.

"The wonderful feature of the New Realism’s metaphor is that it honors our separate points of view without giving up on finding a point of view that integrates them. Two blind New Realists groping an elephant: “OK, I’ll follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree toward the sound of my voice and we’ll see what we feel along the way.” PAUSE. Together;

 “My God, it’s an ELEPHANT!”"

I think this *also* gestures in the direction of some relevant and useful concepts that we are struggling with here.   But to the extent that the guys on both ends of the elephant understand that neither of them is actually holding a snake or a tree at the beginning, they might also concede that when they discover that in fact they are fondling an elephant, that this  too may be it's own relative "illusion".  By this, I mean, that just as the trunk of an elephant might be mistaken for a fat snake and the leg a tree trunk, it seems nearly as plausable that our definition of "elephant" is as relative/contingent as our definition/apprehension of "snake" and "tree". 

Sadly, I know this has gotten a bit to philoSophistical for much of our audience, so I'll try to stop here:  Just because we have names for things doesn't mean that there are things in more than a practical-working-knowledge sense.

- Steve

  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Cc: [hidden email]

Sent: 3/23/2010 6:20:41 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] multiple tool kits [was (advice needed!)]

Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species) and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically trained in these as two separate, but related traditions. When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least had) the premier graduate training program in Animal Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I noticed a disturbing trend:

There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same thing from the same perspective (though with variation in species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad. They were trading in severa! l hard-won and highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych, ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.

If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would have been all for it, but instead they were trying to create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of the distinct approaches. Yuck!

Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very different context,

Eric

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, Steve Smith [hidden email] wrote:

siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the 
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly 
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally 
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things 
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things, 
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!

For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM 
on this very topic...  a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF 
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending 
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of 
"the Science of Collaboration".   Central to this work is the notion 
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct 
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand 
and share their work.    One of the tools to be developed is a 
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts 
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.

We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and 
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in 
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.

We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent 
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling.   It did not address the problem 
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of 
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for 
expressing and exploring simulations.     Of course, within the context 
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when 
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)

Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that 
provides the expressiveness and the leverage.  If you constrained 
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful 
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government.   Things 
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


      

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org