Posted by
McNamara, Laura A on
Jul 25, 2006; 1:14pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/What-have-the-Romans-sorry-complexity-done-for-us-tp522232p522256.html
To follow on Mike's comments: what SFI, NECSI, UCLA, and other hotbeds of complex thinking have in common is some luxury to consider complexity, modeling, and social evolution, to creatively push the application of complex systems studies to culture and society.
And here I go on my soapbox (with apologies to those of you who've heard me rant about this before): what's disturbing is the number of people in government (go figure) who are touting agent based models and complexity as predictive tool and theory, respectively, for making decisions about wickedly complex quagmires in places like... oh, maybe Iraq...? I'm spending the summer studying computational modeling and simulation technologies in the DoD and the level of interest in complexity theory as the holy grail of social theory is both remarkable and worrisome. This being Washington, I've seen more than a few contractors grabbing at DoD money to get that grail up and running, without considering the manifold issues involved. My Sandia colleague, Tim Trucano, and I are gearing up to write about this issue and will likely be at FRIAM quite a bit to toss ideas around with y'all.
Lurking in the discourse about complexity, computational modeling, and society is epistemological question, I think, that requires us to consider how we use modeling and simulation tools to produce knowledge about the world we live in. In academia, we have a great deal of latitude in the purpose of knowledge-making activities; we're engaged in discovery over the long run. Inside the Beltway, it's a different story entirely: they want decision tools, and they want them yesterday.
Of course, this begs the question of why common sense is so utterly absent in our nation's fine capitol...
Laura
________________________________
From:
[hidden email] on behalf of Michael Agar
Sent: Tue 7/25/2006 6:49 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What have the Romans - sorry - complexity done for us?
On Jul 24, 2006, at 6:51 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
>
>
> But more seriously, which university has a department of complex
> systems? Theres the Santa Fe Institute, and possibly NECSI, but where
> else?
>
SFI and NECSI make room for visiting students at different levels,
but neither are degree-granting. In the social realm,
UCLA has a new Human Complex Systems institute that is going
gangbusters in its first year, but it is undergrad only right now,
though the interest there hints that the younger generation is into
it already. At NECSI the Portland State University computer science
program drew some student attention, since they can cobble together
complexity like courses of study. Couple of student emails on the
NECSI list pointed to other possibillities, like George Mason
University's Center for Social Complexity. Otherwise it seems like
academic pockets in various domains. For instance, at NECSI I met a
student who works with Reuben McDaniels, prof at the University of
Texas biz school, known on the Plexus list for his work applying
complexity org development to health care. He works with their
Prigogine Center, though I'm not sure what they do. I'm sure there
are many other centers and institutes and academic pockets that folks
on the list know of as well, and many others in other countries.
David Lane's group at Reggio-Modena comes to mind. It's an
interesting "shreds and patches" kind of situation that probably
reflects the scattered and multi-perspectival nature of the field at
the moment that motivated Owen's original email.
I've been disappointed that anthro hasn't been more active, though
there are some good SFI external faculty examples like Steve Lansing
in ecology and Doug White in networks and George Gummerman and Tim
Kohler on the ancient Anasazi (a questionable label now, since it is
a Navajo term and some Pueblo people object). Shortly before
electricity was invented, when I was in grad school, we learned about
our "holistic" perspective and the "emergent" nature of our work and
how our goal was to learn a new perspective "bottom-up," though that
term we didn't use. Sander van der Leeuw, former SFI faculty, took
over the department at Arizona State and looks like he's changing
things in a complex direction, so maybe it's starting to happen. We
never did anything rigorous and general with the concepts in the old
days, instead learned them by reading ethnographic case after
ethnographic case, like lawyers learn legal reasoning. You'd think
the field would notice the parallels. If anyone's interested, Lansing
did an overview of complexity for the Annual Review of Anthropology a
few years back, and I did a piece in Complexity that complexifies
some ethnographic issues (We Have Met the Other and We're All
Nonlinear) that's on my web page.
And now, for something completely different, this week's Economist
has a feature on evolutionary economics:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7189617Mike
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