Posted by
McNamara, Laura A on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/What-have-the-Romans-sorry-complexity-done-for-us-tp522232p522306.html
Hey Tom, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. My flippant answer is -
PLANNING??? How naive. You don't 'plan' when God's doing it for you.
The serious answer is that I wasn't working closely with military
planners, so no, I didn't. There's a remarkable lack of common sense
here... even some of the intelligence analysts I interviewed were
remarkably open in critiquing this administration.
________________________________
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 10:24 PM
To: sy at synapse9.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What have the Romans - sorry - complexity done for
us?
Laura:
In the course of your research this summer, have you run across any
examples that would suggest some standard (old fashioned?) Project
Management efforts (ideally, files) that were created BEFORE the
decision was made to invade Iraq? You know, a Gantt chart here, a PERT
diagram there. Maybe even, gasp, a calendar?
-Tom
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
_____
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com tom at jtjohnson.com
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
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