May 7, 2005
On the discussion of data
regularity ŕ
On the Stephenson Cyber Attack
Taxonomy ŕ
> Why is this so hard to get concepts
communicated about what might be a
> future development in complex systems research?
...
> My conjecture, and the conjecture of others, is
that the academy is
> not open to this specific extension of formalism,
from Hilbert
> mathematics to computational semiotics.
Longer response, with comments, from un-disclosed
I don't think its that "the academy" in general is not "open" (in the sense that people don't want to hear about new ideas).
<comment: the
Academy is not the only part of our current society that is exhibiting a
particular cultural phenomenon, that of not being very open to new ideas. That “this” is true, in fact
is interesting as an academic discussion about the nature of our American culture
in 2005. But the Academy may be where
there is a higher degree of civic responsibility to accommodate new ideas –
when this issue of being institutionally rigid is seen almost universally to be
“just the way the world is”. >
but I’ll just write from my little corner of academy, since you sent your original message to me (and a couple of others here at um).
< comment:: I sent the message to you because of the
name of your institution, Center of the Study of Complex Systems. >
first note that i get *many* people sending me papers, book drafts, and so on. i simply do not have time to read and understand them all. maybe you are an expert in all fields [1], but i am not, so for many papers/books/proposals i simply do not know enough to evaluate them, and i don't have time to do the background reading to be in that position. [2]
why?
I already have many many things to do (classes to teach, research proposals to write, managing student research, dissertations committees to sit on and dissertation drafts to read, research and administrative meetings to attend, articles and books to read relevant to projects people are actually paying me to do right now, and ...). do you actually think i'm just sitting around bored and wishing someone would send me an interesting idea to learn and think about???
< comment: should I have started the
discussion with a payment of some type.
(smile) I know that this is not what you are implying but really why is
it not that being an Director of a university center not be sufficient to
expect that your response be one of listening.
No requirement for an infinite amount of your time was made. Right?
I first thought that you were the Director of the Center, but see that this is not your position. You are Director of a computer lab. So why not communicate our note to the Director of the Lab? >
and i also happen to have a family who occasionally likes to see me.
There are many many many research projects i wish i could do but just don't have time to even read the smallest fraction of relevant background material to have a chance of making a productive contribution, so i just have to do some hard triage.
< comment: perhaps we should start over
and have a real discussion about why I sent to you this Roadmap. We are looking for academic centers that
would collaborate with us in paid activity.
There is a difference between being a scholar and being a researcher. Being a scholar in a field like complexity theory is not so easy. Being a researcher in this field is very easy. >
so...when something comes out of the blue, i have to evaluate very quickly whether its something i may have an interest in and whether its something i think i can actually productively work on, given my own skill set and interests.
< comment: again, one can only guess that your skill set and interests are consistent with the name of the institution that you direct.>
So, following Herbert Simon, i satisfice. i make some quick judgments and decide what to do with my limited time and brain cycles.
Given what I have seen of the lives of my colleagues, and since you have received the same response so many times, i suspect my situation is not unique.
Here is an example of you doing a similar thing:
> Certainly information
science is not the domain where the
> encumbants will be
willing to talk, as they are firmly committed to the
> first school.
Do you know what *all* the faculty at UM SI are doing and are interested in? (Not to mention other universities...) Have you looked at the research *they* are doing, each of them, to see the questions they seem to be interested in are ones you are interested in? Or to see how to write something to that is fashioned to grab their attention, because if clearly relates to what they are doing? No, of course not. You don't have the time.
< comment: I did
look at your interests as posted on your web site, and saw that you are
interested in Evolutionary Programming.
I wondered, and still wonder if you have come across the work by Lev
Goldfarb (link) on inductive informatics. I have thought a great deal about
evolutionary programming and related areas like evolutionary psychology. I have talked with Holland and Kaufman and
others over the years and am versed in
this literature. I noticed that you
have an interest in curriculum and wonder why you would not be interested in
the project we are working on to develop a K-12 curriculum for the knowledge
sciences. >
did you even take the time to look at the kinds of projects i am interested in, and then write a page or two that relates what you are talking about to that work, in terms of that work and the questions meant to address? no, you did not. why not? i conjecture because you don't have the time.
frankly, i think the burden is on you to write something that engages your readers, i.e., shows in a very simple, clear concise way that your approach might be of interest *to them* in *their terms*. Eg, write some *short* papers that show how your approach solves problems/answers questions/explains the unexplained people in various fields already are interested in, post them to places like arXive, so people might read them and get interested, without the filter of peer review, if that is a problem.
< comment: The
Roadmaps clearly does what you have asked:
It starts out with the following:
In 2005 everyone knows what a horse and buggy is and what an automobile
is. Each person in our society knows
the story of the emergence of the automobile manufacturing business sector and
the American love affair with the automobile.
We do not know to what extent meaning might be captured in a “semantic
web[3]”.
We have not experienced anything that informs us about what semantic technology
might become. Relevant issues in linguistics, social theory and the nature of
science are not well known in departments of computer science. Most of computer science is shaped by
engineering theory and scientific reductionism.
A
roadmap is needed. One is provided here
by a group of natural scientists and mathematicians.
But
then the road map goes beyond this and addresses issue that those who are in
the area of complex systems research should be able to easily identify
with. Right? >
in short, i think *you* need to figure out how to communicate what it is you are doing in a way that connects with the things that *other* people are already doing in the field...to answer open questions, deepen our intuitions and understandings, to explain some phenomenon that is unexplained, and so on.
< Comment: of
course I work very hard on communicating, but one has to be able to object, as
I have in this case when there is not an effort to hear.>
and i think *you* need to remember that the "academy" is actual people, many of them very smart, many of them very interested in finding "the next big idea", many of them just interested in learning and getting joy from appreciating new ways to think about various bits of the world.
if you send out dense prose [4] that would take a day to read to see if its worth reading...sorry, that's just not going to fly. and from your complaint, it does not seem to have flown.
I regret getting into a tit-for-tat on truculence in text, but its a sunny Saturday morning, rare in Ann Arbor, and none-the-less i am working on necessary administria and projects i have already decided are interesting, and you seem to think i should drop what i am doing and get interested in your hunches about what is a good approach to understanding complex systems.
*that* is what puzzles me.
and no, i don't really have time for continuing this discussion. I’ve already spent to much time on this response.
i guess i did because i feel your
pain, i really do. getting people in established fields to accept new
approaches (eg, in my case, evolutionary computation and agent-based modeling)
is very hard and frustrating. all i can say again keep on trucking, and
"good luck" because we all need it.
[1] These is no claim that I have made in this regard.
[2] And so what is one to expect of a Director of a Center for the Study of Complex Systems, if the Roadmap content is deemed not relevant to the Center?
[3] Term coined by Tim Berners-Lee
[4] To say that the Roadmap is dense prose is to give a type of insult to the work that has been done.