[FRIAM] SFI to Trump: The dangers of simplicity in a complex world

[glen ☣]

I continue to be surprised and confused when people (various, going back since I've been on the list) claim we don't talk about complexity.  I grant that some bleed from generic tech issues happens ... or perhaps from politics or physics or whatever.  But for the most part, every message I read here is dripping with complexity concepts.

Of course, that we don't _call_ the concepts by their buzzwords might trick someone into thinking we're not talking about them.  But to that, I say "Yay!"  The buzzwords were long-ago hijacked by people who don't have any interest in actually solving problems ... indeeed, whose interest is tied up in keeping the problems going while assuring those with the problems that they, alone, are capable of solving them ... if you'll talk exclusively to them, pay them lots of money, etc.

And to stay on the topic of applied complexity, to be clear, I welcome those gamers' presence in the game.  They provide a necessary co-evolutionary foil.  But, my defense of them would be lost on some, much the same way my defense of post-modernism is lost on some. >8^D

Your SFI visit report was fun, Nick.  Thanks for sending it.

On 02/06/2017 12:39 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Seriously, I wonder if the fact that we have stopped talking about complexity might have something to do with the state of play of that field.  I reached a point where I began to feel that complexity-talk went on in some alternative universe that, without the initiation and the golden key, I was never going to enter. You will remember, Steve, that  I worked for a couple of years, trying to make a translation between that universe and mine, and was never able to manage it.  When the working vocabulary of a science is inaccessible to a diligent, moderately intelligent, practitioner of neighboring sciences, does that not limit the development of that science?

-- 
☣ glen