[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Thu Jun 8 21:05:47 EDT 2017

Hi, everybody, 

If only because of my despair concerning the current state of our national political discourse, mind mapping tools are of great interest to me. Some of us briefly considered using such tools to moderate conversation between people who disagree.   Would such a tool help to determine whether you-all are using complexity terms in roughly the same way or whether, in the interest of keeping the conversation going, you are letting slide fundamental differences in what you take complexity to be?

In any case, don’t let this thread die. 

Nick   

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2017 7:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Steve:

I think the mind mapping developer you are thinking of is Ron Newman --  <mailto:ron.newman at gmail.com> ron.newman at gmail.com

TJ

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Tom Johnson
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http://www.jtjohnson.com <http://www.jtjohnson.com/>                    tom at jtjohnson.com <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com> 
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On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

Glen -

I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context, but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more) operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to another(s).

I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some feedback on an early version a few years ago..

My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never really adopted by myself.

I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.   The presumption WAS (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested in many of the same physical properties, but with different emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density, humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance and interaction between them has different implications for each group.

Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is hard to push such tools forward.   My part included building the equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective... with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons" is replaced by "multiple ontologies"   or in both cases, the superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what it is worth!

I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others' feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right now, though from your's and Frank's apparent avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool.

Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>.  He supposedly works up at PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post.  But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping develop that tries to classify several different senses of the word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the journal, though. 8^(  But repeating Nick's point back in my own words obviously won't help, here.

Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer", then whatever I composed would be alien to the other participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the secretary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex".  So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate my idiocy.

On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize, neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience with you is that you always say what you mean and mean what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a timely manner.

I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor (aphorism?) mixology.

I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said: "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that moment?  In any case, I don't find your contribution/interaction here to be particularly troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).   Stay away from the Hemlock, OK?

I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors" or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect not.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf

I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity (with limits apparently!).

I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads...  I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed questions that might help that happen?

I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?) teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?

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