[FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

[┣glen┫]

Heh, you're so rife with premature registration!  You _leap_ to thinking about the strength of the onion analogy without seeming to listen to what I'm saying at all.  8^)  That's OK.  I'm used to it.  But to be clear, my point was about _direction_, not the extent to which layers are coupled.  I also mentioned spray painting and sand blasting.  Those are even better than onions, given Russ' target of urban systems.

But on with the onion!  Surely you don't believe your own statement that an onion's layers have relatively little to do with one another.  That would be akin to rejecting the concept of a population _relaxing_ into a landscape.  Literally, the very shape of the outer layers is determined by the shapes of the inner layers.  And since the onion analog (not metaphor) is about space, the shapes matter a great deal to the structural analogy.

More importantly, the thickness of an onions layer has much to do with the gradients it's being painted by.  So, this analog is actually a pretty good one for making my point that layer is a more generically useful term than level.


On 06/08/2017 09:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Late, here, so I will just say a little.  According to the scientific metaphor game I understand, we would now start to cash out the onion metaphor.  Does the relation between the layers in an onion REALLY capture what you are after.  I would guess not, because (I am holding an onion now) the layers in an onion have relatively little to do with one another.  You can slide one with respect to the other.  I am guessing that you are looking for a metaphor in which one layer interacts with another.  (Ugh.  I have to go wash my hands.)  Remember, you can make a metaphor to an abstract onion.  A model has to have its own reality beyond it’s use to represent your notion of layer.  


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␦glen?