[FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

Sat Feb 10 12:15:41 EST 2024

When I was in highschool I became friends with a math grad student at
Berkeley.  He said that a given math professor could, at best, understand
one article in each issue of "Annals of Mathematics".  Occasionally two.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 5:08 AM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:

>   “math had become too big; nobody could understand more than 1/4 of
> it”.
>
> "But with four neighbors I can compute most of it" ;-)
>
> On Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 5:25 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> There’s a famous old rant by von Neumann, known at least by those who
>> were around to hear it, or so I was told by Martin Shubik.
>>
>> von Neumann was grumping that “math had become too big; nobody could
>> understand more than 1/4 of it”.  As always with von Neumann, the point of
>> saying something included an element of self-aggrandizement: von Neumann
>> was inviting the listener to notice that _he_ was the one who could
>> understand a quarter of all existing math at the time (whether or not such
>> an absurdity could be called “true” in any sense).
>>
>> I have wondered if this problem marks a qualitative threshold from which
>> to define a “complex systems” science.  The premise would be that all
>> innovations ultimately occur in individual human heads, triggered somehow.
>>  (And much of the skill of science is to structure your environment of
>> reading and experience and people to “trigger” you in productive ways,
>> since insight isn’t something that can be willed into existence).  But
>> those ideas need to be answerable to the fullest scope of whatever is
>> currently understood that is pertinent.
>>
>> The old answer used to be to cram more and more of current knowledge into
>> single heads as the fuel for their insights, and then to limit to more and
>> more rarified heads that could hold the most and still come up with
>> something.
>>
>> But at some point, that model no longer works because there is a limit
>> (some kind of extreme-value distribution, I guess) to what human heads can
>> hold, at all.
>>
>> The project then shifts over into an effort of community design with
>> explicit concerns that are not reducible to head-packing.  How do good
>> insights come into existence, still limited by heads, but properly
>> responsible to much more knowledge than the heads do, or even could,
>> contain?
>>
>>
>> I can, of course, shoot down my own way of saying this, immediately.  In
>> a sense, engineers have been doing this for some very very long time.  No
>> “person” knows what is in a 777 aircraft (or for the Europeans, an A380).
>> Those cases still feel different to me somehow, and like a more standard
>> expansion of the concept of the assembly line and modularization of tasks
>> through reliable interfaces (the various ideas behind object design etc.)
>>  I imagine that the interesting problem of idea-finding for complex
>> phenomena are those that arise when you have modularized as much as you
>> can, and you have run out of interesting things to add within the modules,
>> because the things you can’t see transcend them.
>>
>> But of course I haven’t “made” anything of this string of words, like a
>> self-help consultancy or the presidency of any institution.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>> On Feb 9, 2024, at 7:45 PM, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
>>
>> Yeah, it seems like the premise of the cartoon, or maybe Jochen's
>> interpretation, was that people have limited scopes of application, and the
>> average scope of application doesn't include interdisciplinary research.
>> But there are people who have larger scope and have a lot of fun doing
>> interdisciplinary projects.  And if an interdisciplinary group can adapt to
>> its participant areas of strength, lots of interesting things can happen.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 3:19 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I didn't read the article but Carnegie Mellon, where I worked for almost
>>> 20 years, prides itself on the amount of interdisciplinary research
>>> accomplished there..  Herb Simon had appointments in psychology, computer
>>> science, business and public policy, I believe.  I was a coauthor of papers
>>> in robotics, public policy, computer science and philosophy.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 1:54 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Tom Gauld describes most of the problems of interdisciplinary research
>>>> in a single image
>>>>
>>>> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2389834-tom-gauld-on-areas-of-expertise/
>>>>
>>>> -J.
>>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Frank Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>> 505 670-9918
>>>
>>> Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
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