[FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe

Sat Jan 6 23:07:22 EST 2018

Thanks, again, Eric.  

I will dig into this tomorrow.   

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 David Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2018 8:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe

Nick and Steve, hi and thank you,

Couple things, and maybe another example following: 

I didn't look hard, but I didn't see an obvious way for this Institute to instantiate en-situ groups as I *think* Nick (and many of us?) would like to see.  Perhaps this is an example of what I have been ranting on... maybe we have to let that go?  It seems hard to consider becoming entirely delocalized.

I would say that Ronin agrees with the sense of value, and doesn’t take for granted having to give it up.  Their main architecture is the internet interface and the legal services of a 501C3 and whatever journal etc. accesses they can get.  But they are hosting an increasing number of web-mediated seminars, general chat sessions they call “watercooler” chats on the slack platform, and in-person “meetups” a few times a year, whenever someone takes the initiative to organize one somewhere.  Many of those who are within geographical proximity also have the option for more regular contacts. It is a light level of in-person access, stabilized by the low cost and general-purpose internet platform, rather than having the in-person mode be the major center of stabilization.

Although, per-exchange, an internet-mediated interaction won’t have much depth, they are aiming for regularity and predictability as a way to engender longer-term relations, and also to mediate active scientific collaborations, so that people come to get a deeper understanding of each other’s minds.

I assume your (Nick's) reference to journal access is to the  <http://unpaywall.org/> http://unpaywall.org/ links?  LANL (Paul Ginsparg) pioneered the use of WWW for open access to journal articles via the  <http://xxx.lanl.gov/> xxx.lanl.gov "physics preprint" server (with an FTP and Gopher server predating that by a couple of years).   I don't know the full implication or utility of the subsequent  <http://arxiv.org/> arXiv.org system but in principle it feels like the "perfect" workaround for the Journal system. I think Grigori Perleman's example (publishing two deeply pivotal papers in mathematics *without* a peer-review journal/process) is significant.  I'm surprised it didn't revolutionize academia and publication more than it did.  Is it inertia or something more fundamental?   

I think not only inertia.  The idea that you can find, through ad hoc networks, and fully understand by your own agency, everything you should want to work with or use, to my mind vastly truncates the set of possibilities for work.  For every step you extend your scope into areas you don’t understand, you add fragility and create problems of validation of qualitatively new types, but you open combinatorial possibilities for guessing and discovery that do not exist at smaller scales.  

The new qualitative problems turn (in my view) fundamentally on the limits of human time, attention, knowledge, etc.  This is why a library is not the same as a mere warehouse full of books, a (real) librarian is not merely a person tasked with keeping others quiet, etc.  Search, sorting, classification, vetting and gatekeeping, are fundamental services.  Each of them has fragilities and each of them is indispensable to all but the most localized tasks.  There are failure modes in all of these, which blamers love to blame, but I don’t think those invalidate the concepts; they dictate the problems that need work and insights.  Since my earliest encounter with “web of trust” cryptographic ideas, I have felt that the interlinked concepts of identity and reputation are vastly richer than these engineering inventions suggest, and it would be great to get more conceptual clarity about their nature.  I have taken some tilts at that problem over 20 years, but never produced anything of any worth.  It does seem that the social disruption and AI innovations are bringing that discussion to life now in a big way, and I can imagine there will be interesting concepts turned up by it.

I feel like this mismatch between conceptually simple technical problems, and conceptually deep and difficult social system problems, arises for many topics that are of interest to this list.  We have seen articles in which people take polarized positions on Bitcoin as being either a new paradigm for money or nearly a scam.  I don’t see it as either.  It is a cryptographic solution to a specific problem of achieving a certain property in an information system that was once sought in material systems: asymmetric ease of verifiability with difficulty of counterfeiting, and having a predictable supply.  But anybody who is serious about what money is would (should, IMO) say that those technical properties are no more the essence of money than the physical properties of Au are the essence of money.  There are cognitive, social, and political foundations in real money and credit systems, which employ material or informational properties as a kind of substrate.  One doesn’t want to confuse the building medium with the built artifact.

So here’s another model in case it is of interest:

https://www.yhousenyc.org/

This one is spearheaded by Piet Hut of IAS Princeton, with significant participation from some Columbia people and several others.

Piet is willing to opine that the university as we currently conceive it is an institution that societies will be unwilling or unable to support on a timescale as short as 25 years.  To me that seems unrealistically close, because (as above) they are so interlocked in processes of reputation and vetting with the whole rest of the society, that I think the institutional creep will be slow and it will be much longer before they are cut loose.

But whether right or wrong, that view motivates Piet to build a model for what takes over the academic job when universities no longer do.  He conceives something that is more socially embedded, more ad hoc in its membership, somehow negotiates academic autonomy while getting sponsorship from businesses, and I guess some other structural stuff.  His test case is about origin of consciousness, which for Piet is the third great Origins problem following OoMatter and OoLife.  We can see if he can make this work, and what is learned from the experiment.

The ambitions of Ronin and YHouse could naturally be synergistic, and they know about each other, but I think they are both still solving local problems.  The styles of the founders are very different, and the visions and designs as well.

One can imagine a loose affiliation by which there are many local experiments addressing “organically” understood needs by a collection of entrepreneurs, which keep each other in view for support and stability.  Something like the clearinghouse of civil society organizations that Paul Hawken wanted to provide:

https://www.blessedunrest.com/

Dunno.  Much to do.

All best,

Eric

I sometimes believe that fundamental change in human institutions (and experience) is roughly bound to the scale of a generation... how many paradigms can a single generation shift through?   What is the current fundamental time-scale of techno-social change in our culture today?  Is the disruption in our culture somehow part of an (important) annealing process?    

mumble,

  - Steve

On 1/6/18 3:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

No, Eric, I did NOT know about this.  My ignorance is always the best default assumption. Now  I have spent ten minutes noodling around on the site and it is very impressive.  I was particularly moved by their page on getting access to journals, etc.    Thank you V E R Y  much. 

Nick  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [ <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2018 2:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group  <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe

Hi you guys,

You are already familiar with this, right?

 <http://ronininstitute.org/> http://ronininstitute.org/

I understand it as trying to solve a concrete and particular problem that lives within the overlaps of both Steve’s and Nick’s points (as I read the two).  In gig humanity, everything can be used more efficiently in the short term, at the price that there is no protection for anything from being carved up and sold off for the shortest-term profit.  To make progress, if one does not have a strategy for overcoming that, then one must acknowledge its reality and impact, and figure out how to deal with them.  On the other hand, there are things that a structured community can make possible which would be unreachable if each individual had to re-discover and re-implement them on his own, and there are critical mass effects for which services can be offered.

All best,

Eric

On Jan 7, 2018, at 5:55 AM, Steven A Smith < <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

Nick -

I did not mean the term oldSkool to be perjorative as such, just acknowledging that the world keeps precessing around a complex (nonlinear) sociodynamic axis, calling for new and different variants of old things again and again.   The coffee house of 17c London was intended as an example of how an (somewhat) unprecedented thing emerged "out of nowhere".  The linked article refers to the differences between a coffee house and a public house of that era.  Both excluded women (by the way).

Coffee houses caught on very quickly, so by 1663 there were more than 83 coffee houses in London. By the beginning of the eighteenth century there were as many as five or six hundred.2 The Prussian nobleman Baron Charles Louis von Pollnitz, who visited London in 1728, described them as one of the great pleasures of the city. He describes how it is “a Sort of Rule with the English, to go once a Day at least” to coffee-houses “where they talk of Business and News, read the Papers, and often look at one another.” Some very famous companies even started as coffee houses. Lloyds of London, an insurance brokerage company, began as Edward Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Street around 1688.

...

Some men spent so much time there that their mail was delivered directly to the coffee house! An interesting fact is that almost every coffee house allowed only male patrons, women being relegated to the home or elsewhere for coffee. Not allowing women into these coffee houses did cause a few problems, which were outlined in the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” published in 1674. Really a mock petition, but rumors and claims against coffee drinking could have been taken serious whether or not they were true. And as stated in the previous quote, they charged only a penny for a cup of black coffee! This gave rise to their nickname, “Penny Universities.”

...

Soon there emerged a distinct difference between the pub and the coffee house, “Rumors of the health benefits of coffee were abundant, and coffee-houses encouraged sobriety, rational thought, and articulate political discussion, whereas taverns merely provided a haven for irreverence and intoxication.”  This wasn’t a place to escape the world and dull the senses, but rather a place to debate current events and create new ideas for how life should be. Until this time there did not exist a forum for the merchant or trading class to have such discussions.

Yes, my Taoist perspective on this is not unlike Economic's "efficient market hypothesis" in which suggests that if there were a true need, a true opportunity, it would be filled already.   I know this sounds terribly fatalistic and even pessimistic but also points to our looking around (as you have and are and do) at the plethora of unique opportunities that Santa Fe already has/enjoys/provides in this regard.   Of course, YOU (and the rest of us) are part of the ecology that co-creates said milieu and if there is to be a "City University of Santa Fe" to add to the mix, then this is an obvious place for it to fester into fruition.   

My (intended to be gentle) chiding about oldSkool is the (partial) implication that what is needed is to return to something some (or many) of us knew from the past... that there once was something (an institutional paradigm, a mold, a pattern) which has been broken and needs to be reconstituted, rather than (I would suggest), the more critical essences recognized in their distillate form and recombined in a (possibly) new way.

Your creating the non-profit vehicle and obtaining a domain name, etc.  is suggestive of the classic "stone" or "nail" soup paradigm which I very much approve of.  If I had me an onion or a turnip, I would in fact scrub the dirt from it, peel it gently and toss it in the pot labeled "CUSF".   The resulting stew may very well not be at all what you intended, or it may match it very well.  Anyone have a pinch of salt?  Some Green Chile?  A not-too-long-dead Rabbit?

On the coming crisis of "gainful underemployment", I think it is an important, even critical thing to consider.   For those who have fully or partially retired, or have endured periods of "gainful underemployment" (like the post Bios implosion around the time of the larger  <http://dot.com/> dot.com bomb),  I think we are hyper aware of the value of "having good work", even if the economy has shifted out from under us to a situation where there is less and less *need* to work, either in terms of gross domestic productivity or in terms of providing sustenance for oneself and one's people.   

The powers that be tend toward offering "bread and circuses" (Netflix and Twitter?) on one end, and "mind-numbing poverty" on the other.   I think it is meritable to work toward finding a way to keep the populace engaged and motivated in more ahem... engaged and motivating pursuits.   

- Steve

On 1/6/18 1:25 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, 

Ok.  Let it be that the notion of the "academy", the quiet place, where a specialized group of people, designated by society, get together to think, is "old skool". But, let it be the case, that those same people are being forced to waste their time doing other things ... like brewing coffee, doing body work for people, doing fiddly computing jobs for other people, etc., etc.  Is that not a waste, of sorts?  How can we organize things so that these people can do what they are best at and love?  How can restore general society's respect for that sort of activity ... for "noodling."  How are we going to head off the jobs crisis that is upon us that happens when automation finally decouples "having a job" from "being a useful person".    Surely your Taotic position is not, "Whatever is is for the best" or even "Que sera sera?"  Or is it?

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
 <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [ <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2018 12:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group  <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe

Nick -

My sympathies are with you in aching to see the potential of such a rich milieu as is implied by this city/region (more) fulfilled (elaborated?).   At the same time, my inner Taoist believes it is "precisely as it should be". 

Your appeal reminded me of my reading on the origin of "Coffee Houses"
in England in the 17th century and their role as "Penny Universities". Of course, that is roughly how THIS forum began and continues as "the Mother Church", holding services weekly.  

It was this very vision which caused/allowed me to "stay the course"
with the SF Complex from beginning to (beyond the) end, in spite of innumerable tangents and setbacks.

I fear that the image of a "University" in any sense other than the above "Penny University" might be ultimately too nostalgic and oldSkool for our "modern times".  The likes of SFx or even MeowWolf may be closer to what is likely (or needed?) today.   The sum of SFAI/CCA/SFI/SITE/Lannan/??? sponsored talks and exhibitions is a rich tapestry which perhaps makes up for the lack of something more focused, with it's own (adobe) bricks and (mud) mortar?

I don't offer this as a wet blanket, but maybe more an urging to (continue to) think broadly and maybe even a bit inside-out.  

The following is a reasonable (contemporary) description of the "Coffee House" phenomenon of the 17th/18th century which itself had a limited lifespan...

     <https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/> https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/

- Steve

On 1/6/18 12:03 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi Glen and other interested parties,

I went by the Secretary of State's office on Thursday and we found The City University of Santa Fe without difficulty and all I have to do is pay past filing fees to get myself back in good standing with the State of New Mexico.  When you search it, be sure to start with leading "The" .  I tried to find my old web page on the way back machine and I think I found some reference to it, but not the page itself.  The url was something like  <http://www.cusf.org/> www.cusf.org. If anybody finds it, save it for me, would you.  I quite liked it.  I mean for citizen work. 

Some of you seem to raise the question where do we go from here.  I had thought, since I am getting so friggin old, that I would just shut it down.  The only things it has going for it are the name and the fact that Santa Fe is in many ways a university town without a university.  It has all these institutions doing quasi graduate work, and a gazillion retired PhD's doing various proects, and even a couple of advanced degree granting places.  But no desire to coalesce and cooperate, that I could detect.  I am not much of a culture vulture, but on a whim, went out to hear a TGIF concert of Schubert Leider in the Presbyterian church, this evening .  There were something like 500 people there.  Not sure you could get a crowd like that on a cold winter's night to hear a local singer in Berkeley.  Santa Fe is an extraordinary town.  It deserves a University.  

At today's meeting of the mother church I was banging on about the battering that the Liberal Arts ideal has received during my lifetime and my blief that we need to restore the country's faith in LEARNING.    I believe with all my heart that good things happen when you get smart diverse people together and make them think and argue about stuff.  I also thing there are a tremendous amount of young people in Santa Fe, working as baristas, and programmers, and piano tuners who by their devotion to the life of the mind deserve to pursue their interests.  

Speaking of battering, it's my understanding that the small liberal arts colleges are in for a terrible few years under the new tax bill and the Relatively Wealthy People of Santa Fe may need to be thinking about how to defend St. Johns, not to mention what every might be left of the poor old College of Santa Fe. 

Take care,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 
 <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [ <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2018 8:53 AM
To: FriAM  <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe

I don't know how long they keep their records.  But there's no corporation with that name in the online database:

   <https://portal.sos.state.nm.us/BFS/online/CorporationBusinessSearch> https://portal.sos.state.nm.us/BFS/online/CorporationBusinessSearch

There are some non-profits with a Nick Thompson as an officer.  But that Nick seems to live in Albuquerque.

On 01/05/2018 07:35 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

    On Jan 4, 2018 11:05 PM, "Nick Thompson" < <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> nickthompson at earthlink.net  <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
        YEARS ago, when the College of Santa Fe was failing, I 
started a nonprofit called the City University of Santa Fe which was 
designed to pull all the educational resources of Santa Fe into one 
semi-formal organization, which, at the very minimum, would keep 
everybody informed about what everybody else was doing and maximally, 
might have provided temporary, volunteer,  faculty to the College of Santa Fe
during its time of stress.   It turns out that you can set up a New 
Mexico non-profit for 25 dollars and ten bucks a year thereafter.  
Frank, and tom, and Mike Agar signed on as board members, I set up a 
website, and then, essentially, nothing happened.   SFAUD took over 
from CofSF and other organizations I contacted about the possible 
communication function dismissed the idea out of hand.  AND I lost my 
website and url,

--
∄ uǝʃƃ

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