[FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Marcus Daniels marcus at snoutfarm.com
Wed Jan 15 23:06:58 EST 2020 

Like cities, the great thing about organizations is that there are so many to choose from.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of "thompnickson2 at gmail.com" <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 7:57 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Marcus,

This behavior difference tells a lot.  I dunno about SFI.  The more I dealt with them up there, the more I felt there were mostly a bunch of strivers hoping that the Call to Hah-vud would come before the soft money ran out.  Some wonderful exceptions, but still.  Speaking of isolation from the community, it’s hard to imagine an institution more uninterested in its community than SFI.  Well, I suppose I should acknowledge the Ted Talks at the Lensic.  There’s a famous [apocryphal?] story about when SAR approached SFI and solicited an invitation to visit.  SFI acceded and some people trooped up the hill, and everybody seemed to have a wonderful time.  On the strength of that apparent success, the SAR people invited the SFI people for a return visit.  The response, stated with genuine bewilderment, was, “Oh why ever would we do that?”

To be a thousand percent, this is probably most sour grapes on my part.  When I retired out here, I naively hoped that I could make some sort of contact with SFI. Nothin’ doin’.   In fact, it was you-guys who welcomed me, and made retirement here in Santa Fe possible.

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 6:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Nick writes:

“So what then IS IT about?”

Something called work/life balance.   That’s a thing, I’m told.    It is facilitated by lots of federal money sloshing around, and having free time on your hands.

https://www.lanl.gov/careers/life-at-lab/index.php

I would contrast it against working at SFI, where it was not unusual to stop by at midnight and find a dozen people working or doing something like working.

Marcus

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of "thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>" <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 2:23 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

So what then IS IT about?

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 2:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

On the topic of LANL in Santa Fe, or on the topic of the quality of life in Los Alamos itself, I am not even taking the position that the local people in the surrounding reason (e.g. Santa Fe proper) are or should be a consideration, or that anything in particular is good or bad for them.   I understand that is an objectionable disposition to some people, and that’s fine.  However, even when one expects the anglo-invaders to assert whatever they want from the environment, they don’t really seem to want to do much.   That’s what is kind of sad to me about life at LANL.   One does not find office lights on at 10pm.   It’s not about the lifestyle and it isn’t even about the work.

Marcus

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com<mailto:merlelefkoff at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 12:57 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Hi Marcus,

My client many years ago was Los Alamos County.  They hired my consulting firm to design and facilitate a county-wide meeting to discuss the relationship between LANL and the citizens who lived there.  When I interviewed local people prior to designing the meeting, I found a lot of anger about the role of the lab in relation to its surrounding neighbors.  It was quite emotional, and so I brought in a colleague who is a psychiatrist to help me facilitate.  Toward the end of a difficult weekend of discussion, he asked:  "We've had deep dialogue together, but I feel that there is still an "unspoken" here.  What is it?"  A member of the group raised her hand and said the "unspoken here is that the laboratory considers the county, the town, and its citizens just "decoration.  We have practically no relationship, and they feel we do not contribute any added value."

So sad, and so totally expected.



On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 10:30 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Glen writes:

< I remember moving to Santa Fe and hating Cerrillos Rd with all it's little businesses, the trashy look, sections of ill- and un-used properties, peppered with upscale stuff in some spots. >

Before brainstorming about how to integrate LANL, etc. into the St. Michael / Cerrillos area, it might be worth asking why the town of Los Alamos is so abysmal.   Los Alamos county has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, and yet there is not a thing to spend money on up there besides real estate.   One reason I've heard is that the folks that own the lots in the town find it more profitable to hold on to them and rent to the lab when the need arises.   Thus there is no way to build anything.   Another is that it is a family town, and oddly enough not a town that facilitates workism -- people more-or-less work 9 to 5 and then hang out at home, and want to.   Or on the weekends they ski or hike.   Its always been astonishing to me that there aren't more restaurants.   The only conventional sign of progress is the big Smiths facility.

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 8:14 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Just a preamble: I remember moving to Santa Fe and hating Cerrillos Rd with all it's little businesses, the trashy look, sections of ill- and un-used properties, peppered with upscale stuff in some spots. I'd moved there from Dallas, TX, where they'd rather tear down an old building than repurpose it. I recognized the "planned" look of Dallas because I grew up in Houston, where zoning laws are relatively loose.

But Cerrillos is what taught me the meaning of "organic". So, as an (also vague) attempt to answer the question, the only way one can "design" an ecosystem is by first studying the already extant ecosystem and nudging it in multifarious ways. The primary problem with organically grown systems is the lack of executive function ... a high-order feedback (like a cerebral cortex) ... to establish and maintain constraints like water limits, geographical sprawl, pollution, etc. So, the FIRST part of the plan would be to constructively aggregate the extant businesses into some sort of scaffolded hierarchy starting with tiny businesses (businesses run by people with ZERO spare time, of course), up through boutique businesses (coffee shops, breweries, fashion, etc.), up through larger scale businesses, etc. ... all the way up to behemoths like LANL or the State of NM.

The second part of the plan would be to adopt some trial (non-local) constraints like water limitations and experiment with feeding that back down the hierarchy (layer by layer *or* cross-trophically, jumping over layers) and then following the effects back up the hierarchy. As trials, there must be challenge tests, ways to decide whether to abandon or iteratively modify the constraints and their up- and down-ward signaling. So, this second part of the plan might *start* by formalizing those tests (in an "agile" style).

Any interference/manipulation by a behemoth like Amazon or CMU would require them to *facilitate* the hierarchy, as opposed to *disrupting* it. (As I think someone in this thread has already mentioned, but I don't have the bandwidth to farm the posts for who said/implied it.) Following co-evolution and multi-objective optimization, the constraints have to be at least partially *endogenous*. The executive has to be pretty tightly coupled to the rest of the system. Any attempts at decoupled, directed evolution of the ecosystem will be fragile to disrupting enterprises. But if the disruptions are small/local, then the network of feedbacks can adjust, limiting any species collapse in response to that disruption.

That's how I would "define the function" of the behemoth.

On 1/14/20 1:03 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I know the members on this list mostly don’t have powers of implementation, but as idle intellectual exercise, if you/we were portfolio managers, or really avant-garde regional planners, what would your design look like to get through critical mass thresholds to tip an interior, water-limited, relatively low-population region into some kind of self-maintaining decent standard of life and opportunity for whoever lived there stably for a long time.  (And how many can that be, in water-limited regions?)  Intel made a significant impact in ABQ, but putting a semiconductor fab in a desert is about as unsustainable a business decision as I can imagine.  What resources exist currently?  If you were designing the institutional ecosystem, and knew you needed some economic social function but couldn’t find an actor to fit it, could you define in somewhat operational terms what that function would need to be, and how much of the remainder of the context could you populate with specific actors and a plan to get them into place?
>
> I know this is much too loose and long-term to deal with immediate practicalities of interacting wtih the SF city council, but we often speak as if long-term future visioning efforts could in principle yield something useful.

--
☣ uǝlƃ
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--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org<http://emergentdiplomacy.org>
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefkoff at gmail.com<mailto:merlelefoff at gmail.com>
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