[FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

Sat Feb 10 20:19:05 EST 2024

If one takes results like this -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494 -- and then consider what happens with, say, Code Llama, it seems plausible that it is representing both the breadth and depth of what humans know about large and complex code bases.   It is not clear to me why knowledge can’t be extended far beyond what the highest-bandwidth humans can learn in a lifetime.   I agree mastery of the idiomatic patterns could constrain invention, though.   For software engineering, the most impressive people to me are those that can navigate large and complex code bases, often remembering a lot of the code, but also can discard whole modules at a time and reimagine them.    Managers are suspicious of such people because managers want to modularize expertise for division of labor.   Scrum is in some sense a way to impede the development of expertise and to deny the need for it.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2024 2:25 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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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