Yes, I suppose that one could say that Nick is the best kind of Troll here... I always appreciate his (deliberately) naive questions and hair splitting even when it IS the hair on my own chinny chin chin!


On 6/8/17 4:08 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
No, my troll comment was meant for Nick's OP. Not in an unkind way, but ...

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Steven A Smith <sasm...@swcp.com <mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:

    Glen -

    I have found concept mapping tools to be helpful in this context,
    but usually in live-brainstorming sessions... with one (or more)
    operators clicking and typing and dragging and connecting while
    others chatter out loud, then shifting the mouse/keyboard(s) to
    another(s).

    I know we have a mind-mapping ( I prefer concept-mapping) tool
    developer on the list...  I'm blanking his name, though I know he
    has been active off and on!  I hope he catches this and pitches
    in.  I believe he was heading toward web-enabled, simultaneous
    editing capabilities.   I did some tests and provided some
    feedback on an early version a few years ago..

    My only significant experience in this is with CMAPtools and a few
    others driven by various project-lead's preferences, but never
    really adopted by myself.

    I was in the process of developing some more formal tools with UNM
    for the NSF a few years ago, based on formalisms being developed
    by Tim Goldsmith (dept. Psychology) at UNM.  The presumption WAS
    (IS) that we all have reserved lexicons and for a collaborative
    group to develop a common one, there has to be a lot of discussion
    and negotiation.  Our example was a group of climate change
    scientists who (un)surprisingly used identical terms in very
    similar contexts with very different intentions and meanings in
    some cases.   It isn't too surprising when you realize that an
    ocean scientist and an atmospheric scientist are very interested
    in many of the same physical properties, but with different
    emphasis and within different regimes.   Pressure, density,
    humidity, salinity, vorticity all seem to have pretty clear
    meanings to any scientist using them, but the relative importance
    and interaction between them has different implications for each
    group.

    Needless to say, we didn't finish the tools before the funding ran
    out.  This is now nearly 8 years old work... the ideas area still
    valid but without a patron and without SME's to "test on" it is
    hard to push such tools forward.  My part included building the
    equivalent of what you call "mind maps" from the differing lexical
    elements, floating in N-space and "morphing" from each individual
    (or subgroup's) perspective to some kind of common perspective...
    with the intention of helping each individual or subgroup
    appreciate the *different* perspective of the others.

    This is modestly related to my work in "faceted ontologies" (also
    currently not under active development) where "multiple lexicons"
    is replaced by "multiple ontologies"  or in both cases, the
    superposition of multiple lexicons/ontologies.

    I haven't worked with Joslyn since that 2007? paper... but we
    *tried* a joint project with PNNL/NREL a couple of years ago, but
    it failed due to inter-laboratory politics I think.   He's an
    equally brilliant/oblique character as you...   take that for what
    it is worth!

    I liked Frank's double-dog-dare to you.   I think that is one of
    the good things you bring out in this list, all kinds of others'
    feistiness!  It was also good that you could both call it for what
    it was.  It makes me want to read Kohut... I have special reasons
    for trying to apprehend alternate self-psychology models right
    now, though from your's and Frank's apparent
    avoidance(/dismissal?) of Kahut and my immediate phonetic
    slip-slide to Camus, I'm a little leery.

    On 6/8/17 2:33 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

        We quickly polluted that thread, too.  But it drives home the
        point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative
        production tool.

        Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the
        PSL<https://www.psl.nmsu.edu/>. He supposedly works up at
        PNNL.  Thanks for that article.

Yes, I took Owen to be calling Russ' post a trolling post. But "troll" is like "complex", meaningless out of context.

        I'm completely baffled why "layer" isn't understood ... makes
        me think I must be wrong in some deep way.  But for whatever
        it's worth, I believe I understand and _agree_ with Nick's
        circularity criticism of mechanistic explanations for
        complexity, mostly because of a publication I'm helping
        develop that tries to classify several different senses of the
        word "mechanistic".  The 1st attempt was rejected by the
        journal, though. 8^( But repeating Nick's point back in my own
        words obviously won't help, here.

        Yes, I'm willing to help cobble together these posts into a
        document.  But, clearly, I can't be any kind of primary.  If
        y'all don't even understand what I mean by the word "layer",
        then whatever I composed would be alien to the other
        participants.  One idea might be to use a "mind mapping" tool
        and fill in the bubbles with verbatim snippets of people's
        posts ... that might help avoid the bias introduced by the
        secretary.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software
        
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software>
I also don't care that much about the meaning of "complex". So, my only motivation for helping is because y'all tolerate
        my idiocy.


        On 06/08/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

            I admit to being over my depth, at least in attention, if
            not in ability to parse out your dense text, and more to
            the point, the entire thread(s) which gives me more
            sympathy with Nick who would like a tool to help organize,
            neaten up, trim, etc. these very complex ( in the more
            common meaning of the term) discussions. My experience
            with you is that you always say what you mean and mean
            what you say, so I don't doubt that there is gold in that
            mine... just my ability to float the overburden and other
            minerals away with Philosopher's Mercury (PhHg) in a
            timely manner.

            I DO think Nick is asking for help from the rest of us in
            said parsing...   to begin, I can parse HIS first
            definition of "layer" is as a "laying hen"... a chicken
            (or duck?) who is actively laying eggs.   A total
            red-herring to mix metaphors here on a forum facilitated
            by another kind of RedFish altogether... a "fish of a
            different color" as it were, to keep up with the metaphor
            (aphorism?) mixology.

            I DON'T think Owen was referring to you when he said:
            "troll", I think he was being ironical by suggesting Russ
            himself was being a troll.  But I could be wrong.   Owen
            may not even remember to whom his bell "trolled" in that
            moment?  In any case, I don't find your
            contribution/interaction here to be particularly
            troll-like.  Yes, you can be deliberately provocative, but
            more in the sense of Socrates who got colored as a
            "gadfly" (before there were trolls in the lexicon?).  Stay
            away from the Hemlock, OK?

            I'm trying to sort this (simple?) question of the meaning
            (connotations) of layering you use, as I have my own
            reserved use of the term in "complex, layered metaphors"
            or alternately "layered, complex metaphors"... but that is
            *mostly* an aside.   I believe your onion analogy is
            Nick's "stratum" but I *think* with the added concept that
            each "direction" (theta/phi from onion-center) as a
            different "dimension".   Your subsequent text suggests a
            high-dimensional venn diagram.   My own work in
            visualization of  Partially Ordered Sets (in the Gene
            Ontology) may begin to address some of this, but I suspect
            not.

            https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf
            <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4935.pdf>

            I may continue to dig into this minefield of rich ore and
            interesting veins, but it has gotten beyond (even) me as a
            multiple attender who thrives on this kind of complexity
            (with limits apparently!).

            I think I heard you suggest that YOU would volunteer to
            pull in the various drawstrings on this multidimensional
bag forming of a half-dozen or more branching threads... I'll see if I can find that and ask some more pointed
            questions that might help that happen?

            I truly appreciate Nick's role (as another Socrates?)
            teasing at our language to try to get it more plain or
            perhaps more specific or perhaps more concise?  Is there
            some kind of conservation law in these dimensions?




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