Hello Tom,
Welcome to Friam! Don't mind the occasional squawk from the ParrotFarm
- the birds get crotchety if we forget to clean the cages. :-)
Yes, you'll find fans of Brian Arthur-speak here. In particular, I
think his ideas of "Deep Craft" wrt innovation <http://tinyurl.com/yfud2p3
> emerging in some places and not others is interesting. I would
argue Northern New Mexico has a level of deep craft in simulation and
related topics like optimization and visualization that allows
practitioners to exchange ideas quickly with common vocabularies
(though one could argue about how deep it goes).
BTW, I enjoy the tools and visualizations coming out of Caida! If
you're out in Santa Fe, please consider giving a brownbag talk.
-Stephen
--- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... ....
[email protected]
(m) 505.577.5828 (o) 505.995.0206
redfish.com _ sfcomplex.org _ simtable.com _ ambientpixel.com
On Feb 13, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Tom Vest wrote:
On Feb 13, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
Sheesh, what a bunch of academic phraseology!
• functional modularization
• combinatorial evolution
• both "top-down" as well as "bottom-up" initiative [...]
indispensable
IM(Not So)HO, America at large has been sufficiently dumbed down
by the brutal combination of a mediocre educational system, an
academic peer review system that rigidly refuses to think outside
the box, pay-for-play politics, fundamentalist christian &
christian wannabe religions, McDonalds lardburgers, and short-
sighted Wall Street quants that innovation is now solidly a thing
of the past, and will probably remain so for a very long time.
--Doug
Actually, we said approximately the same thing, or rather your list
included a small subset of the things I was trying to cover with my
academic phraseology.
No question that your phraseology is much more colorful! Not so easy
to model however.
I only chimed in (and subscribed) because I'm trying to model some
related problems in my own field.
I saw the terms "modeling" and "applied complexity" on the group
page -- but perhaps I misinterpreted the sense in which one or more
of those terms is being used...
In any case, please excuse the intrusion.
TV
On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Tom Vest <[email protected]> wrote:
On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
In a recent washingtonpost.com article named
"Erasing our innovation deficit" ( http://bit.ly/cG6vGW )
Eric Schmidt said
"We have been world leaders in [technological] innovation for
generations. It has driven our economy, employment growth and our
rising prosperity.
[..] We can no longer rely on the top-down approach of the 20th
century, when big investments in the military and NASA spun off to
the wider economy."
Do you agree? What kind of approach does the
USA need to return to old strength?
-J.
I'm surprised that none of the current/former SFIers on the list
have mentioned Brian Arthur's recent pitch for "combinatorial
evolution" as the engine of innovation.
As I read it, Brian's argument is that innovation is an
epiphenomenon arising from:
-- the functional modularization of many different kinds of
technologies*, plus
-- the standardization of "open" interfaces enabling those
functional components or modules to be combined in different ways,
plus
-- an environment that enables and incentivizes widespread
experimental combination of different technologies, e.g., by
occasionally rewarding those who come up with novel, useful
combinations.
*These could be of the "hard" or "soft" variety, e.g., chip design
or double-entry bookkeeping.
So, on this account it would seem that both "top-down" as well as
"bottom-up" initiative is indispensable.
Bottom-up activities are the proximate cause and primary engine
driving innovation.
However, the size of that engine (e.g., the share of the total
population capable of participating constrictively in the
combinatorial search) depends substantially on the existence,
scope, and openness/interoperability of those modules and the
standardized interfaces between them. Unfortunately, by their very
definition "standards" are a top-down phenomenon -- both because
they are never adopted with unanimous consent (but must be appx.
universally binding with a domain in order to work in that domain),
and because they must remain relatively stable over time, which
means that for everyone that comes along after the moment of
standardization, they may feel like an "unjust," arbitrary
imposition.
In 2002, a quartet of prominent Internet standards developers
published a paper called "Tussle in Cyberspace" (link below), which
made a broadly similar argument about how the Internet has evolved.
However, while mechanisms that the Tussle authors describe are
broadly similar, the tone seems quite different, to me at least.
The earlier paper seemed to be (obliquely) engaging a topical
issues that was just emerging around that time -- i.e., the
aspirations of some dominant Internet service providers to subtly
alter and/or partially vacate some of the standards that make the
Internet "open" and thus had fostered the Internet's rapid growth
up to that time (note: today the issue is most commonly called "net
neutrality"). In that context, the Tussle paper seems to lean ever
so slightly past the domain of observation and Darwinian theory
construction, in the general direction of advocating the tussle
process and the embrace of whatever outcomes it yields, ala "social
darwinism."
In any case, I think that any present US deficit in innovation can
probably be chalked up, at least in part, to the ongoing
progressive deviation from our most recent moment of optimal
balance between those "top down" and "bottom up" forces. Some of
the biggest recent winners in the innovation game -- i.e., those
who benefited most from the latest round of technical
standardization -- have started exert their own top-down authority
in ways that advance their own private interests, but which
collaterally degrade the environment for future/distributed
innovation...
(The question resonates for me because of the looming inflection
point in Internet protocol standards associated with the depletion
of the IPv4 address pool, which happens to be the stuff of my day
job)
My own 0.02, +/-
Tom Vest
"Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet"
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle2002.pdf
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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--
Doug Roberts
[email protected]
[email protected]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
