13 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. Plex is my very life - and has been all along, I suspect. From a creative and in-quisitive childhood, sampling all the arts, crafts, and sciences, through a strongliberal-arts background, to pure mathematics and electrical engineering - I foundmyself swept into the very exciting dawn of the computer age in my first graduate-student summer job, in 1952. Just as my marriage to Pat in the January breakof my senior year at Oberlin had been the perfect choice, my change to part-timeSpecial Student status, while embarking on my full-time professional career atMIT, can be seen as inevitable, when viewed from today's vantage point. Thereis an exquisite economy in the doings of nature, and for a long time, now, I havebeen firmly convinced that, whoever I may really be, my role in the scheme ofthings has been to initiate the discovery of Plex, not by chance, but as what Ido, simply because I'm me

      I can see him struggling with this concept at this point I dont think we had greb the concept of arts as not something you do but a part of expressing what you have to say

      There are many techinical people that are into arts and we think of that as an oddity but art is technology

  2. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

  3. Sep 2022
    1. Multidiscpl teams are different from heterogenous ones when it comes to learning. Dense networks useful for incremental steps, but hinder innovative steps (Vgl [[Lurking Weak Strong Ties 20040204063311]]) Provide team design principles.

      Full paper in Zotero

  4. Nov 2021
    1. This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics.

      The inability to think holistically is the problem.

  5. Mar 2021
  6. Sep 2020
  7. Jul 2020
  8. Jun 2020
  9. May 2020
    1. A multidisciplinary approach is powerful as it enhances decision-making, pattern recognition, and creativity. Inversely, it also mitigates blind spots – and all mistakes come from blind spots.

      Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn has been one of the most impactful books I've ever read. He argues that becoming multidisciplinary also helps one acquire the "jargon" one needs to be able to communicate effectively with others. He says, "One major step you must do, and I want to emphasize this, is to make the effort to master their jargon. Every field seems to have its special jargon, one which tends to obscure what is going on from the outsider-and also, at times, from the insiders!" (https://blas.com/learning-to-learn/)

  10. Apr 2020