The problem with the difficulty frame is that I don’t really see any reason to believe that you get the same problems & solutions to increasing the difficulty of the problems you try to solve in the following fields:
Economics
Sociology
Biology
Evolution
Neuroscience
AI
Probability theory
Ecology
Physics
Chemistry
Except of course from the sources of
Increasing the difficulty of these in some ways plausibly leads to insights about agency & self-reference
There are a bunch of mathematical problems we don’t have efficient solution methods for yet (and maybe never will), like nonlinear dynamics and chaos.
I’m happy with 1, and 2 sounds like applied math for which the sea isn’t high enough to touch yet. Maybe its still good to understand “what are the types of things we can say about stuff we don’t yet understand”, but I often find myself pretty unexcited about the stuff in complex systems theory which takes that approach. Maybe I just haven’t been exposed enough to the right people advocating that.
I didn’t mean to propose the difficulty frame as the answer to what complexity is really about. Although I’m realizing now that I kinda wrote it in a way that implied that.
I think what I’m going for is that “theorizing about theorizers” seems to be pointing at something more akin to difficulty than truly caring about whether the collection of parts theorizes. But I expect that if you poke at the difficulty frame you’ll come across issues (like you have begun to see).
The problem with the difficulty frame is that I don’t really see any reason to believe that you get the same problems & solutions to increasing the difficulty of the problems you try to solve in the following fields:
Economics
Sociology
Biology
Evolution
Neuroscience
AI
Probability theory
Ecology
Physics
Chemistry
Except of course from the sources of
Increasing the difficulty of these in some ways plausibly leads to insights about agency & self-reference
There are a bunch of mathematical problems we don’t have efficient solution methods for yet (and maybe never will), like nonlinear dynamics and chaos.
I’m happy with 1, and 2 sounds like applied math for which the sea isn’t high enough to touch yet. Maybe its still good to understand “what are the types of things we can say about stuff we don’t yet understand”, but I often find myself pretty unexcited about the stuff in complex systems theory which takes that approach. Maybe I just haven’t been exposed enough to the right people advocating that.
Hm, good points.
I didn’t mean to propose the difficulty frame as the answer to what complexity is really about. Although I’m realizing now that I kinda wrote it in a way that implied that.
I think what I’m going for is that “theorizing about theorizers” seems to be pointing at something more akin to difficulty than truly caring about whether the collection of parts theorizes. But I expect that if you poke at the difficulty frame you’ll come across issues (like you have begun to see).