
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning - akakievich
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand
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webmaven
A few supplemental links that may be of interest to the HN crowd:

A Pace Layering seminar: [http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jan/27/pace-
layers-thinkin...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jan/27/pace-layers-
thinking/)

Doc Searls riffed interestingly (in 2008!) on pace layering (aka "Layers of
Time"), the Internet, the Burton Matrix[0], and Open Source:
[http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Open_Sources_2.0/B...](http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Open_Sources_2.0/Beyond_Open_Source:_Collaboration_and_Community/Making_a_New_World)

[0] Craig Burton's Open/Closed Proprietary/Public Domain matrix isn't often
explicitly named, it's insights having been so thoroughly absorbed by our
community: [http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/understanding-
infrastruc...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/understanding-
infrastructure)

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goombastic
What are there tools that help simulate complex systems? Things like
biochemical balances in the human body, economies, enzyme actions and
homeostasis, environment and climate? Etc etc...? What tools are used by those
in the profession?

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ColanR
That sounds like an incredibly broad domain of tools.

~~~
goombastic
The tools are probably probably domain specific as well. But are there any
standard/OTS commercial tools for this?

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rheh
Intresting stuff

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summarian
The author tries to develop a perspective on the interaction of spaces over
time. It is a long stream of consciousness republished from a decades old
piece. A few examples are used to identify the idea and model the theory onto
the whole world from a social point of view. In the process he reinvents the
idea of homomorphisms. Fashion, as is quickly diagrammed, would be the
terminal element in a category of ordered group actions up to isomorphism,
reacting to catastrophe by isomorphisms as isomorphous shielding layer without
modifying the underlying, generating functions, in fact preserving them.
Without side-effects.

Only in the end an old example of different levels of longevity of a building
are pointed out, revealing that the whole issue concerns planning and that
"layers" are meant literally and figuratively.

Critically, that seems to be exactly the weakness of the exposition, it
reveals no real insight. The choice of terms is either mundane (literally, cf.
french _monde_ ) or subconsciously influenced by the overarching theme of
layers, as in layers of fashionable clothes.

In essence, the whole article tries to frame the question to "explain the
mechanism" to "absorb shocks and in fact incoporate them". And the answer,
without it being named, seems to be hierarchy ... (when in fact, that couldn't
be further from the truth. It's a state analysis, not dynamical. It's also
ideologically colored, reiterating the old themes of the invisible hand of the
market and the wealth trickling down.)

Disclaimer: I'm just joshin' around entertaining the idea to translate the
article to abstract maths. See, everyone can write absurd amounts of text to
say very little, but not everyone is going to read it. And not everyone can
keep it short because it feels soooo god to hear yaself talkin.

