Professor Sha Xin Wei will give a talk in the Making Sense of Complexity SCAS lectures series:
Infrastructure clinics and navigating indeterminacy
11:00 AM MST, Oct 15
We recap basic limits on complexity models, information, data science and machine learning, and introduce abductive heuristics, continuous topological dynamics, and performative techniques as supplements to those formalisms. As a practical application we describe a clinic for prototyping alternative socio-technical infrastructures.
NOTE:
This responds to some observations by Sander van der Leeuw and Gary Dirks, presented by Sander in the SCAS lecture series September 17”Competence without Comprehension”. Prof. Van der Leeuw considers how societies and organizations have moved from open systems to closed systems, from long-term to short term thinking. Flipping the problem-solving paradigm, he observes how solutions generically create unanticipated problems. Given the growth of competency without comprehension, he calls for turning from modeling the present in terms of the past to making a place in our science and social technology for unexpected and unintended consequences.