I started college at 14. Dropped out at 16. Tried to re�nroll four years later, talked my way into being accepted into the political science department at Buffalo State College, but found I was ineligible for the financial aid I was counting on. Under the terms of my parents’ divorce, Dad was supposed to pay child support on each of us kids until we reached 18. The fact that I hadn’t been 18 for a couple years, and the fact that we kids never had dime one of that money spent on us, are matters for another time. The important thing is that I was listed as a dependent on Dad’s tax forms, and was thus out of luck as far as receiving grants or loans went. No Political Science department for me; hello, fifteen years of manual labor at subsistence wages.
It’s been a while since I spent any time regretting that missed opportunity: my intellectual life is varied and rewarding.
In fact this morning, reading this post and subsequent comments over at Crooked Timber, I found myself feeling a profound gratitude to my parents for inadvertently helping to spike my renascent academic career.
It’s an interesting post. Complex systems are endlessly fascinating, and social networks are an accessible, familiar, and fractally intricate example of said complexity. A less-hidebound person might take note of the fact that some physicists find the work of some social scientists valuable enough to devote some attention to its (in this case near-literal) ramifications, and ask what this says about current thought in the complexity biz. Or one might point out that this kind of stuff is old hat, that Murray Gell-Mann helped found the complex systems program at the Santa Fe Institute for a reason, and that nonetheless the work at issue is kinda interesting.
I’m solidly in the second camp. The dot-line drawings at issue here are being claimed by some in the thread as an innovation of social scientists whose work has been tragically and offensively ignored by those damn physicists. There is, however, no mention in the thread of the long-term use of very similar heuristics in the fields of population biology, chemical and theoretical ecology, or systems analysis. I spent about a week ten years ago sitting in a room with Fritjof Capra and Sym VanDerRyn, the three of us drawing very similar graphs of ecological relationships in fields varying from wildlife biology to literary criticism to mathematical modeling — that last was amusingly recursive. So where’s our goddamned cite?
You’d think someone who’d devoted their life to intellectual inquiry would find gratification in having his or her ideas taken seriously. The “how dare they think about my idea” notion always leaves me breathless. The fact that people could discuss a study of who cites whom and get pissed off that someone wasn’t cited in the work studying who cites whom and not see the humor in their anger is frightening indeed. This is the only time I’ll likely type the next four words: Henry Kissinger was right. To think I might have wasted even a small part of my only life on this pointless turf warfare. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for setting me on a better course.
), but copying and pasting it into the browser’s address box worked for me.
