cdb5cc7a_When_Knowledge_Worlds_Collide__as__screeds__manifestos__etc__
[NAME] Nicole [Reading] Helmreich vs Lansing, Lansing ch6
I'm sympathetic to some of Helmreich's criticisms of Lansing, even if I think they are a bit misdirected/overread. Biological vs industrial time, for instance: I think Lansing really means agricultural time, as the basic form of many calindrical systems, and calling it "biological time" naturalizes it more than the rest of that chapter indicates it should be. (By the way, it's interesting to be writing this on such a fertility-symbol heavy, calindrically complicated holiday as Easter) But even though I think Helmreich's critique of the simulation is more about his work on the talismanic fascination of emergent complexity and computer simulation for mathematically minded Westerners than it is about Lansing's book, like Keith I wondered about the limitations of the modelling compared to the qualitative parts of Priests and Programmers. Little of what we see in chapter 6 is as useful for understanding the system as the previous 2 or 3 chapters, and it seems to reduce this active process of religious/social/political interactions to something like "people can figure technically difficult stuff out, even without knowing every piece of relevant data". But what's interesting about that is that Lansing mentions multiple times that without the simulations he would not have understood the system -- placing it at then end is somewhat puzzling. Am I missing where it fits in earlier, or is this a difficulty with the book as written?
When Knowledge Worlds Collide
AGENDA ITEM (questions, comments, ideas, screeds, manifestos, etc.)