Transdisciplinary transitions and apprenticeships

[jacob]

I gave my thoughts on the importance of transdisciplinary work to come up with novel solutions in Stoa2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MGQgQZHx1Q I don't think that the contemporary strategy of interdisciplinary Coordination between experts result in enough Creativity for solving complex problems. While sufficient for complicated problems, talking to other experts doesn't not convey enough information to solve complex problems. (See Cynefin framework. ERE book for CCCCCC).

@Kielbasy's post on seeking research assistant positions ( viewtopic.php?p=275963#p275963 ) and my response ( viewtopic.php?p=276107#p276107 ) made me wonder just how difficult inducing this kind of cross pollinating creativity really is? The current solution seems to be to "go back to school and retrain". OTOH, this is heterotelic to the problem transdisciplinarity is trying to solve. Schooling creates conformists but transdisciplinarity seeks to Create novel solutions using outside perspectives.

For example, much of the FIRE movement was created by immigrants to the US who brought a non-US perspective to the US-environment. This would not had happened if we first had to reeducate ourselves to the values of the UN-environment. Indeed, it would likely have ended any kind of creativity.

Now this is easy enough when it comes to solo-enterprises---the renaissanceman approach.

However, what are the strategies or any success stories for walking into a different field WITHOUT having to reschool, conform, work one's way up from the bottom?

[mountainFrugal]

In general I think walking into a field without having to deal with the conformity chain would be to perform at a relatively high-level (for a newb) in the field without the school. Or to leverage the thing that you are already an expert in and overlap it with the new field in a novel way. So rather than starting from scratch within each field, you start where you are and move towards the new field from where your expertise currently is.

Having something to show for your interest in another field (a completed project), goes a long way to convincing people within the field you are moving towards that you are serious about it and might bring a fresh perspective. Maybe you might not be able to compete (especially in technical fields) with a specialist for the day to day. However, you can compete with them in originality of ideas. If you understand the major concepts of the field and have at least some of the technical chops, then people will take you seriously. If you know enough technical language and when it use it appropriately, then this would also help. You are doing a lot of the communications bridge work.

I think the most generalized answer to this question is people that are already doing whatever it is in the field at a fairly high level because they are interested in it. They put in the time to get good.

Examples include:
Software engineering - there are really good self-taught hackers out there. It seems like a lot of good hackers solve some problem they have and support an open-source project around it.

Makers - there are some incredible engineering projects out there by people not formally trained in engineering, but they taught themselves. They may not be able to bid on a new structure project with the state, but they can build huge sculptures for personal projects.

Entrepreneurs - you do not need business school or an MBA, just start working on your company. Once I was serious about starting a company and working on it full time based off my savings, then investors took me more seriously.

I started taking art seriously at the end of 2019. Now I am getting paid to combine my knowledge of science, my general writing ability, and my art skills for making content and explainer diagrams. I am now leveraging this to work towards mentoring art and design students in data intensive projects. In my examples, I would not have these opportunities if I was not already working on them in my free-time and trying to get really good. I was building credibility by completing projects even if they might not be considered as high-level as a specialist in that field.

[zbigi]

However, you can compete with them in originality of ideas.

My experience in workplace is that everybody has ideas, and what is needed the most is not people who can generate more ideas, but the people who will do mountains of (difficult, technical, specialized) gruntwork that are behind every novel idea. At least that's what I experienced in software field, maybe it's different elsewhere.

[jacob]

@zbigi --- nah... the true believers may be the true movers too. Not because they know [the true] but because they don't know any better.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, it has been my experience that part of the problem with reschooling yourself at an advanced age is that you are less capable of conforming, but generally more competent and less likely to give a damn. Although, this may depend on whether you are doing it "again" at an advanced age vs. finally doing it!! or resigning yourself to doing it at an advanced age. For instance, getting an M.S. in IT at the age of 58 is kind of like taking on a challenge/bet to go back to high school and get a date with some smart jock for the prom when I'd still rather be making our with Judd Nelson in the shack in the woods.

Intellectually, it's just another realm where I can readily take on the perspective of systems theory. Of course, HIGHLY likely that my level is too low in any of my realms to spark significant insight beyond "Wow, an operating system actually is a system!!!"

[mountainFrugal]

My experience in workplace is that everybody has ideas, and what is needed the most is not people who can generate more ideas, but the people who will do mountains of (difficult, technical, specialized) gruntwork that are behind every novel idea. At least that's what I experienced in software field, maybe it's different elsewhere.

I do not disagree on ideas vs. implementation, but building on the ideas by putting in the work (to the best of your ability) will likely attract others to work on it.This seems to be the case with most successful open-source projects. There may be a lot of grunt work that needs to get done, but it takes someone with the conviction to work on it, or to find and convince others with the technical chops to work on it with you.

add: originality of ideas is not necessarily technical, but maybe there is a killer application in one of the other fields that you are an expert in that does not have good software people working in it.

[7Wannabe5]

Yeah, that's true. I never had any shortage of volunteers to help me with my permaculture projects or my rare book business. Of course, beyond ideas and implementation (conviction), you also have to manifest your projects out is the "open" in order to attract others. When I am tutoring students at the cafe, other humans sometimes actually approach me to commend me for my service. I am seriously bored with my IT coursework, so I've been trying to come up with a project that would make it more interesting for me. I was even contemplating purchasing a video game since that seems to be a path of engaged entry for many.

[Frita]

Well, it has been my experience that part of the problem with reschooling yourself at an advanced age is that you are less capable of conforming, but generally more competent and less likely to give a damn. Although, this may depend on whether you are doing it "again" at an advanced age vs. finally doing it!! or resigning yourself to doing it at an advanced age. For instance, getting an M.S. in IT at the age of 58 is kind of like taking on a challenge/bet to go back to high school and get a date with some smart jock for the prom when I'd still rather be making our with Judd Nelson in the shack in the woods.

A well-developed inner-FU seems to make life easier. I remember “retreads” being so much more eager in undergrad. By grad school, it was apparent that straight shot finishers had less experience than those who actually had been working in the field. In the 1980s, having experience counted for something, though age discrimination was around then too. Green hires were less desirable. Now, at least around her, the ideal candidate has no experience.

What’s the vibe from your classmates? Professors?

[7Wannabe5]

@Frita:

I’m 100% online, so the main “vibe” would be “distant.” It’s also a program aimed at working adults, so more variety than usual within the overall vibe of “serious professional.” Our only interactions are extremely dull asynchronous discussions on fairly formulaic topics.

I think the main thing that keeps me trudging forward is the fact that I am going half-time at double speed, so I have just one new class every 10 weeks, which is pretty ideal for my attention span. I recently picked up an organizational book entitled the “The Twelve Week Year” with thought that I might benefit from organizing all my goals in this manner.

[zbigi]

@7Wannabe5: if you're so bored by the studies, aren't you worried you'll be bored out of your mind at the actual job?

[Frita]

@5W7
Thanks for explaining. I knew that you were online but assumed some in person time too. (Personally, the only thing I dislike more than taking a class online is teaching one. Just thinking about it sucks some energy out of my soul.) Hopefully focusing on one class at a time with a new course every ten weeks makes it more tolerable long-term. Do you write a thesis, do a plan B paper, and/or do a written/oral exam?

[7Wannabe5]

@zbigi: I am currently bored, but open to becoming interested. I'm kind of following the folk wisdom inherent in "It's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man." Also, and more relevant to this thread, I am engaging in my own reading/exercise project in related topics in the hope that something might eventually "pop" for me. For instance, I am currently interested in learning about applications of Bayesian probability in data science, while simultaneously being deeply uninterested in topics such as cybersecurity (which seems to be the most exciting topic for many or most of my classmates.) I hate being bored, but I hate being in chronic pain worse than being bored, so I am currently tied to "modern" lifestyle by an 8 week long cord attaching me to infusions of advanced biologics, thus it seems that I must further do my part to contribute.

@Frita: Keystone project.

[mountainFrugal]

Not exactly transdisciplinary per say because he is operating within film, but Robert Rodriguez is multi-talented within that realm and does ALOT of the roles himself.

Robert Rodriguez - Rebel Without a Crew - https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-without-Cr ... 0452271878
"Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rodriguez

I seem to remember him saying something like "Get a business card with your name and filmmaker on it... now you are a filmmaker...go make a film". This would apply to all creative arts and professions where you do not legally need a credential.

[midnightembers]

However, what are the strategies or any success stories for walking into a different field WITHOUT having to reschool, conform, work one's way up from the bottom?

This makes me think of The Millionaire Next Door - the independent, small business owner who hits on an idea successful enough to ramp into FU-money pretty quickly, allowing them to run their business their way. The few I have known didn't do well in succession planning; their kids didn't adopt thrifty-over-flashy spending habits nor the work ethic to garner a spot on easy street. I'm thinking of two in particular who are both doing grunt work now when they could have been owners if only they had paid attention. They were handed the ring and they promptly dropped it. On the other hand, I met two people recently who both apprenticed with a master (a well driller and a tree/lumber expert) and became businesses owners once the masters had saved enough to retire. Neither had experience in well drilling or tree felling but grabbed the opportunity when it presented itself. There may have been an element of "working up from the bottom" but it wasn't onerous (learning a valuable skill never is, and even if they hadn't taken over they were putting themselves in a position for success).

[mathiverse]

An article about a transdisciplinary transition success story: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet ... over-again. This article was discussed a bit here: viewtopic.php?t=1182.

Erez Lieberman Aiden seems to have done it by learning a lot about multiple disciplines through normal avenues (degrees with multiple majors that are fairly different), then joining a typical specialist PhD program in a different discipline and applying his prior skills to the new discipline. I may have the order of events slightly wrong here. The interdisciplinary idea in the new field he wanted to pursue may have come before the enrollment in the specialist program. He got lucky to have a breakthrough with that approach which got him notoriety and funding to continue his approach. If you're FI, then you can do mF's self funded tenure idea to try some of your ideas, which may all fail, without worrying about funding. That does limit the research you can pursue since if your project requires millions in investments and research team, then you won't have that support.

That does make me wonder about something else. For example, mF mentioned something here that piqued my curiosity:

because of scarce grant funding and/or faculty positions, it is more often in the achievement/competition realm leaving many potentially fruitful ideas under-explored.

Are there many potentially fruitful ideas in your discipline, mF, that could not be explored without institutional levels of support? What percentage could really be be pursued during a self funded tenure? Do you have a guess about that?

Also, a slightly less on topic question about what you said, are there really good ideas that never get pursued in research labs because of the competition for publications? Is this just the idea that a very good idea with a high chance of failure generally won't be pursued due to the need for very conservative risk management or was there something else to it?

[mountainFrugal]

I will read this article. Thank you for posting it.

It does limit things from a support level, but that does not mean you cannot first make prototypes, models, simulations, theory etc. and then try to find the funding to grow the idea later. This is the strategy I am taking trying to work across domains. It might take a long time, it might not work out at all, or I could get lucky when suddenly something clicks.

As for fruitful ideas... yes and no. More on the theory end for sure because you can write down ideas and get some progress by running simulations and testing those against published data. The world is completely awash in data across most domains so the opportunities for new ways of seeing the world by modeling and combining data sets is seemingly endless. If publications are not the only output, then it makes it more endless. I am not sure I have a guess actually. Ideas are cheap, implementation is not (as @zbigi stated) so you might be more much more limited by the time of an individual (also lifespan!) with appetite for risk, self-funded tenure, and some ideas they deem worth exploring. .

The publication, or "publon", as a research output unit is a pragmatic medium. Many fields get into a race to the bottom mentality about further refining the reductionist chain of reasoning so competition for inching things forward is intense.

Ultimately, yes it is the conservative risk management of the panels who are ultimately accountable to the taxpayers. Grants get awarded (having sat on panels) to people with reputations for publications and inching forward the discipline. A common grant proposal is a 1, 2, 3 formula where three is "the edgiest idea" but a bulk of the grants will be 1 and 2 incremental ideas that are likely already done to have enough preliminary data to be competitive for the grant in the first place. 3 will rarely get any actual research time even if three is the most interesting. A more venture capital model for at least a portion of the funding could break us out of this madness. This model would fund 10 big ideas even further out there (4, 5, 6 in the example of the grant ideas) with only 1 actually working out. There are groups exploring this funding model now. This is actually why I left academia initially. Venture capital funding of ideas come with their own problems, but they are interested in big ideas generally.

Add Aiden Quote:

People have this romantic notion of inventors as people who go into caves and come out with an amazing thing that’s totally novel. I think a huge amount of invention is recognising that A and B go together really well, putting them together and getting something better. The limiting step is knowing that A and B exist. And that’s the big disadvantage that one has as a specialist – you gradually lose sight of the things that are around. I feel I just get to see more.

[7Wannabe5]

I just wish that I could learn enough data science to hack together an arbitrage against the realm of J.Bozo, and thereby capture a bounty adequate to fund the acquisition of my next garden/laboratory/studio.

[jacob]

Having something to show for your interest in another field (a completed project), goes a long way to convincing people within the field you are moving towards that you are serious about it and might bring a fresh perspective. Maybe you might not be able to compete (especially in technical fields) with a specialist for the day to day. However, you can compete with them in originality of ideas. If you understand the major concepts of the field and have at least some of the technical chops, then people will take you seriously. If you know enough technical language and when it use it appropriately, then this would also help. You are doing a lot of the communications bridge work.

These are not the droids I'm looking for. The history of physicists going to Wall Street is a good example. In the heyday (1980s), there was an enormous amount of low hanging fruit from surplus physicists moving from cold war (defense) to finance. They'd bring in novel ideas and often independently discover new things because quant finance wasn't formalized yet. The motivation from the hiring managers was that it was easier to teach a physicist finance than it was to teach calculus to a business major. Thus bring in a bunch of physicists to roam intellectually free and clean up all those $20 bills that the efficient economists had left on the sidewalk. However, over time, the educational industry jumped on it and started offering "quant certifications" and "masters programs". The result was that every graduate of these programs would essentially know the same things. Being a quant became a career in its own. Innovation died because having to understand the major concepts of the field already meant that the fluid intelligence was partially crystalized.

About a decade ago a friend from HS (then a professor of microbiology) brought me into a project of his that involved "microbiological reaction networks" for lack of a better word. My background involves nuclear reaction networks. It turned out that whatever was state of the art in microbiology in 2012---mostly relying on commercial equipment---or so was state of the art in astrophysics in 1955 so I could code this up during a lunch break, more or less. While there were some initial problems of "translation" between the fields, in this case he was the one to make the connection and provide the enzyme101 vocabulary. (Initially, I was very set on mass conservation ... because E=mc^2 is a big deal when dealing with nuclear reactions, whereas a small variation in heat or cold is irrelevant to a petri-dish.)

It's this kind of transdisciplinary connection I'm looking for. Not the stuff were one has to prove one's hoop jumping ability or having to learn a language first but institutions that has a system in place that gives a chance for outsiders to walk in.

Unfortunately I forget where I heard it, but apparently there was/is a university that had a program in place where professors would hold a lecture series in a field that was entirely different than their own. I can't overstate how wonderful I think this idea is. This went across departments. Basically the professors would bring their "deep" framework---the way they thought---but subconsciously apply it to teach a 101 course in an unfamiliar field. This would require them to learn everything a freshman would know but with the benefit of a mature framework from another field. For example, having a physicist teach personal finance ... or maybe a psychologist teaching poetry... or a philosopher teaching quantum mechanics.

It is SUCH KINDS of connections I'm looking for. Not restarting in another field of learning what little is required to do interdisciplinary work.

Add: My ~K-12 school system provided two such experiences that required students to combine knowledge from two or more different fields including knowledge that wasn't taught in school. In the 7th grade (1988 for context), we played a game of international resource politics. The class was divided into groups of 3-4 people each. A group would be either a developing country (lots of resources, few tools) or a developed country (opposite). Resources were different kinds of paper. Tools were pencils, scissors, glue, and compass. The object was to end up the richest country after making various paper shaped objects (priced according to how many tools were required). How we did it trading tools, resources, etc. was left to our creativity (strategy, ability to combine fields, optimize, negotiate, etc.). In the 8th grade, we simulated a [book wrapping] business. Writing job applications and getting hired. Then fulfilling orders (some in French which nobody spoke, but we figured it out), making payments and payroll. These experiences really stand out in terms of how much they fired up the creative juices. That's 2 days out of 12 years. It could be worse. It could also be much better.

[mountainFrugal]

I think I see now. I have two examples that might come closer to the droids you are looking for.

One was co-teaching a class an architecture department. The theme was "Experimental Design" where the emphasis was on the double meaning of Design. The class was a studio course so there was much less structure. I taught the students experimental design principles to isolate variables and make valid experiments, but I was also a student myself in the class. The students gave me critical feedback on my project based around avalanche mitigation. One student came up with a design that changed colors in a plaza and they made a human tracker to collect data on where the humans moved throughout the space and responded to the color changes.

The second example was a long weekend art/science hackathon. I did this for a few years in a row with two art/design friends. We came up with a theme for each hackathon and then iterated on the ideas over three days. I learned how to use the basic rendering programs Rhino and some of it's plug-ins to make 3D sculptures out of plant growth data. We made paper sculptures, we made 3D prints, we made clay sculptures, etc. The second hackathon we converted a plant growth model and merged it with a hacked xbox kinect so that you could manipulate the plant growth by using your hand movements as the inputs to the model. REALLY FUN! Art/science/engineering/data/design/sculpture

I hope do more of these types of things in the near future with this new gig I am trying to make happen.

[7Wannabe5]

Maybe it's finally time to commence work on "ERE: The Musical!"? I second mF's general observation that there are more opportunities for highly creative collaborations at the Bohemian juncture between The Artist and The Scientist. For instance, one of the grouchy old engineers in my social circle helped my musician sister repair the hydraulics on her drumming bear, and ended up playing a bit part in a movie her musician husband wrote and directed with the assistance of an award winning videographer in his social circle. I was actually paid $25 for playing a more major role in the film

Another example would be that my youngest sister, who was a film/media major at the time, created an art/electronics/engineering installation that replicated the experience of being born from the perspective of the infant.

Things are a bit more dullsville in my family circle since the need for $$ has morphed all of the artists into lawyers.


I've been re-reading Scott Page's "The Model Thinker", and I think his description of models as falling into the 3 general categories of Simplification of the World, Mathematical Analogy, or Exploratory may be relevant to this discussion. Transdiciplinary insight will generally occur when a Mathematical Analogy can be recycled for use in another field. Integrating art or play* is more towards creating an Exploratory Model.

*For instance, one course I took a number of years ago was entitled "Drama and the Human Experience" and it was aimed at encouraging teachers to bring a more playful, kinesthetic vibe to the classroom. For instance, instead of teaching the concept of the number line with paper and pencil, you might assign them the roles of different numbers and have them sort themselves out on a sports field and/or actually hop along a number line.