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scott kirkpatrick's avatar

Two thoughts --

-- The matsutake community and its connections to the rest of the world is nicely captured as a truffle-hunter in the recent movie "Pig."

__ Something like the patchiness and limits to simplistic scaling is showing up experimentally in machine learning as researchers and entrepreneurs throw almost unlimited computing power and vastly overcomplete representations at apparently endless amounts of data. It works, but in patches, often not scaling fully up to the hoped-for world size and markets.

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Doug Turnbull's avatar

A potentially useful analogy to help structure this sort of thinking about the world would be modern understanding of evolution and the biological world. That framing captures change and adaptation without buying into an overall notion of progress, either at the global or local level. And it also matches with her argument that areas of disturbance are where change can happen.

And ecology also seems patchy, in her sense, with a focus on the local and particular, and a lack of scalability while still being embedded in larger ecosystems. And the more we learn, the more important cooperative and symbiotic relationships seem to be in the natural world.

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