Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast COMPLEXITY
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 1: What is Intelligence | 25 Sep 2024 | 00:43:28 | |
Guests:
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Podcast logo by Nicholas Graham Follow us on: More info: Complexity Explorer: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning Lecture: Artificial Intelligence SFI programs: Education Books:
Talks:
Papers & Articles:
| |||
| Trailer for The Nature of Intelligence | 19 Sep 2024 | 00:03:25 | |
Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence?
In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities of human intelligence, how it compares to that of other species, and where AI fits in. We'll dive into the relationship between language and thought, examine AI's limitations, and ask: Could machines ever truly be like us?
| |||
| Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology | 05 Apr 2023 | 01:22:19 | |
One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find. Thank you for listening. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned & Related Media: Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks Communities in Networks Social Structure of Facebook Networks Critical Truths About Power Laws The topology of data Complex networks with complex weights A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions Social network analysis for social neuroscientists Community structure in social and biological networks The information theory of individuality Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks Gregory Bateson (Wikipedia) Complexity Ep. 99 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. “Why Do We Sleep?” Complexity Ep. 4 - Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities Complexity Ep. 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity Ep. 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) Complexity Ep. 100 - Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
| |||
| W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy | 15 Jan 2020 | 01:00:49 | |
If the economy is better understood as an evolving system, an out-of-equilibrium ecology composed of agents that adapt to one another’s strategies, how does this change the way we think about our future? By drawing new analogies between technology and life, and studying how tools evolve by building on and recombining what has come before, what does this tell us about economics as a sub-process of our self-organizing biosphere? Over the last forty years, previously siloed scientific disciplines have come together with new data-driven methods to trace the outlines of a unifying economic theory, and allow us to design new human systems that anticipate the planet-wide disruptions of our rapidly accelerating age. New stories need to be articulated, ones that start earlier than human history, and in which societies work better when engineered in service to the laws of physics and biology they ultimately follow… This week’s guest is W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. In this second part of our two-episode conversation, we discuss technology as seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, and how he foresees the future of the economy as our labor market and financial systems are increasingly devoured by artificial intelligence. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a review at Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on social media. Thank you for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: “Where is technology taking the economy?” in McKinsey, 2017. The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered” by Gould & Eldredge. "A natural bias for simplicity" by Mark Buchanan in Nature Physics. "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" by John Maynard Keynes. | |||
| W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics | 08 Jan 2020 | 00:57:03 | |
From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studied in the present day. The notion that our economic systems are in equilibrium, that they’re made of actors making simple rational and self-interested decisions with perfect knowledge of society— these ideas prove about as useful in the Information Age as Newton’s laws of motion are to quantum physicists. A novel paradigm for economics, borrowing insights from ecology and evolutionary biology, started to emerge at SFI in the late 1980s — one that treats our markets and technologies as systems out of balance, serving metabolic forces, made of agents with imperfect information and acting on fundamental uncertainty. This new complexity economics uses new tools and data sets to shed light on puzzles standard economics couldn’t answer — like why the economy grows, how sudden and cascading crashes happen, why some companies and cities lock in permanent competitive advantages, and how technology evolves. And complexity economics offers insights back to biology, providing a new lens through which to understand the vastly intricate exchanges on which human life depends. This week’s guest is W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. In this first part of a two-episode conversation, we discuss the heady early days when complex systems science took on economics, and how biology provided a new paradigm for understanding our financial and technological systems. Tune in next week for part two... If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on social media. Thank you for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: For more information: “Where is technology taking the economy?” in McKinsey, 2017. The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered” by Gould & Eldredge. | |||
| Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks | 18 Dec 2019 | 01:05:47 | |
It may be a cliché, but it’s a timeless truth regardless: who you know matters. The connectedness of actors in a network tells us not just who wields the power in societies and markets, but also how new information spreads through a community and how resilient economic systems are to major shocks. One of the pillars of a complex systems understanding is the network science that reveals how structural differences lead to (or help counter) inequality and why a good idea alone can’t change the world. As human beings, who we are is shaped by those around us — not just our relationships to them but their relationships to one another. And the topology of human networks governs everything from the diffusion of fake news to cascading bank failures to the popularity of social influencers and their habits to the potency of economic interventions. To learn about your place amidst the networks of your life is to awaken to the hidden seams of human culture and the flows of energy that organize our world. This week’s guest is SFI External Professor Matthew O. Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and senior fellow of CIFAR, also a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In this episode, we discuss key insights from his book, The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors. For transcripts, show notes, research links, and more, please visit complexity.simplecast.com. And note that we’re taking a short break over the winter holiday. COMPLEXITY will be back with new episodes in January 2020. If you enjoy this show, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a review at Apple Podcasts, or by telling your friends on social media…after this episode’s discussion, we know you’ll understand how crucial this can be. Thank you for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Matthew Jackson’s Stanford Homepage. WSJ reviews The Human Network. Jackson’s Coursera MOOCs on Game Theory I, Game Theory II, and Social & Economic Networks. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Ray Monk on The Lives of Extraordinary Individuals: Wittgenstein, Russell, Oppenheimer | 11 Dec 2019 | 00:50:13 | |
In this show’s first episode, David Krakauer explained how art and science live along an axis of explanatory depth: science strives to find the simplest adequate abstractions to explain the world we observe, where art’s devotion is to the incompressible — the one-offs that resist abstraction and attempts to write a unifying framework. Between the random and the regular, amidst the ligaments that bind our scientific and artistic inquiries, we find a huge swath of the world that we struggle to articulate in formal quantitative terms, but that rewards our curiosity and offers us profound insights regardless. Here lives the open question of what we can learn from history — specifically, the histories of other people’s lives. Why do we love biographies? What can the stories of the lives of others teach us about both situational and common truths of being? This is a different kind of episode and conversation, one living at the intersection of philosophy and history and science… This week’s episode features guest interviewer, SFI President David Krakauer, in conversation with philosopher and biographer Ray Monk. Monk teaches at the University of Southhampton and was SFI’s 2017 Miller Scholar, a position that he earned for his biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and J. Robert Oppenheimer — three mavericks whose legacies are lessons for contemporary leaders. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on social media. Thank you for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Ray Monk’s SFI Miller Scholar Profile Page. Ray Monk on Hidden Forces Podcast. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation | 04 Dec 2019 | 01:06:12 | |
What is the difference between 100 kilograms of human being and 100 kilograms of algae? One answer to this question is the veins and arteries that carry nutrients throughout the human body, allowing for the intricate coordination needed in a complex organism. Energy requirements determine how the evolutionary process settles on the body plans appropriate to an environment — one way to tell the story of life’s major innovations is in terms of how a living system solves the problems of increasing body size with internal transport networks and more extensive regulation. And the same is true in our invented information systems, every bit as subject to the laws of physics as we are. Computers, just like living tissue, seek effective tradeoffs between their scale and energy efficiency. A physics of metabolic scaling — one that finds deep commonalities and crucial differences between ant hives and robot swarms, between the physiology of elephants and server farms — can help explain some of the biggest puzzles of the fossil record and sketch out the likely future evolution of technology. It is already revolutionizing how we understand search algorithms and the genius of eusocial organisms. And just maybe, it can also help us solve the challenge of sustainability for planetary culture. This week’s guest is Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the University of New Mexico, and Principal Investigator for the NASA Swarmathon. In this episode, we talk about her highly interdisciplinary work on metabolic scaling in biology and computer information-processing, and how complex systems made and born alike have found ingenious ways to balance the demands of growth and maintenance — with implications for space exploration, economics, computer chip design, and more. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on social media. Thank you for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Melanie’s UNM Webpage & full list of publications. “Beyond pheromones: evolving error-tolerant, flexible, and scalable ant-inspired robot swarms” by Joshua Hecker & Melanie Moses. “Energy and time determine scaling in biological and computer designs” by Moses, et al. “Shifts in metabolic scaling, production, and efficiency across major evolutionary transitions of life” by DeLong, Moses, et al. “Distributed adaptive search in T cells: lessons from ants” by Melanie Moses, et al. “Curvature in metabolic scaling” by Kolokotrones, et al. The NASA Swarmathon. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making | 27 Nov 2019 | 01:19:23 | |
We live in a world so complicated and immense it challenges our comparably simple minds to even know which information we should use to make decisions. The human brain seems tuned to follow simple rules, and those rules change depending on the people we can turn to for support: when we decide to follow the majority or place our trust in experts, for example, depends on the networks in which we’re embedded. Consequently, much of learning and decision-making has as much or more to do with social implications as it has to do with an objective world of fact…and this has major consequences for the ways in which we come together to solve complex problems. Whether in governance, science, or private life, the strategies we lean on — mostly unconsciously — determine whether we form wise, effective groups, or whether our collective process gets jammed up with autocrats or bureaucrats. Sometimes the crowd is smarter than the individual, and sometimes not, and figuring out which strategies are better requires a nuanced look at how we make decisions with each other, and how information flows through human networks. Given the scale and intensity of modern life, the science of our social lives takes on profound importance. This week’s guest is SFI Professor & Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics Mirta Galesic, External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In this episode we talk about her research into how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce complex social phenomena…and how we can understand and cope with the uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach a wider audience by leaving a five-star review at Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening! Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Mirta’s Website. Visit Mirta’s Google Scholar Page for links to all the papers we discuss. Mirta’s 2015 talk at SFI: “How interaction of mind and environment shapes social judgments.” Digital Transformation documentary about Mirta and her work. Michelle Girvan’s SFI Community Lecture on reservoir computing. Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History | 20 Nov 2019 | 01:04:17 | |
It’s easy to take modern Earth for granted — our breathable atmosphere, the delicately balanced ecosystems we depend on — but this world is nothing like the planet on which life first found its foothold. In fact it may be more appropriate to think of life in terms of verbs than nouns, of processes instead of finished products. This is the evolutionary turn that science started taking in the 19th Century…but only in the last few decades has biology begun to see this planet’s soil, air, and oceans as the work-in-progress of our biosphere. The story of our planet can’t be adequately told without some understanding of how life itself depends on opportunities that life creates, based on the energy and mineral resources made as byproducts of our metabolisms. A new, revelatory narrative of the last 3.8 billion years refigures living systems in terms of thermodynamic flows and the ever-growing range of possibilities created by our ever-more-complex ecologies. And in the telling, this new history sheds light on some of the biggest puzzles of the fossil record: why complex animals took so long to appear, why humans are the way we are, and maybe even why the sky is blue. This week’s guest is evolutionary biologist and science journalist Olivia Judson, an honorary research fellow at The Imperial College of London who received her PhD from the University of Oxford and whose writing has appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, The Guardian, and National Geographic. She is also the author of the internationally best-selling popular science book, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. In this episode, we discuss her work on major energy transitions in evolution (the subject of her next book), and what we can learn by studying the intimate dance of biology and geology over the last 4 billion years. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Olivia’s Website. “The energy expansions of evolution” in Nature. The Atlantic on Olivia’s essay. Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice | 13 Nov 2019 | 00:59:39 | |
Whether or not you think you hold them, stereotypes shape the lives of everyone on Earth. As human beings, we lack the ability to judge each situation as unique and different…and how we group novel experiences by our past conditioning, as helpful as it often is, creates extraordinary complications in society. As modern life exposes us to an increasing number of encounters with the other in which we do not have time to form accurate models of someone or some place’s true identity, we find ourselves in a downward spiral of self-reinforcing biases — transforming how we practice law enforcement, justice, and life online. Our polarized, irrational world calls for an intense look at what it will take to humanize each other — at traffic stops, in court, on social media, and anywhere our doubt about an unfamiliar face can lead to tragic consequences. This week’s guest is Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode, we discuss how biases in our attention and cognition lead to unfair outcomes on the streets and on the Web, and where we can look for hope in countervailing strategies. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice by Brendan O’Flaherty & Rajiv Sethi (Harvard University Press). Albert Kao & Iain Couzin on collective intelligence and modular societies. “We can’t disagree forever” (Geanakopolos & Polemarchakis). Raissa D’Souza on the Collapse of Networks. Geoffrey West on scaling laws and cities. Music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Jennifer Dunne on Reconstructing Ancient Food Webs | 06 Nov 2019 | 00:48:05 | |
Looking back through time, the fossil record shows a remarkable diversity of forms, creatures unfamiliar to today’s Earth, suggesting ecosystems alien enough to challenge any sense of continuity. But reconstructed trophic networks — maps of who’s eating whom — reveal a hidden order that has been conserved since the first complex animals of half a billion years ago. These network models offer scientists an armature on which to hang new unifying theories of ecology, a way to answer questions about how energy moves through living systems, how evolution keeps producing creatures to refill specific niches, how mass extinctions happen, what minimal viable ecosystems are and why. Untangling this deep structure of food webs may also shed light on technology and economics, and guide interventions to ensure sustainability in agriculture, conservation efforts, even venture capital investment. This week’s guest is Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science and Fellow at the Ecological Society of America. Dunne got her PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, joined SFI’s faculty in 2007, and sits on the advisory board for Nautilus Magazine. In this second half of a two-part conversation, we discuss her work on reconstructing ancient food webs, and the implications of this research for our understanding of ecologies, extinctions, sustainability, and technological innovation. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Jennifer Dunne’s Website. Related Reading: Modern Lessons from Ancient Food Webs Parasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and Complexity The roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food webs A primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchers Quanta Magazine features Dunne on humans in food webs. Jennifer on This Week in Science at InterPlanetary Festival 2019. Learn more about The ArchaeoEcology Project. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Jennifer Dunne on Food Webs & ArchaeoEcology | 30 Oct 2019 | 00:46:24 | |
For as long as humans have erected walls around our cities, we’ve considered culture separate from the encircling wilderness. This difference came to be expressed in our “man vs. nature” narratives, beliefs in our dominion over the nonhuman world, and lately even the assertion that the Earth would be better off without us. Ecology research has strangely almost never included humans in the picture. And yet Homo sapiens is a phenomenon of nature, woven into food webs, demonstrating the same principles at work as any other creature on this planet. New research into trophic networks — who’s eating whom — has bridged ecology and archaeology to shed light on the many ways that human beings have participated as key members of ecosystems round the globe. The emerging portrait of our place in nature offers us the opportunity to tell new stories of the hairless ape and what we’re doing here — and just in time, perhaps, to help reshape our attitudes toward conservation and development, and what we dare to hope for in the years to come. This week’s guest is Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science and Fellow at the Ecological Society of America. Dunne got her PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, joined SFI’s faculty in 2007, and sits on the advisory board for Nautilus Magazine. In the first half of a two-part conversation, we discuss her work on food and use webs and the ArchaeoEcology Project working group at SFI, where she and her collaborators are transforming how we think of human history. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Jennifer Dunne’s Website. The New York Times features Dunne’s collaborator, SFI Postdoc Stefani Crabtree and her work on the Martu people of Australia. Learn more about The ArchaeoEcology Project. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self | 24 Mar 2023 | 01:06:49 | |
For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics…maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence. If you value our research and communication efforts, Please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes…and thank you for listening! Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Related Reading & Listening: Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales “Nature” (1844) Finnegans Wake InterPlanetary Voyager (Interactive Golden Record Liner Notes) Blue Planet (BBC) | |||
| Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities | 23 Oct 2019 | 00:50:17 | |
If you’re a human in this century, the odds are overwhelming that you are a city-dweller. These hubs of human cultural activity exert a powerful allure – and most people understand that this appeal is due to some deep link between the density, pace, wealth, and opportunity of cities. But what is a city, really? And why have the vast majority of human beings migrated to these intense and often difficult locations? Cities breed not just ideas but also crime, disease, and inequality. We live amidst a shift in what a normal human life looks and feels like, akin to the transition from our lives as nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers — only this time, it is happening before our eyes. How can we cultivate the best that cities offer and minimize the predicaments they pose? A powerful new science of the city has emerged in just the last few years, connecting the metropolis through physics to the properties that govern animal metabolisms, ecological diversity, and economics. This week’s guest is Luis Bettencourt, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. We spoke while he was visiting Santa Fe to lead SFI’s Global Sustainability Summer School to talk about what makes a city such a fertile zone for innovation of all kinds, and how to help ensure the future of the city is one human beings want to live in. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Visit The Mansueto Institute's Website. Watch a short video on Bettencourt’s work to eliminate slums. Here are the three papers we discussed in this episode: "Toward cities without slums: Topology and the spatial evolution of neighborhoods" in Science Advances. "The Origins of Scaling in Cities" in Science. “Towards a statistical mechanics of cities” in Science Advances. Learn more about SFI's Global Sustainability Summer School. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales | 16 Oct 2019 | 00:39:23 | |
If complex systems science had a mascot, it might be the murmuration. These enormous flocks of starlings darken skies across the northern hemisphere, performing intricate airborne maneuvers with no central leadership or plan. Each bird behaves according to a simple set of rules about how closely it tracks neighbors, resulting in one of the world’s most awesome natural spectacles. This notion of self-organizing flocks of relatively simple agents has inspired a new paradigm of engineering, building simple, flexible, adaptive swarms that stand to revolutionize the way we practice medicine, map ecosystems, and extend our public infrastructure. We’re living at the dawn of the age of the robot swarm – and these metal murmurations help us create communications networks, fight cancer, and evolve to solve new problems for an age that challenges the isolated strategies of individuals. This week’s guest is Sabine Hauert, Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol and President/Co-founder of robohub.org, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the robotics community to the world. In this episode, we talk about how swarms have changed the way we think about intelligence, and how we build technologies for everything from drug delivery to home construction. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Hauert Lab Website. RoboHub Website. NanoDoc Website. Sabine at Nature on the ethics of artificial intelligence. Sabine's 2019 SFI Community Lecture. Follow us on social media: | |||
| The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019 | 09 Oct 2019 | 00:55:37 | |
A few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, upsetting centuries of certainty about the history of life, he wrote a now-famous letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, British botanist and advocate of evolutionary theory. "But if (and oh what a big if),” Darwin’s letter reads, “we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.” That was 1871. Nearly 150 years hence, humankind has worked out the details of the evolutionary process to exquisite depth and resolution, but abiogenesis - the origins of life - remains one of the greatest mysteries of our world. Fierce theoretical debates rage on between those who think life got its start in deep sea hydrothermal vents and those who think it started in “some warm little pond” – not to mention more heterodox hypotheses. The consequences are enormous – shaping plans for interplanetary exploration, changing our approach to medicine, and maybe foremost, settling the existential question of what life is in the first place. This week’s episode was recorded live at the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Festival in June 2019. The panel features evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, President of SFI; biochemist Sarah Maurer, Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University; and SFI Professor Chris Kempes, who works on biological scaling laws. In this discussion, we present a spectrum of perspectives on the origins of life debate, and speak to the importance of presenting this unsettled science as itself an evolutionary object... Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations. Sarah Maurer's Website. Chris Kempes's Website. InterPlanetary Festival's Website. Complexity Explorer's Origins of Life Online Course. Follow us on social media: | |||
| David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science | 09 Oct 2019 | 00:46:32 | |
For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies. So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control. At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for. This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience. Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations. Follow us on social media: | |||
| Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems | 09 Mar 2023 | 01:06:41 | |
How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this episode we speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. For HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes. Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information. There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th. Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist. You can also join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned & Related Links: Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter. His SFI Seminars to date: W. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite Variety Hyperobjects How can we think the complex? The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy Complexity and Philosophy Heterogeneity extends criticality When Can we Call a System Self-organizing? Temporal, Structural, and Functional Heterogeneities Extend Criticality and Antifragility in Random Boolean Networks When slower is faster Self-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systems Dynamics of ranking Self-Organizing Traffic Lights Dynamic competition and resource partitioning during the early life of two widespread, abundant and ecologically similar fishes Towards a general theory of balance A Calculus for Self-Reference On Some Mental Effects of The Earthquake Self-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systems Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility Does Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics? | |||
| Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick | 24 Feb 2023 | 01:00:21 | |
And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney. Follow us on social media: (SOME) Mentioned & Related Links: David Krakauer James Gleick Ted Chiang David Wolpert | |||
| Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06) | 09 Feb 2023 | 01:12:36 | |
There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.) Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned & Related Links: Transparency Is Surveillance The Seductions of Clarity The Natural Selection of Bad Science Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving The Division of Cognitive Labor The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciences On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I. Seeing Like A State Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative In The Country of The Blind 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) 91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04) 97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05) | |||
| Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds | 25 Jan 2023 | 01:20:46 | |
This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there? In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links? Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known... Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School. OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Thank you for listening… EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB. Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned & Related Links: Curious Minds: The Power of Connection by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022) Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks by Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett Murray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video] The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner Complexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity by Perry Zurn Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity by David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett Complexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. Smith Complexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication Complexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists by Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. Bassett Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle Hazard The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Dirk Brockmann’s interactive explorables Nicky Case’s interactive explorables LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models by Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia Jitsev Complexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality Dani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast | |||
| Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. | 11 Jan 2023 | 01:08:19 | |
Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage- wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School. OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned & Related Links: Alison Gopnik’s Google Scholar page Explanation as Orgasm Twitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child development Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation Models of Human Scientific Discovery Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children Our Favorite New Things Are the Old Ones An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 15: R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative Complexity 97: Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society Derek Thompson at The Atlantic on the forces slowing innovation at scale (citing Chu & Evans) | |||
| Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere | 22 Dec 2022 | 01:13:09 | |
What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced & Related Works Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space John Hopfield (re: biology as computation) Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis Complexity 93 - Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life Simon Conway Morris (re: macroevolutionary trends) Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Will Ratcliff (re: yeasts and emergent multi-cellularity) Synthetic criticality in cellular brains Tom Ray (re: artificial life) Complexity and fragility in ecological networks Ecological Networks and Their Fragility The small world of human language Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution Complexity 66 - Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry Chris Langton (re: criticality) Jim Crutchfield (re: the edge of chaos) Per Bak (re: self-organized criticality) Complexity 10 - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation Complexity 3 - Sabine Hauert on Swarming Across Scales Niles Eldredge (re: punctuated equilibria) Terraforming the biosphere: can bioengineering save us? Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology Rachel Armstrong (re: synthetic biology for CO2 fixing in concrete) Stewardship of global collective behavior Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White | |||
| Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05) | 10 Dec 2022 | 01:17:55 | |
In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this century looks more like a bouquet of complementary approaches. This pluralistic thinking hearkens back to the work of 19th century psychologist William James and looks forward into the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches that cultivate diversity in team-building, governance, and ecological systems. Context-dependent theory and practice calls for choirs of voices…so how do we encourage this? New systems must emerge to handle the complexity of digital society…what might they look like? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we dip back into our sub-series on SFI’s Emergent Political Economies research theme with a trialogue featuring Microsoft Research Lead Glen Weyl (founder of RadicalXChange and founder-chair of The Plurality Institute), and SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore (author of over 150 papers at the intersection of physics and computer science). In our conversation we discuss the case for a radically pluralistic approach, explore the links between plurality and quantum mechanics, and outline potential technological solutions to the “sense-making” problems of the 21st century. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced & Related Works Why I Am A Pluralist Reflecting on A Possible Quadratic Wormhole between Quantum Mechanics and Plurality Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods Equality of Power and Fair Public Decision-making Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution Toward a Connected Society The role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spread The Generals’ Scuttlebutt: Byzantine-Resilient Gossip Protocols Effective Resistance for Pandemics: Mobility Network Sparsification for High-Fidelity Epidemic Simulation How Accurate are Rebuttable Presumptions of Pretrial Dangerousness? A Natural Experiment from New Mexico The Uncertainty Principle: In an age of profound disagreements, mathematics shows us how to pursue truth together On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The World [Twitter thread on chess] Letter from Birmingham Jail The End of History and The Last Man Enabling the Individual: Simmel, Dewey and “The Need for a Philosophy of Education” Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendship What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? Allison Duettman (re: existential hope) Evan Miyazono (re: Protocol Labs research) Intangible Capital (“an open access scientific journal that publishes theoretical or empirical peer-reviewed articles, which contribute to advance the understanding of phenomena related with all aspects of management and organizational behavior, approached from the perspectives of intellectual capital, strategic management, human resource management, applied psychology, education, IT, supply chain management, accounting…”) Polis (“a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning”) Related Complexity Podcast Episodes 7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice 51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) 91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04) | |||
| John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness | 23 Nov 2022 | 00:49:09 | |
What makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience? How are our gifts of simulation and imagination different from those of other animals? And what, if anything, can we know of the “curiosity” of even larger systems in which we’re embedded — the social superorganisms, ecosystems, technospheres within which we exist like neurons in the brain? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we conclude a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins. In this episode, we talk about the nature of curiosity and learning, and whether the difference between the cognitive capacities and inner lifeworld of humans and other animals constitutes a matter of degree or one of kind… Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com . If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Please also note that we are now accepting applications for an open postdoc fellowship, next summer’s undergraduate research program, and the next cohort of Complexity Explorer’s course in the digital humanities. We welcome your submissions! Lastly, for more from John Krakauer, check out our new six-minute time-lapse of notes from the 2022 InterPlanetary Festival panel discussions on intelligence and the limits to human performance in space… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced in this episode: Prospective Learning: Back to the Future The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren The Intelligent Life of the City Raccoon The maintenance of vocal learning by gene-culture interaction: the cultural trap hypothesis Mindscape Podcast 87 - Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy The Apportionment of Human Diversity From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution I Am a Strange Loop Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism Related Episodes: Complexity 9 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity 21 - Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know Complexity 52 - Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm Complexity 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence Complexity 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity 95 - John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain | |||
| Physics of Life, Ep 6: Multiple worlds, containing multitudes | 10 Apr 2024 | 00:40:48 | |
Guests:
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera Society Follow us on: More info: Apply for the 2024 Complexity Global School at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia SFI programs: Education
Videos:
Papers & Articles:
| |||
| John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain | 11 Nov 2022 | 00:51:05 | |
The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing… Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about how learning is inherently a future-focused exercise, and what that means for education. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced in this episode: Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias Two Views of the Cognitive Brain On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology Former SFI Fellow David Kinney, epistemologist (re: disciplines as levels of explanatory granularity) Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World Carl Cranor, moral philosopher (re: causation) The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science Brain Inspired Podcast W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World | |||
| David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication | 21 Oct 2022 | 01:06:29 | |
Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed, error, and energy (among other things) promises insights far deeper than merely whether we can keep making faster internet devices. Strap in (and consider slowing down) for a broad and deep discussion on the bounds within which our entire universe must play… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI Professor David Wolpert and MIT Physics PhD student Farita Tasnim, who have worked together over the last year on pioneering research into the nonlinear dynamics of communication channels. In this episode, we explore the history and ongoing evolution of information theory and coding theory, what the field of stochastic thermodynamics has to do with limits to human knowledge, and the role of noise in collective intelligence. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including a handful of open postdoctoral fellowships — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, this weekend — October 22nd & 23rd — is the return of our InterPlanetary Festival! Join our YouTube livestream for two full days of panel discussions, keynotes, and bleeding edge multimedia performances focusing space exploration through the lens of complex systems science. The fun begins at 11 A.M. Mountain Time on Saturday and ends 6 P.M. Mountain Time on Sunday. Everything will be recorded and archived at the stream link in case you can’t tune in for the live event. Learn more at interplanetaryfest.org… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced in this episode: Nonlinear thermodynamics of communication channels Heterogeneity and Efficiency in the Brain Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes Stochastic Mathematical Systems Twenty-five years of nanoscale thermodynamics Ten Questions about The Hard Limits of Human Intelligence What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex, but both costs are needed to predict synapse number An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence When Slower Is Faster The stochastic thermodynamics of computation Elements of Information Theory, Second Edition (textbook) Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach (textbook) An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications (textbook) | |||
| Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics | 01 Oct 2022 | 01:09:45 | |
What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into the weeds and see if we can find a continuity between biology and physics. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, about her research to produce synthetic minimal cells that are not technically alive but can perform myriad biological processes. Along the way the distant past and future meet. Can we build life? Or can we grow machines? Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced in this episode: Nonenzymatic Template-Directed RNA Synthesis Inside Model Protocells Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthetic minimal cells Competition between model protocells driven by an encapsulated catalyst Synthetic cells in biomedical applications Parasites, infections and inoculation in synthetic minimal cells Build-a-Cell: Engineering a Synthetic Cell Community The Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life: Monolith Monologues Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life Terraforming the Biosphere by Ricard Solé Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) | |||
| Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society | 21 Sep 2022 | 00:57:24 | |
One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility of going even deeper. What fundamental insights — and what sounds — emerge by bringing physicists, composers, social scientists, data artists, and biologists together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we sit with two of SFI’s External Professors — Miguel Fuentes at the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis and the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso, and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli at the University of North Texas — for a discussion that roams from their working group on the complexity of music, to fundamental questions about the nature of emergence, to how we might bring all of these ideas together to think about social transformation as a kind of music in its own right. A show that spend so much time exploring sense and nonsense would hardly be complete without technical errors, so please accept our apologies for losing some of Miguel’s backstory to a recording glitch. For this reason, be extra sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Referenced in this episode: An ‘integrated mess of music lovers in science’ Expanding our understanding of musical complexity Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces Tonal harmony and the topology of dynamical score networks a computer-aided data-driven composition environment for the sonification and dramatization of scientific data streams Machines that listen: towards a machine listening model based on perceptual descriptors Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library? Complexity and the Emergence of Physical Properties The Structure of Online Information Behind Social Crises 88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines 86 - Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics 36 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2) 27 - COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2) Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science SFI’s Operating Principles | |||
| Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04) | 02 Sep 2022 | 01:11:13 | |
As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wicked problem help us walk the system back into a healthy balance? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity we speak with Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University about how self-serving economic actors intervene in regulation to stifle innovation, increase inequality, and contribute to the conditions in which violence can flourish. Referencing Teles’ aisle-crossing book The Captured Economy with co-author Brink Lindsey, we link the problem of regulatory capture in its myriad forms to Sethi’s work on race, inequality, and crime, which we discussed in Episode 7 (Rajiv Sethi on Crime, Stereotypes, and The Pursuit of Justice). At the interface between the left and right, public and private, our guests shed light on the forces that divide — and may help reunite — the USA and other modern nations. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: More on the Emergent Political Economies SFI Research Theme: SFI launches new research theme on emergent political economies Complexity 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice Complexity 19 - David B. Kinney on the Philosophy of Science Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA Crime and Punishment in a Divided Society Rajiv Sethi discusses gun violence, critical race theory, and bezzles The Gun Deal by Rajiv Sethi (Substack) Rajiv Sethi reviews Boldrin/Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey on EconTalk with Russ Roberts Is Nothing Sacred? Rajiv Sethi on Salman Rushdie (Substack) Rajiv Sethi with Bari Weiss and David French on gun violence Rajiv Sethi on James Tobin’s Hirsch Lecture on Functional Inefficiency in Finance (Substack) | |||
| Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome | 19 Aug 2022 | 01:22:35 | |
Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implicates us in the evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely ineffable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reins of our economies and cultures. This is, in some sense, hardly new: since humankind first started writing down our memories to pass them down through time, we have participated in the “dataome” — a structure and a process that transcends, and transforms, our individuality. Fast-forward to the modern era, when the rapidly-evolving aggregation of all human knowledge tips the scales in favor of the dataome’s emergent agency and its demands on us… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, about his book, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, and LIfe’s Unending Algorithm. In this episode, we talk about the interplay of information, energy, and matter; the nature of the dataome and its relationship to humans and our artifacts; the past and future evolution of the biosphere and technosphere; the role of lies in the emergent informational metabolisms of the Internet; and what this psychoactive frame suggests about the search for hypothetical intelligences we may yet find in outer space. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned and related resources: Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings We Are The Aliens We Are Our Data, Our Data Are Us Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? Where Do Minds Belong? Autopoiesis (Wikipedia) The physical limits of communication The Extended Phenotype “Time Binding” (c/o Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics) (Wikipedia) The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone Argument-making in the wild Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants Complexity 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1) The Collapse of Networks Jevons Paradox (Wikipedia) What Technology Wants The Glass Cage The evolution of language Complexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1) Complexity 87 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence Simulation hypothesis (Wikipedia) Complexity 88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines Building a dinosaur from a chicken Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System The evolution of lying in well-mixed populations | |||
| Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace | 03 Aug 2022 | 00:52:50 | |
Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think about bodies as hypotheses about the stable features of their ancestral environments, what do the features of our unusual physiology say about what humans ARE, where we come from, the details of our origin story as a profoundly successful species? And what can we learn by telescoping that story forward to explain some of the most persistent puzzles and paradoxes about our health, the way we age, our need for physical exercise, and our nearly ubiquitous aversion to habits that are good for us? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week, we sprint into the paleoanthropology, biomechanics, and physiology of exercise with Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, author of several books including Exercised, The Story of the Human Body, and The Evolution of the Human Head. In our rapid-fire discussion we explore how millions of years as hunter-gatherers equipped hominids with a unique package of adaptations for endurance running, why exercise is so good for us but so generally undesirable, and how physical activity in old age helped shape us into the strongly intergenerational social apes we are today. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our 2023 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned papers and other resources: SFI Colloquium & Twitter thread on Daniel Lieberman’s “Active Grandparent Hypothesis” The evolution of human fatigue resistance "What beer and running taught me about the scientific process" Endurance running and the evolution of Homo SFI Professor David Wolpert & the thermodynamics of computation Complexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White 3100: Run and Become (Documentary Film) Why run unless something is chasing you? Hate Working Out? Blame Evolution The Aging of Wolff’s “Law”: Ontogeny and Responses to Mechanical Loading in Cortical Bone Effects of footwear cushioning on leg and longitudinal arch stiffness during running | |||
| Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines | 18 Jul 2022 | 01:14:58 | |
Ask any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect” where tiny changes lead to large results, but the inverse also works: complex organisms buffer their development against adverse mutations so that tiny changes cannot redirect the growth of limbs and other organs. It takes a lot to shake the pattern of five fingers on a hand, or five toes on a paw. This is robustness: how much change can something soak up before it transforms? The question leads us into a secret garden of cryptic variation: mutations waiting for their moment, pieces sitting in place that might suddenly and radically metamorphose in changing circumstances. It’s why evolution stutters, halts and leaps, and maybe it can help us think about society and mind in ways that deepen comprehension of the tangled and surprising forces playing out at all scales, in society and in ecology. For quests as deep as these, we need to wear new lenses and train inquiries stereoscopically. How can and do the sciences and the humanities inform each other as we keep evolving — not just biologically, but culturally? Can we triangulate the truth by holding theories side by side and looking through them all together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week, we speak with Aviv Bergman (Google Scholar), External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the new Albert Einstein Institute for Advanced Study in the Life Sciences. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that our applications for SFI postdoctoral fellowships open on August 1st! Tell a friend. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned Papers: Waddington’s canalization revisited: Developmental stability and evolution Evolutionary capacitance as a general feature of complex gene networks Phenotypic Pliancy and the Breakdown of Epigenetic Polycomb Mechanisms Mammalian Endothermy Optimally Restricts Fungi and Metabolic Costs How on Earth can Aliens Survive? Concept and Case Study
Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3) Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making What Determines The Complexity of Writing Systems? Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer? Explosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths Armchair Science The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn "Ancestral forms are very different, but as you increase regulatory interactions is decreasing the space of the possible. You can think of bureaucracy..." | |||
| Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence | 02 Jul 2022 | 01:22:23 | |
What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to time. Life appears to hinge on information transfer — but, again, what do we mean by “information,” and what it is relationship to energy and matter? If humankind can’t settle fundamental issues with these theoretical investigations, we might be missing other kinds of life (and mind) — not just in outer space, but here on Earth, right beneath our noses. But new models that suggest a vastly wider definition of life offer hope that we might — soon! — not only learn to recognize the biospheres and technospheres of other living worlds, but notice other “aliens” at home, and even find our place amidst a living cosmos. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show, we speak with SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Twitter, Google Scholar), Deputy Director of The Beyond Center at ASU, where she acts as Associate Professor in half a dozen different programs. In this conversation, we discuss her pioneering research in the origins of life and the profound and diverse implications of Assembly Theory — a new kind of physics she’s developing with chemist Leroy Cronin and a team of SFI and NASA scholars. Sara likes to speculate out loud in public conversation, so strap in for an unusually enthusiastic, animated, and free-roaming conversation at the very bleeding edge of science. And be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentioned Papers: Intelligence as a planetary scale process The Algorithmic Origins of Life Beyond prebiotic chemistry: What dynamic network properties allow the emergence of life? Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies the Emergence of Selection and Evolution Quantum Non-Barking Dogs The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life Other Related Videos & Writing: SFI Seminar - Why Black Holes Eat Information Major Transitions in Planetary Evolution 2022 Community Lecture: “Recognizing The Alien in Us” Sara Walker and Lee Cronin: The Alien Debate If Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do It The Ministry for The Future Re: Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment On the SFI “Exploring Life’s Origins” Research Project Complexity Explorer’s Origins of Life Free Open Online Course Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory Simon Saunders, Philosopher of Physics at Oxford Related SFI Podcast Episodes: Complexity 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History Complexity 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution Complexity 41 - Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature Detection Complexity 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns & Verbs (Part 1) Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling Alien Crash Site 015 - Cole Mathis Alien Crash Site 019 - Heather Graham | |||
| Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality | 18 Jun 2022 | 01:25:16 | |
Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of inquiry. And, curiously, Western composition has evolved over several hundred years in much the same way economies and agents in long-running simulations have: becoming measurably more complex; encoding more and more environmental structure. (But then, sometimes collapses happen, and everything gets simpler.) Music theorists, like the alchemists that came before them, are engaged in a centuries-long project of deciphering the invisible geometry of these relationships. What is the hidden grammar that connects The Beatles to Johann Sebastian Bach — and how similar is it to the hidden order disclosed by complex systems science? In other words, what makes for “good” music, and what does it have to do with the coherence of the natural world? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show, we speak with mathematician and composer Dmitri Tymozcko at Princeton University, whose work provides a new rigor to the study of the Western canon and illuminates “the shape of music” — a hyperspatial object from which all works of baroque, classical, romantic, modern, jazz, and pop are all low-dimensional projections. In the first conversation for this podcast with MIDI keyboard accompaniment, we follow upon Gottfried Leibniz’s assertion that music is “the unconscious exercise of our mathematical powers.” We explore how melodies and harmonies move through mathematical space in ways quite like the metamorphoses of living systems as they traverse evolutionary fitness landscapes. We examine the application of information theory to chord categorization and functional harmony. And we ask about the nature of randomness, the roles of parsimony and consilience in both art and life. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentions and additional resources: All of Tymoczko’s writings mentioned in this conversation can be found on his Princeton.edu website You can explore his interactive music software at MadMusicalScience.com The Geometry of Musical Chords An Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmony This Mathematical Song of the Emotions The Sound of Philosophy Select Tymoczko Video Lectures: On the 2020 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group (with a link to the entire video playlist of public presentations). On the 2022 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics Institute at SFI Short explainer animation on SFI Professor Sidney Redner’s work on “Sleeping Beauties of Science” The evolution of syntactic communication The Majesty of Music and Math (PBS special with SFI’s Cris Moore) The physical limits of communication Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism Will brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science? Scaling, Mirror Symmetries and Musical Consonances Among the Distances of the Planets of the Solar System “The reward system for people who do a really wonderful job of extracting knowledge and understanding and wisdom…is skewed in the wrong way. If left to the so-called free market, it’s mainly skewed toward entertainment or something that’s narrowly utilitarian for some business firm or set of business firms.” Related Episodes: Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems | |||
| Physics of Life, Ep 5: How human history shapes scientific inquiry | 27 Mar 2024 | 00:33:53 | |
Guests:
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifishmusic, Trundlefly, Greenvwbeetle, Miksmusic, Brewlabboffin Follow us on: More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer:
Books:
Talks:
Papers & Articles:
| |||
| Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance | 04 Jun 2022 | 01:07:48 | |
We lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep the lights on: both have grown organically, piecemeal, in complex networks that nobody seems to fully understand. And yet, we must. Compared to life 150 years ago, we are all utterly dependent on the power grid, and learning how it operates — how tiny failures cause cascading crises, and how tense webs of collaborators make decisions on the way that electricity is priced and served — matters now more than ever. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack (Google Scholar page), Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics and International Affairs in EME and Director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. In this conversation we explore the arcane yet urgent systems that comprise the power grid and how it’s operated, reminding us that the mundane is ever a deep reservoir of questions. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentions and additional resources: Topological Models and Critical Slowing down: Two Approaches to Power System Blackout Risk Analysis Do topological models provide good information about electricity infrastructure vulnerability? Can capacity markets be designed by democracy? The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation The Energy Transition in New Mexico: Insights from a Santa Fe Institute Workshop EBF 483: Introduction to Electricity Markets What’s behind $15,000 electricity bills in Texas? RTOGov: Exploring Links Between Market Decision-Making Processes and Outcomes Ensuring Consideration of the Public Interest in the Governance and Accountability of Regional Transmission Organizations Electricity governance and the Western energy imbalance market in the United States: The necessity of interorganizational collaboration Untangling the Wires in Electricity Market Planning, with Kate Konschnik Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society Early-warning signals for critical transitions Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith Image Credit: Paul Hines | |||
| Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) | 21 May 2022 | 01:20:49 | |
As our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map the landscape of capability across scales? And what insights emerge by layering networks of people, firms, states, markets, regions? We’re all riding a bucking horse; what questions can we ask to make sure that we can stay in the saddle? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with two SFI External Professors helping to rethink political economy: newly-appointed Science Board Co-Chair Ricardo Hausmann (Website, Wikipedia, Twitter) is the Director of the Harvard Growth Lab and J. Doyne Farmer (Website, Wikipedia) is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. In this episode we zoom wide to try and find a way to garden all together, learning limits that can help inform discussion and decisions on the shape of things to come… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Heads up that our online education platform Complexity Explorer’s Origins of Life Course is still open for enrollment until June 1st! We hope to see you in there… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentions and additional resources: The new paradigm of economic complexity How production networks amplify economic growth Productive Ecosystems and the arrow of development Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare Historical effects of shocks on inequality: the great leveler revisited Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems Pitchfork Economics Complexity 15 - R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment Will a Large Complex System be Stable? Investigations The Collapse of Networks | |||
| Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02) | 06 May 2022 | 00:50:42 | |
In the digital era, data is practically the air we breathe. So why does everybody treat it like a product to be hoarded and sold at profit? How would our world change if Big Tech operated on assumptions and incentives more aligned with the needs of a healthy society? Are more data — or are bigger models — really better? As human beings scamper around like prehistoric mammals under the proverbial feet of the new enormous digital monopolies that have emerged due to the Web’s economies of scale, how might we tip the scales back to a world governed wisely by human judgment and networks of trust? Would Facebook and Twitter be more beneficial for society if they were public services like the BBC? And how do we settle on the social norms that help ensure the ethical deployment of A.I.? These and many other questions grow from the boundary-challenging developments of rapid innovation that define our century — a world in which the familiar dyads of state and market, public and private, individual and institutional are all called into question. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with two researchers helping to rethink political economy: SFI External Professor Eric Beinhocker is the Professor of Public Policy Practice at the University of Oxford, and founder and Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University’s Oxford Martin School. He is also the author of The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society. Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and co-director of the Bennett Institute, whose latest book — Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be— was published by Princeton University Press last fall. In the first episode of this subseries, we spoke with SFI President David Krakauer about how the study of political economy has changed over the last two hundred years due to the innovation of new mathematical and computational methods. In this episode, we examine how the technological milieu that empowered these changes has also transformed the subject of study itself: digital surveillance architecture, social media networks, big data, and (largely inadequate) attempts to formalize econometrics have all had a profound impact on modern life. In what ways do new institutions beget even newer institutions to address their unintended consequences? How should we think about the complex relationships between private and public agencies, and what status should we give the data they produce and consume? What is it going to take to restore the trust in one another necessary for society to remain coherent, and what are the most important measures to help economists and policymakers navigate the turbulence of our times into a more inclusive, prosperous, and sustainable world? Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced… If you value our research and communication efforts, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentions and additional resources: Toward a New Ontological Framework for the Economic Good Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium Socializing Data The Public Option Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership Pitchfork Economics The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves Geoffrey West on Complexity 35 Will A Large Complex System Be Stable? Blockchain: Trust Companies: Every Company Is at Risk of Being Disrupted by A Trusted Version of Itself The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative Recoupling Economic and Social Prosperity Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution Why we should have a public option version of Google and Facebook (response to Diane Coyle) Bryant Walker Smith on Complexity 79 “Premature optimization is the root of all evil." | |||
| David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) | 21 Apr 2022 | 00:52:57 | |
The world is unfair — but how much of that unfairness is inevitable, and how much is just contingency? After centuries of efforts to arrive at formal theories of history, society, and economics, most of us still believe and act on what amounts to myth. Our predecessors can’t be faulted for their lack of data, but in 2022 we have superior resources we’re only starting to appreciate and use. In honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring Emergent Political Economies, we dedicate this new sub-series of Complexity Podcast to conversations on money, power, governance, and justice. Subscribe for a new stream of dialogues and trialogues between SFI’s own diverse scholastic community and other acclaimed political economists, historians, and authors of speculative fiction. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this episode, we talk with SFI President David Krakauer about the goals of this research theme and what SFI brings to the table. We discuss the legacy of long-standing challenges to quantitative history and mathematical economics, how SFI thinks differently about these topics, and a brief outline of the major angles we’ll explore in this sub-series over the next year-plus — including the roles of dimension, causality, algorithms, scaling, innovation, emergence, and more. Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Diane Coyle, Eric Beinhocker, Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Mentions and additional resources: Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates Conflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structures The Star Gazer and the Flesh Eater: Elements of a Theory of Metahistory The Cultural Evolution of National Constitutions Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West (Complexity Podcast) The Dawn of Everything Mitch Waldrop speaks on the history of SFI (Twitter excerpts) The Hedgehog and the Fox War and Peace On the Application of Mathematics to Political Economy How Economics Became A Mathematical Science Machine Dreams All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series) Can’t Get You Out of My Head (TV series) The Collective Computation Group at SFI Seeing Like A State Uncertain times At the limits of thought Preventative Citizen-Based Medicine The uncertainty paradox. Can science make uncertainty optimistic? Editorial note: At one point DK mentions "John" Steuart but meant James Steuart, author of | |||
| C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems | 08 Apr 2022 | 01:14:17 | |
Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this (paradoxically) limits the universality of scientific claims, it also lets us draw analogies between the context-dependency of one phenomenon and others: how protein folding shapes HIV evolution is meaningfully like the way that growing up in a specific neighborhood shapes educational and economic opportunity; the paths through a space of all possible four-letter words are constrained in ways very similar to how interactions between microbes impact gut health; how we make sense both depends on how we’ve learned and places bounds on what we’re capable of seeing. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Yale evolutionary biologist C. Brandon Ogbunu (Twitter, Google Scholar, GitHub) about the importance of environment to the activity and outcomes of complex systems — the value of surprise, the constraints of history, the virtue and challenge of great communication, and much more. Our conversation touches on everything from using word games to teach core concepts in evolutionary theory, to the ways that protein quality control co-determines the ability of pathogens to evade eradication, to the relationship between human artists, algorithms, and regulation in the 21st Century. Brandon works not just in multiple scientific domains but as the author of a number of high-profile blogs exploring the intersection of science and culture — and his boundaryless fluency shines through in a discussion that will not be contained, about some of the biggest questions and discoveries of our time. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. You'll find plenty of other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Discussed in this episode: “I do my science biographically…I find a personal connection to the essence of the question.” – C. Brandon Ogbunugafor on RadioLab "Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond" “A Reflection on 50 Years of John Maynard Smith’s ‘Protein Space’” “Collective Computing: Learning from Nature” “Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power” “A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution” “The 300 Most Common Words” “The Host Cell’s Endoplasmic Reticulum Proteostasis Network Profoundly Shapes the Protein Sequence Space Accessible to HIV Envelope” “Competition along trajectories governs adaptation rates towards antimicrobial resistance” “Scientists Need to Admit What They Got Wrong About COVID” “Deconstructing higher-order interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination” “What Makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?” Not mentioned in this episode but still worth exploring: “Part of what I was getting after with Blackness had to do with authoring ideas that are edgy or potentially threatening. That as a scientist, you can generate ideas in the name of research, in the name of breaking new ground, that may stigmatize you. That may kick you out of the club, so to speak, because you’re not necessarily following the herd.” “How Afrofuturism Can Help The World Mend” “The COVID-19 pandemic amplified long-standing racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system” Also mentioned: Simon Conway Morris, Geoffrey West, Samuel Scarpino, Rick & Morty, Stuart Kauffman, Frank Salisbury, Stephen Jay Gould, Frances Arnold, John Vervaeke, Andreas Wagner, Jennifer Dunne, James Evans, Carl Bergstrom, Jevin West, Henry Gee, Eugene Shakhnovich, Rafael Guerrero, Gregory Bateson, Simon DeDeo, James Clerk Maxwell, Melanie Moses, Kathy Powers, Sara Walker, Michael Lachmann, and many others... | |||
| Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling | 26 Mar 2022 | 00:53:36 | |
As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, improving in their ability to access and harness nutrients as they’ve evolved over the last 400 million years. Roots also exemplify another maxim for living systems: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” As the Earth’s climate has transformed, the plants and fungi have transformed along with it, reaching into harsh and unstable environments and proving themselves in a crucible of evolutionary innovation that has reshaped the biosphere. Dig deep enough and you’ll find that life, like roots, trends toward the ever-finer, more adaptable, more intertwined…we all live in and on Charles Darwin’s “tangled bank”, whether we recognize it in our farms, our markets, or our minds. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Mingzhen Lu (Google Scholar, Twitter) about the lessons of the invisible webwork beneath our feet, the hidden world upon which all of us walk and rely — largely unnoticed, and until recently scarcely understood. We discuss the intersection of geography, ecology, and economics; the relationship between the so-called “Wood-Wide Web” and urban systems; how plants domesticated mycorrhizal fungi much as humans domesticated animals and plants; the evolutionary trends revealed by a paleoecological study of roots and what they suggest for the future of technology and civilization… This episode is an especially intertwingled and far-reaching one, as suits the topic. Plant yourself and soak it up! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. You'll find plenty of other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Discussed in this episode: “Evolutionary history resolves global organization of root functional traits” “Global plant-symbiont organization and emergence of biogeochemical cycles resolved by evolution-based trait modelling” “Biome boundary maintained by intense belowground resource competition in world’s thinnest-rooted plant community” Complexity ep. 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth "General statistical model shows that macroevolutionary patterns and processes are consistent with Darwinian gradualism” “Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions” Complexity ep. 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West Complexity ep. 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution Complexity ep. 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Shock Doctrine Doughnut Economics The Long Descent “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World” The Expanse (novel series) | |||
| The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith | 11 Mar 2022 | 00:57:01 | |
Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexity of driving comes into ever-sharper and more daunting focus. In 2022, even the most capable robotic cars aren’t self-determining agents but linked into swarms and acting as the tips of a vast and hidden web of design, programming, legislation, and commercial interest. Infrastructure is more than the streets and signs but includes licensing requirements, road rules, principles of product liability, and many other features that form the landscape to which driverless cars continue to adapt, and which they will increasingly alter. While most ethical debates about them seem to focus on the so-called “Trolley Problem” of how to teach machines to make decisions that minimize human casualties, there are many other wicked problems to consider: Is automated driving a technological solution or a policy solution? Should policymakers have the same expectations for automated and conventional driving? How safe must an automated vehicle be for deployment? Should humans or computers have ultimate authority over a given action? Should harm that a human could have prevented somehow outweigh harm that a human caused? Given that a hacker could infect entire fleets, maps, or real-time communication between cars, how much new risk are we willing to take to reduce the more traditional safety hazards with which we are familiar? And, perhaps most surreally: How do you ticket a robot, and who should pay? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on complexity, we speak to Bryant Walker Smith (Twitter) at the University of South Carolina School of Law and The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford, whose work centers on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. We link up to explore the myriad complexities — technological, regulatory, and sociocultural — surrounding the development and roll-out of new mobility platforms that challenge conventional understanding of the boundaries between person, vehicle, institution, and infrastructure. Buckle up and lean back for a dynamic discussion on the ever-shifting locii of agency, privacy and data protection, the relationship between individuals, communities, and corporations… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Discussed: • Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Transport Mentioned: Melanie Mitchell - A.I.: A Guide for Thinking People + Complexity ep. 21 | |||
| Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies | 25 Feb 2022 | 01:13:37 | |
Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The society itself is a kind of individual that gathers information and adapts to its surroundings by encoding stable environmental features in the power relationships between its members. But what works for the society at large often results in violence and inequity for its members; as the founder of this field of research put it, “A grave seriousness lies over the chicken yard.” Over the last hundred years, the science of dominance hierarchies has bloomed faster than a saloon brawl — branching out for deeper understanding of the lives of everything from fish to insects, apes to parakeets. Today, amidst clashing national and corporate titans, systemic economic inequality, and legitimacy crises in the institutions that once served to maintain (admittedly unfair) order, the time is ripe to turn to and learn from what science has discovered about the fundamental mechanisms that underly both human nature and the rest of it: who loses and who wins, and why, and at what cost? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with former ASU-SFI Fellow Elizabeth Hobson (Website | Twitter), now an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, about the last century of pecking order research. Dobson just co-edited an issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B devoted to this topic, and we unpack her and others’ contributions to this volume — including retrospectives, literature reviews, quantitative analysis, and a look at the current state and frontiers of the science of what we can colloquially call “punching up and down”… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Papers & People Discussed Include: • The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies • Jessica Flack Related Podcast Episodes Include: • Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life | |||
| Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier | 11 Feb 2022 | 00:54:18 | |
As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is vast; some sci-fi writers pay less tribute to the line between the possible and the impossible. Others, though, adopt a far more sober tactic and write “hard” sci fi that does its best to stay within the limits of our current paradigm while rooting visions of the future that can grow beyond and beckon us into a bigger, more adventurous reality. The question we might ask, though, is: which one is which? Our bounded rationality, our sense for what is plausible, is totally dependent on our personal life histories, cultural conditioning, information diet, and social network biases. One person’s linear projections seem too conservative; another person’s exponential change seems like a fantasy. If we can say one thing about our complex world, it might be that it always has, and always will, defy our expectations… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we join up with Caitlin McShea and the InterPlanetary Project’s Alien Crash Site podcast for a wild discussion with SFI Trustee, technologist, and philosopher Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey. This book takes readers forward more than a century into a highly automated, highly-stratified post-climate-change world in which our protaganist defies the rigid norms of his society to follow fundamental questions about mind, life, purpose, meaning, consciousness, and truth. It is a perfect backdrop to our conversation on the role of complex systems science in our understanding of both present-day society and the futures that may, or may never, come to pass… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Go Deeper With These Related Media Science: Speculative Fiction: Podcast Episodes: | |||
| Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2 | 27 Jan 2022 | 00:46:07 | |
COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is politicized. But thinking across scales offers answers, insights, better questions… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we conclude our conversation (recorded on December 9th last year) with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware of our new SFI Press book, The Complex Alternative, which gathers over 60 complex systems research points of view on COVID-19 (including those from this show). Learn more at SFIPress.org. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Related Reading & Listening: “Spatially distributed infection increases viral load in a computational model of SARS-CoV-2 lung infection” “Sunsetting As An Adaptive Strategy” “The Virus That Infected The World” A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program "The inevitable shift towards science as crisis response is a call to arms for complexity science. How well we will be able to meet these challenges will determine the future path of humanity." Also Mentioned: Jessica Flack, James C. Scott, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Joseph Henrich, Luis Bettencourt, Matthew Jackson, David Kinney | |||
| Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives | 13 Mar 2024 | 00:33:58 | |
Guests:
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer: Fractals and Scaling: Toward a Theory of Urban Scaling Introduction to Complexity: Ant Foraging and Task Allocation
Talks:
Papers & Articles:
| |||
| Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1 | 13 Jan 2022 | 00:46:03 | |
Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, acting on, and being acted upon by the same nested networks. Our fates are intertwined, but our destinies diverge like weather forecasts, hingeing on small variations in contingency: the circumstances of our birth, the changing contexts of our lives. Seen through a complex systems science lens, the problem of unfairness — in economic opportunity, in health care access, in susceptibility to a pandemic — stays wicked. But the insights therein could steer society toward a much better future, or at least help mitigate the worst of what we’re left to deal with now. This is where the rubber meets the road — where quantitative models of the lung could inform economic policy, and research into how we make decisions influences who survives the complex crises of this decade. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, in a conversation recorded on December 9th 2021, we speak with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. In the first part of a conversation that — like COVID itself — will not be contained, and spends much of its time visiting the poor and under-represented, we discuss everything from how the network topology of cities shapes the outcome of an outbreak to how vaccine hesitancy is a path-dependent trust fail anchored in the history of oppression. Melanie and Kathy offer insights into how to fix the vaccine rollout, how better scientific models can protect the vulnerable, and how — with the help of complex systems thinking — we may finally be able to repair the structural inequities that threaten all of us, one boat or many. Subscribe for Part Two in two weeks! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware of our new SFI Press book, The Complex Alternative, which gathers over 60 complex systems research points of view on COVID-19 (including those from this show) — and that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna. Learn more at SFIPress.org and SantaFe.edu/Gains, respectively. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Related Reading & Listening: A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program Mentions Include: Johan Chu, James Evans, Sam Scarpino, Simon DeDeo, Tony Eagan, Matthew Jackson, Mirta Galesic, Stuart Firestein, David Kinney, Jessica Flack, Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Cris Moore, Miguel Fuentes, Stephanie Forrest, David Krakauer, Luis Bettencourt Many additional resources in the show notes for the next episode! Stay tuned… | |||