COMPLEXITY

Guests: 

• Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona
• Pablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

Producer: Katherine Moncure

Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

Other music: Craig Smith, Justkiddink, MaestroALF, ComputerHotline, James Ro Davidson, SoundEnsemble, Trundlefly, Geoff Bremner, Newagesgroup, Oddmonoliths, Thepla

Follow us on:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky

More info:

SFI programs: Education

Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life: Astrobiology & General Theories for Life - Scaling with Pablo Marquet

Books: 

• Scale by Geoffrey West
• Scaling Biodiversity (Ecological Reviews) edited by David Storch, Pablo Marquet , James Brown 
• How Landscapes Change: Human Disturbance and Ecosystem Fragmentation in the Americas (Ecological Studies Book 162) edited by Gay A. Bradshaw and Pablo A. Marquet 

Talks: 

• Better Forecasting our Ecological Future: Taming Big Data with Big Theory, Brian Enquist

Papers & Articles:

• “More than 17,000 tree species are at risk from rapid global change,” in Nature Communications (January 2, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44321-9
• “Metastatic cells exploit their stoichiometric niche in the network of cancer ecosystems,” in Science Advances (December 13, 2023), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi79
• “Environmental heterogeneity as a driver of terrestrial biodiversity on a global scale” in PPG: Earth and Environment (August 11, 2023), doi.org/10.1177/03091333231189045
• “The number of tree species on Earth,” PNAS (Jan 31, 2022), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115329119
• “Globally important plant functional traits for coping with climate change,” in Frontiers of Biogeography (October 2, 2021), doi.org/10.21425/F5FBG53774
• “Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems: Developing a General Trait Driver Theory via Integrating Trait-Based and Metabolic Scaling Theories,” Advances in Ecological 
• Research (May 4, 2015),  doi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2015.02.001
• “A general quantitative theory of forest structure and dynamics,” PNAS (April 28, 2009), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0812294106

Guests: 

• Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
• Sara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems

Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

Producer: Katherine Moncure

Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

Other music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Aesterial-Arts, Dijifishmusic, Greenvwbeetle, Odilon Marcenaro, Jobro, Benboncan, Bone666138, Aiwha, Josh Berry, Rubenvvuuren, and Miksmusic

Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky

SFI programs: 

• Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life
• Education

Books & Films: 

• Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, based on book by Mary Shelley
• The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann
• Signs of life: How complexity pervades biology by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin

Talks: 

• Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space by Ricard Solé
• Evolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic by Ricard Solé
• A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara Walker

Papers & Articles:

• “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” in Nature (October 4, 2023) doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9
• “Time is an object” in Aeon, May 19, 2023
• “The Algorithmic Origins of Life” in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (February 6, 2013) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869
• “Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken” in Entropy (May 9, 2022), doi.org/10.3390/e24050665
• “Unicellular–multicellular evolutionary branching driven by resource limitations” (June 2, 2022) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0018

Guests: 

• Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania
• Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute

Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes

Producer: Katherine Moncure

Podcast theme music: Mitch Mignano

Other Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Craig Smith.

Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky

SFI programs: 

• Complexity Global School 
• Complexity Explorer: Fractals & Scaling
• Education

Books & Stories: 

• Tell Me Why by Arkady Leokum
• Scale by Geoffrey West
• “Funes, the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges

Talks: 

• How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural Circuits by Vijay Balasubramanian
• The Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West
• Energy, Scaling & The Future of Life on Earth by Geoffrey West
• Complex Time Working Group: “What is Sleep?” with Geoffrey West, Van Savage, Alex Herman

Papers: 

• “Brain Power” in PNAS (August 2, 2021) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.210702211
• “The Physical Effects of Learning” preprint published in biorxiv
• “Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development” in Science Advances (September 18, 2020) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0398
• “The Scales That Limit: The Physical Boundaries of Evolution” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (August 7, 2019) doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00242

Episode Title and Show Notes:

106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.

We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. 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 SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.

Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

📚Reading & Videos:

The Lost World
by Michael Crichton

Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton

The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen

InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
by SFI

Complexity Economics
by SFI Press

Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)

How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
by Michael Garfield

Artists Misusing Technology
by NXT Museum

The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)

The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer

Welcome To Jurassic Park
by Tink Zorg
(re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains)

Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine
(re: Albert Kao)

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack

Argument Making In The Wild
by Simon DeDeo
(SFI Seminar re: egregores)

The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society
by Jessica Flack (SFI Community Lecture re: “hourglass emergence”)

Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together
by Adi Livnat

In The Country of The Blind (_Afterword: An Introduction to Cliology)
by Michael Flynn

An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence
by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David Wolpert

Murray Gell-Mann - Information overload. A crude look at the whole (180/200)
(re: the challenges of funding truly innovative research)

The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction
by W.J.T. Mitchell

Ken Wilber

Intelligence as a planetary scale process
by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker

Light & Magic (documentary series)
on Disney+

Palantir Analytics
The Lord of The Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff

Michael Levin

Robustness of variance and autocorrelation as indicators of critical slowing down
by Vasilis Dakos, Egbert H van Nes, Paolo D’Odorico, Marten Scheffer

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone
by Cosma Shalizi

🎧Podcasts:

Complexity Podcast

001 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science

009 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making

012 - Matthew Jackson on Social and Economic Networks

013 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics

016 - Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy

036 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse?

056 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

060 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt’s Naturegemälde

065 - Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers

067 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics

072 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology

087 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

090 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

92 - Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society

099 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

Future Fossils Podcast

194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions
190 - Lauren Seyler on Dark Microbiology & Right Relations in Science

165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia

125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano

Other music by Michael Garfield

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned & Related Media:

Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)

Communities in Networks
by Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter Mucha

Social Structure of Facebook Networks
by Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason Porter

Critical Truths About Power Laws
by Michael Stumpf & Mason Porter

The topology of data
by Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni Katifori

Complex networks with complex weights
by Lucas Böttcher & Mason A. Porter

A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs
by Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason Porter

A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions
by Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason Porter

Social network analysis for social neuroscientists
Elisa C Baek, Mason A Porter, & Carolyn Parkinson

Community structure in social and biological networks
by Michelle Girvan & Mark Newman

The information theory of individuality
by David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica C Flack, Nihat Ay

Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility
by Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo Barberá, Monica Bhole & Nils Wernerfelt 

Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks
by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, M.E.J. Newman

Gregory Bateson (Wikipedia)

Complexity Ep. 99 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

“Why Do We Sleep?”
by Van Savage & Geoffrey West at Aeon Magazine

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

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
 

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
by Andrea Wulf

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
by Andrea Wulf

Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
by Lewis Hyde

Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales

“Nature” (1844)
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chopin’s Preludes

Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce

InterPlanetary Voyager (Interactive Golden Record Liner Notes)
by SFI’s InterPlanetary Festival

Blue Planet (BBC)
with David Attenborough

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned & Related Links:

Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter.

His SFI Seminars to date:
A Brief History of Balance
Emergence, (Self)Organization, and Complexity
Criticality: A Balance Between Robustness and Adaptability
Festina lente (the slower-is-faster effect)
Antifragility: Dynamical Balance

W. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite Variety

Hyperobjects
by Timothy Morton

How can we think the complex?
by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen

The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy
by Carlos Gershenson

Complexity and Philosophy
by Francis Heylighen, Paul Cilliers, Carlos Gershenson

Heterogeneity extends criticality
by Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, Octavio Zapata, Omar K, Pineda, Gerardo Iñiguez, and Carlos Gershenson

When Can we Call a System Self-organizing?
by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen

Temporal, Structural, and Functional Heterogeneities Extend Criticality and Antifragility in Random Boolean Networks
by Amahury Jafet López-Díaz, Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, and Carlos Gershenson

When slower is faster
by Carlos Gershenson, Dirk Helbing

Self-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systems
by Carlos Gershenson

Dynamics of ranking
by Gerardo Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, & Albert-László Barabási

Self-Organizing Traffic Lights
by Carlos Gershenson

Dynamic competition and resource partitioning during the early life of two widespread, abundant and ecologically similar fishes
by A. D. Nunn, L. H. Vickers, K. Mazik, J. D. Bolland, G. Peirson, S. N. Axford, A. Henshaw & I. G. Cowx

Towards a general theory of balance
by Carlos Gershenson

A Calculus for Self-Reference
by Francisco Varela

On Some Mental Effects of The Earthquake
by William James

Self-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systems
by Carlos Gershenson

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Complexity Ep. 99

Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
Complexity Ep. 72

David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
Complexity Ep. 45

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
by Stewart Brand

Michael Lachmann

Stuart Kauffman

Andreas Wagner

Cosma Shalizi

Nassim Taleb

Does Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics?
Big Think interviews Sean Carroll

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

(SOME) Mentioned & Related Links:

David Krakauer
Mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics
by Nicolas Gisin
Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math
by Natalie Wolchover
The Principle of Least Action
Path Integral Formulation
Closed Timelike Curve
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
Kip Thorne

James Gleick
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
The Physicist and The Philosopher
by Jimena Canales

Ted Chiang
“Story of Your Life”
Arrival
Exhalation
Russian Doll (TV series)
“The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”

David Wolpert
Complexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Complexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
Intuitionist Mathematics

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned & Related Links:

Transparency Is Surveillance
by C. Thi Nguyen

The Seductions of Clarity
by C. Thi Nguyen

The Natural Selection of Bad Science
by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath

Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving
by Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro Pérez Velilla, Mikkel Werling

The Division of Cognitive Labor
by Philip Kitcher

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciences
by Eugene Wigner

On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I.
by Melanie Mitchell

Seeing Like A State
by James C. Scott

Jim Rutt

Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science
by Johan Chu and James Evans

The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative
by Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles

Peter Turchin

In The Country of The Blind
by Michael Flynn

82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)

83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)

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)