COMPLEXITY

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:
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Mentioned and related resources:

Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings

Caleb’s Twitter

We Are The Aliens
by Caleb Scharf at Scientific American

We Are Our Data, Our Data Are Us
by Caleb Scharf at The Los Angeles Times

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
by Caleb Scharf at Nautilus

Where Do Minds Belong?
by Caleb Scharf at Aeon

Autopoiesis (Wikipedia)

The physical limits of communication
by Michael Lachmann, M. E. J. Newman, Cristopher Moore

The Extended Phenotype
by Richard Dawkins

“Time Binding” (c/o Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics) (Wikipedia)

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone
by Cosma Shalizi

Argument-making in the wild
SFI Seminar by Simon DeDeo

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?
by Kathleen McAuliffe at Discover Magazine

When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants
by Jeremy DeSilva, James Traniello, Alexander Claxton, & Luke Fannin

Complexity 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)

The Collapse of Networks
SFI Symposium Presentation by Raissa D'Souza

Jevons Paradox (Wikipedia)

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly

The Glass Cage
by Nicholas Carr

The evolution of language
by Martin Nowak and David Krakauer

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
by Jack Horner at TED

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
by Jonathan T. Rowell, Stephen P. Ellner, & H. Kern Reeve

The evolution of lying in well-mixed populations
by Valerio Capraro, Matjaž Perc & Daniele Vilone

Complexity 42 - Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned papers and other resources:

SFI Colloquium & Twitter thread on Daniel Lieberman’s “Active Grandparent Hypothesis”

The evolution of human fatigue resistance
by Frank E. Marino, Benjamin E. Sibson, Daniel E. Lieberman 

"What beer and running taught me about the scientific process"
Seminar by SFI Journalism Fellow Christie Aschwanden

Endurance running and the evolution of Homo
by Dennis Bramble & Daniel Lieberman in Nature

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?
by Daniel Lieberman at The Harvard Gazette

Hate Working Out? Blame Evolution
by Daniel LIeberman at The New York Times

The Aging of Wolff’s “Law”: Ontogeny and Responses to Mechanical Loading in Cortical Bone
by Osbjorn Pearson & DanielL Lieberman

Effects of footwear cushioning on leg and longitudinal arch stiffness during running
by Nicholas B.Holowkaab, Stephen M.Gillinovac, EmmanuelVirot, Daniel E.Lieberman

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned Papers:

Waddington’s canalization revisited: Developmental stability and evolution
Mark L. Siegal & Aviv Bergman

Evolutionary capacitance as a general feature of complex gene networks
Aviv Bergman & Mark L. Siegal

Phenotypic Pliancy and the Breakdown of Epigenetic Polycomb Mechanisms
Maryl Lambros, Yehonatan Sella, Aviv Bergman

Mammalian Endothermy Optimally Restricts Fungi and Metabolic Costs
Aviv Bergman & Arturo Casadevall

How on Earth can Aliens Survive? Concept and Case Study
Aviv Bergman’s 2022 SFI Seminar

Additional Mentioned Podcasts, Videos, & Writing:

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?
on the work of SFI Fellow Helena Miton

Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?
SFI Seminar by External Professor John Pepper

Explosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths
SFI Seminar by External Professor Simon DeDeo

Armchair Science
by 2022 SFI Journalism Fellow Dan Falk at Aeon Magazine

The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin 10 April 2020

Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science
Stuart Firestein’s 2022 SFI Community Lecture

Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
Jordana Cepelewicz at Aeon Magazine

"Ancestral forms are very different, but as you increase regulatory interactions is decreasing the space of the possible. You can think of bureaucracy..."
- SFI President David Krakauer on #DevoBias2018

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentioned Papers:

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

The Algorithmic Origins of Life
by Sara Imari Walker & Paul C. W. Davies

Beyond prebiotic chemistry: What dynamic network properties allow the emergence of life?
by Leroy Cronin & Sara Walker

Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry
by Stuart Marshall, Cole Mathis, Emma Carrick, Graham Keenan, Geoffrey Cooper, Heather Graham, Matthew Craven, Piotr Gromski, Douglas Moore, Sara Walker & Leroy Cronin

Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies the Emergence of Selection and Evolution
by Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, Michael Lachmann, Christopher Kempes, Sara Walker, Leroy Cronin

Quantum Non-Barking Dogs
by Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, Prasant Samantray, Yakir Aharonov

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
by Christopher P. Kempes & David C. Krakauer 

Other Related Videos & Writing:

SFI Seminar - Why Black Holes Eat Information
by Vijay Balasubramanian

Major Transitions in Planetary Evolution
by Hikaru Furukawa and Sara Imari Walker

2022 Community Lecture: “Recognizing The Alien in Us”
by Sara Walker

Sara Walker and Lee Cronin: The Alien Debate
on The Lex Fridman Show

If Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do It
SFI Press Release on work by Michael Lachmann

The Ministry for The Future
by Kim Stanley Robinson

Re: Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment
Wikipedia

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 2 - The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019

Complexity 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History

Complexity 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution

Complexity 40 - The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover)

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

Alien Crash Site 020 - Chris Kempes

Alien Crash Site 021 - Natalie Grefenstette

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

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
by Dmitri Tymoczko

An Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmony
by Nori Jacoby, Naftali Tishby and Dmitri Tymoczko

This Mathematical Song of the Emotions
by Dmitri Tymoczko

The Sound of Philosophy
by Dmitri Tymoczko

Select Tymoczko Video Lectures:
Spacious Spatiality (SEMF) 2022
The Quadruple Hierarchy
The Shape of Music (2014)

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
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent Jansen

The Majesty of Music and Math (PBS special with SFI’s Cris Moore)

The physical limits of communication
by Michael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cristopher Moore

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

Will brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science?
by David Krakauer at Aeon Magazine

Scaling, Mirror Symmetries and Musical Consonances Among the Distances of the Planets of the Solar System
by Michael Bank and Nicola Scafetta

“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.”
– Murray Gell-Mann, A Crude Look at The Whole Part 180/200 (1997)

Related Episodes:

Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
Complexity 72 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
Complexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism: Surfacing Invisible Labor
Complexity 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
Complexity 46 - Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems
Complexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentions and additional resources:

Topological Models and Critical Slowing down: Two Approaches to Power System Blackout Risk Analysis
by Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth Blumsack

Do topological models provide good information about electricity infrastructure vulnerability?
by Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth Blumsack

Can capacity markets be designed by democracy?
by Kyungjin Yoo & Seth Blumsack

The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation
by Kyungjin Yoo & Seth Blumsack

The Energy Transition in New Mexico: Insights from a Santa Fe Institute Workshop
by Seth Blumsack, Paul Hines, Cristopher Moore, and Jessika E. Trancik

EBF 483: Introduction to Electricity Markets
by Seth Blumsack

What’s behind $15,000 electricity bills in Texas?
by Seth Blumsack

RTOGov: Exploring Links Between Market Decision-Making Processes and Outcomes
by Kate Konschnik

Ensuring Consideration of the Public Interest in the Governance and Accountability of Regional Transmission Organizations
by Michael H. Dworkin & Rachel Aslin Goldwasser

Electricity governance and the Western energy imbalance market in the United States: The necessity of interorganizational collaboration
by Stephanie Lenhart, Natalie Nelson-Marsh, Elizabeth J. Wilson, & David Solan

Untangling the Wires in Electricity Market Planning, with Kate Konschnik
by Resources Radio

Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks
Complexity Podcast 12

Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
Complexity Podcast 78

The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society
Jessica Flack’s 2019 SFI Community Lecture

Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
Complexity Podcast 67

Early-warning signals for critical transitions
by Marten Scheffer, Jordi Bascompte, William A. Brock, Victor Brovkin, Stephen R. Carpenter, Vasilis Dakos, Hermann Held, Egbert H. van Nes, Max Rietkerk & George Sugihara

Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
Complexity Podcast 84

Anjali Bhatt

Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems
Complexity Podcast 73

Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making
Complexity Podcast 9

Jessika Trancik

Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution
by Leonardo Oña & Michael Lachmann

The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
Complexity Podcast 79

Image Credit: Paul Hines

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentions and additional resources:

The new paradigm of economic complexity
Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Tom Broekel, Dario Diodato, Elisa Giuliani, Ricardo Hausmann, Neave O’Clery, and David Rigby
in Research Policy

How production networks amplify economic growth
James McNerney, Charles Savoie, Francesco Caravelli, Vasco M. Carvalho, and J. Doyne Farmer 
in PNAS

Productive Ecosystems and the arrow of development
by Neave O’Clery, Muhammed Ali Yıldırım, and Ricardo Hausmann 

Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare
Ricardo Hausmann and Ulrich Schetter
in ScienceDirect

Historical effects of shocks on inequality: the great leveler revisited
Bas van Bavel and Marten Scheffer
in Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications
(Twitter thread)

Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
Christopher P. Kempes and David C. Krakauer 
in Journal of Molecular Evolution

Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA
Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Christopher P. Kempes
in Journal of The Royal Society Interface

Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems

Pitchfork Economics
by Nick Hanauer (podcast)

Complexity 15 - R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment

Will a Large Complex System be Stable?
by Robert May
in Nature

Investigations
by Stuart Kauffman

The Collapse of Networks
by Raissa D’Souza (SFI Symposium Talk)

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.

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Mentions and additional resources:

Toward a New Ontological Framework for the Economic Good
by Eric D. Beinhocker

Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
edited by W. Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, Allison Stanger

Socializing Data
by Diane Coyle

The Public Option
by Diane Coyle

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

Pitchfork Economics
by Nick Hanauer

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
by W. Brian Arthur

Geoffrey West on Complexity 35

Will A Large Complex System Be Stable?
by Robert May

Blockchain: Trust Companies: Every Company Is at Risk of Being Disrupted by A Trusted Version of Itself
by Richie Etwaru

Helena Miton on Complexity 46

The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
by Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin

Recoupling Economic and Social Prosperity
by Katharina Lima de Miranda, Dennis J. Snower

Signalling architectures can prevent cancer evolution
by Leonardo Oña & Michael Lachmann

Why we should have a public option version of Google and Facebook (response to Diane Coyle)
by James Pethokoukis

Bryant Walker Smith on Complexity 79

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
— Donald Knuth

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Mentions and additional resources:

Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility
by David Krakauer for SFI Parallax Newsletter, Spring 2022 Edition

Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates
by Jessica Flack, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer in Nature

Conflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structures
by Eleanor Brush, David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack in Science Advances

The Star Gazer and the Flesh Eater: Elements of a Theory of Metahistory
by David C. Krakauer in History, Big History, and Metahistory at SFI Press

The Cultural Evolution of National Constitutions
by Daniel Rockmore, Chen Fang, Nick Foti, Tom Ginsburg, & David Krakauer in SSRN

Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality
by José Lobo, Todd Whitelaw, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Polly Wiessner, Michael E. Smith, & Scott Ortman in Current Anthropology

W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Podcast (eps. 13, 14, 68, 69)

Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West (Complexity Podcast)

The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber and David Wengrow at Macmillan Publishers

Mitch Waldrop speaks on the history of SFI (Twitter excerpts)

The Hedgehog and the Fox
by Isaiah Berlin

War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy

On the Application of Mathematics to Political Economy
by F. Y. Edgeworth in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

How Economics Became A Mathematical Science
by E. Roy Weintraub at Duke University Press

Machine Dreams
by Philip Mirowski at Cambridge University Press

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series)
by Adam Curtis for BBC

Can’t Get You Out of My Head (TV series)
by Adam Curtis for BBC

The Collective Computation Group at SFI

Seeing Like A State
by James. C Scott at Yale Books

Uncertain times
by Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell at Aeon

At the limits of thought
by David Krakauer at Aeon

Preventative Citizen-Based Medicine
by David Krakauer for the SFI Transmissions: Reflections series

The uncertainty paradox. Can science make uncertainty optimistic?
by Stuart Firestein (SFI Seminar)

Editorial note: At one point DK mentions "John" Steuart but meant James Steuart, author of
An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy
(a more thoroughly-indexed and searchable version can be found here)

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

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"
Brandon’s February 2022 SFI Seminar (YouTube Video + Live Twitter Coverage)

“A Reflection on 50 Years of John Maynard Smith’s ‘Protein Space’”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in GENETICS

“Collective Computing: Learning from Nature”
David Krakauer presenting at the Foresight Institute in 2021 (with reference to Rubik’s Cube research)

“Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power”
Alexander Matt Turner, Logan Smith, Rohin Shah, Andrew Critch, Prasad Tadepalli in arXiv

“A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Daniel Hartl in PLOS Computational Biology

“The 300 Most Common Words”
by Bruce Sterling

“The Host Cell’s Endoplasmic Reticulum Proteostasis Network Profoundly Shapes the Protein Sequence Space Accessible to HIV Envelope”
Jimin Yoon, Emmanuel E. Nekongo, Jessica E. Patrick, Angela M. Phillips, Anna I. Ponomarenko, Samuel J. Hendel, Vincent L. Butty, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Yu-Shan Lin, Matthew D. Shoulders in bioRxiv

“Competition along trajectories governs adaptation rates towards antimicrobial resistance”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Margaret J. Eppstein in Nature Ecology & Evolution

“Scientists Need to Admit What They Got Wrong About COVID”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED

“Deconstructing higher-order interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination”
Yitbarek Senay, Guittar John, Sarah A. Knutie, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in bioRxiv

“What Makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED

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.”
– Physicist Stephon Alexander in an interview with Brandon at Andscape

“How Afrofuturism Can Help The World Mend”
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED

“The COVID-19 pandemic amplified long-standing racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system”
Brennan Klein, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Benjamin J. Schafer, Zarana Bhadricha, Preeti Kori, Jim Sheldon, Nitish Kaza, Emily A. Wang, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Samuel V. Scarpino, Elizabeth Hinton in medRxiv

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...