COMPLEXITY

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Discussed in this episode:

“Evolutionary history resolves global organization of root functional traits”
by Zeqing Ma, Dali Guo, Xingliang Xu, Mingzhen Lu, Richard D. Bardgett, David M. Eissenstat, M. Luke McCormack & Lars O. Hedin
in Nature

“Global plant-symbiont organization and emergence of biogeochemical cycles resolved by evolution-based trait modelling”
by Mingzhen Lu, Lars O. Hedin
in PubMed

“Biome boundary maintained by intense belowground resource competition in world’s thinnest-rooted plant community”
by Mingzhen Lu, William J. Bond, Efrat Sheffer, Michael D. Cramer, Adam G. West, Nicky Allsopp, Edmund C.  February,  Samson Chimphango, Zeqing Ma, Jasper A. Slingsby, and Lars O. Hedin
in PNAS

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

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
by Henry Gee (Senior Editor of Nature)

"General statistical model shows that macroevolutionary patterns and processes are consistent with Darwinian gradualism”
by SFI Professor Mark Pagel
in Nature
Complexity ep. 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

“Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions”
by SFI Professor Alison Gopnik
in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B

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?
by Philip K. Dick

The Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein

Doughnut Economics
by Kate Raworth

The Long Descent
by John Michael Greer

“6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World”
by Paul Stamets

Complexity ep. 43 - Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities

The Expanse (novel series)
by James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck, here at IPFest 2019 on our World Building panel)

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Discussed:

• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Transport
• Who is driving driverless cars?
• From driverless dilemmas to more practical commonsense tests for automated vehicles
• Who’s Responsible When A Self-Driving Car Crashes?
• How Do You Ticket a Driverless Car?
• Controlling Humans and Machines
• Regulation and the Risk of Inaction
• Government Assessment of Innovation Shouldn’t Differ for Tech Companies
• New Technologies and Old Treaties
• It’s Not The Robot’s Fault! Russian and American Perspectives on Responsibility for Robot Harms

Mentioned:

Melanie Mitchell - A.I.: A Guide for Thinking People + Complexity ep. 21
Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses on The Complexity of Harm, Complexity ep. 75
Cris Moore on Algorithmic Injustice, Complexity ep. 51
Luis Bettencourt on Urban Networks, Complexity ep. 4
Sabine Hauert on Swarming Robots, Complexity ep. 3
Kevin Kelly - Out of Control
Emergent Engineering
Cory Doctorow
Jake Harper (formerly of Zoox)
InterPlanetary Festival
Jose Luis Borges
W. Brian Arthur - The Nature of Technology + Complexity ep. 13
Ricardo Hausmann
Amazon Prime Video - Upload
Charles Stross - Halting State
Doyne Farmer on Market Malfunction, Complexity ep. 56
Marten Scheffer on Autocorrelation & Collapse, Complexity ep. 33

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Papers & People Discussed Include:

• The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies
Eli D. Strauss, James P. Curley, Daizaburo Shizuka and Elizabeth A. Hobson
• Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research
Elizabeth A. Hobson
• DomArchive: a century of published dominance data
Eli D. Strauss, Alex R. DeCasien, Gabriela Galindo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Daizaburo Shizuka and James P. Curley
• Social hierarchies and social networks in humans
Daniel Redhead and Eleanor A. Power
• Dominance in humans
Tian Chen Zeng, Joey T. Cheng and Joseph Henrich
• From equality to hierarchy
Simon DeDeo and Elizabeth A. Hobson
• More is Different
Phil Anderson
• Environmentally Mediated Social Dilemmas
Sylvie Estrela, Eric Libby, Jeremy Van Cleve, Florence Débarre, Maxime Deforet, William R. Harcombe, Jorge Peña, Sam P. Brown, Michael E. Hochberg

• Jessica Flack
• Michael Mauboussin
• Joshua Bell
• Robert Kegan
• Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe

Related Podcast Episodes Include:

• Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life
• Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
• Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers
• Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs
• Fractal Conflicts & Swing Voters with Eddie Lee
• Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)
• Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks
• Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Go Deeper With These Related Media

Science:
Paul Smaldino: The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
Geoffrey West: Scale
Bob May: Will a Large Complex System be Stable?
Melanie Mitchell: The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
Melanie Mitchell: On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in AI
Elisa Heinrich Mora et al.: Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States
SFI ACtioN Climate Change Seminar: Complexity of Sustainability
Raissa D’Souza: The Collapse of Networks
David Krakauer: Preventative Citizen-Based Medicine
Simon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson: From equality to hierarchy
Peter Turchin: The Double Helix of Inequality and Well-Being

Speculative Fiction:
2019 IPFest World Building Panel Discussion with Rebecca Roanhorse, James S.A. Correy, and Cris Moore
Robin Hanson: Age of Em
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
Peter Watts: Blindsight
Isaac Asimov: Foundation
The Strugatsky Brothers: Roadside Picnic

Podcast Episodes:
Complexity 10: Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation
Complexity 14: W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy
Complexity 19: David Kinney on the Philosophy of Science
Complexity 21: Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know
Complexity 22: Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds
Complexity 36: Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)
Complexity 51: Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference
The Jim Rutt Show 152: Gary Bengier on Hard Sci-Fi Futures

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Related Reading & Listening:

“Spatially distributed infection increases viral load in a computational model of SARS-CoV-2 lung infection”
by Melanie E. Moses et al. incl. Stephanie Forrest

“Sunsetting As An Adaptive Strategy”
by Roberta Romano and Simon A. Levin

“The Virus That Infected The World”
by David Krakauer & Dan Rockmore

A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program
Legacies of Harm, Social Mistrust & Political Blame Impede A Robust Societal Response to The Evolving COVID-19 Pandemic
How To Fix The Vaccine Rollout
Models That Protect The Vulnerable
Complexities in Repair for Harm (Kathy’s SFI Seminar)

"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."
- Miguel Fuentes

Also Mentioned:

Jessica Flack, James C. Scott, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Joseph Henrich, Luis Bettencourt, Matthew Jackson, David Kinney

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Related Reading & Listening:

A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program
Legacies of Harm, Social Mistrust & Political Blame Impede A Robust Societal Response to The Evolving COVID-19 Pandemic
How To Fix The Vaccine Rollout
Models That Protect The Vulnerable
Complexities in Repair for Harm (Kathy’s SFI Seminar)
How a coastline 100 million years ago influences modern election results in Alabama @ Reddit
🎧 Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)
🎧 Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference
🎧 Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making
🎧 Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks
🎧 Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities

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…

If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs — whether it’s N95 mask distribution, log-jammed shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, superspreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks. Ultimately, the effects go even deeper: How has COVID changed our understanding of individuality — the self and its relationship to other selves?

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 special year-end wrap-up episode, we speak with  SFI President David Krakauer and former SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about The Complex Alternative, a new SFI Press volume gathering the perspectives of over 60 members of the complex systems research community on COVID-19 — not just the disease but the webbed and embedded systems it revealed.

Complexity Podcast will take a winter hiatus over the holidays and return on Wednesday, January 12th. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe 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 that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna, Austria. Learn more at santafe.edu/gains.

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

Related Reading & Listening:

The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Selected contributions from that volume:
David Kinney - Why We Can’t Depoliticize A Pandemic
Simon DeDeo - From Virus To Symptom
On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)
Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of Crisis
Cristopher Moore on the heavy tail of outbreaks
Sidney Redner on exponential growth processes
Anthony Eagan - The COVID-19-Induced Explosion of Boutique Narratives
Carrie Cowan on the future of education
Melanie Mitchell - The Double-Edged Sword of Imperfect Metaphors
Danielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi - Prediction and Policy in a Complex System

Additional Media:
John Kaag - What Thoreau can teach us about the Great Resignation
Kyle Harper - The Fall of the Roman Empire (SFI Talk)
Niall Ferguson’s Networld, Part 1 “Disruption” feat. Geoffrey West
Neal Stephenson, SFI Miller Scholar
The Limits of Human Scale - David Pakman interviews Geoffrey West
Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin - The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
Jonathan Rausch - The Constitution of Knowledge
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19
Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions
Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)
Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)

New Directions in Science Emerge from Disconnection and Discord
by Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei Wu

Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States
by Elisa Heinrich Mora, Jacob J. Jackson, Cate Heine, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Christopher P. Kempes

Democracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent institutions exert top-down regulation on the individuals and orgs that live together in a polity; feedback loops and tipping points abound. And so perhaps it comes as no surprise in our times of turbulence and risk that democratic processes are under extraordinary pressure from the unanticipated influences of digital communications media, rapidly evolving economic forces, and the algorithms we’ve let loose into society.

In a new special feature at PNAS co-edited by SFI Science Board Member Simon Levin, fifteen international research teams map the jeopardy faced by democracies today — as Levin and the other editors write in their introduction to the issue, “the loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society.” And yet humankind has never been more well-equipped to understand the problems that we face. What can complex systems science teach us about this century’s threats to democracy, and how to mitigate or sidestep them? How might democracy itself transform as it adapts to our brave new world of extremist partisanship, exponential change, and epistemic crisis?

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 Tina Eliassi-Rad, Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, about her complex systems research on democracy, what forces stabilize or upset democratic process, and how to rigorously study the relationships between technology and social change.

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:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Related Reading & Listening:

Tina’s Website & Google Scholar Page

“What science can do for democracy: a complexity science approach”
Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornette, Karim Thébault & Karoline Wiesner

“Stability of democracies: a complex systems perspective”
K Wiesner, A Birdi, T Eliassi-Rad, H Farrell, D Garcia, S Lewandowsky, P Palacios, D Ross, D Sornette and K Thébault

“Measuring algorithmically infused societies”
Claudia Wagner, Markus Strohmaier, Alexandra Olteanu, Emre Kıcıman, Noshir Contractor & Tina Eliassi-Rad

1 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science
7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice
35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West
38 - Fighing Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (Garland, Galesic, Olsson)
43 - Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities
51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice and The Physics of Inference

“Stewardship of global collective behavior” - Joe Bak-Coleman et al.

Michelle Girvan - Harnessing Chaos & Predicting The Unpredictable with A.I.

Transmission T-015: Anthony Eagan on Federalism in the time of pandemic
Transmission T-031: Melanie Moses and Kathy Powers on models that protect the vulnerable

Also Mentioned:

Simon DeDeo
Elizabeth Hobson
Danielle Allen
Alexander De Tocqueville
Stewart Brand
Safiya Noble
Filippo Menczer
Jessica Flack
Rajeev Gandhi
Scott Adams
David Brin

What makes a satisfying explanation? Understanding and prediction are two different goals at odds with one another — think fundamental physics versus artificial neural networks — and even what defines a “simple” explanation varies from one person to another. Held in a kind of ecosystemic balance, these diverse approaches to seeking knowledge keep each other honest…but the use of one kind of knowledge to the exclusion of all others leads to disastrous results. And in the 21st Century, the difference between good and bad explanations determines how society adapts as rapid change transforms the world most people took for granted — and sends humankind into the epistemic wilds  to find new stories that will help us navigate this brave new world.

This week we dive deep with SFI External Professor Simon DeDeo at Carnegie Mellon University to explore his research into intelligence and the search for understanding, bringing computational techniques to bear on the history of science, information processing at the scale of society, and how digital technologies and the coronavirus pandemic challenge humankind to think more carefully about the meaning that we seek, here on the edge of chaos…

If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you  listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation 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

Works Discussed:

“From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning”
Zachary Wojtowicz & Simon DeDeo (+ SFI press release on this paper)

“Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism”
Simon DeDeo (SFI lecture video)

“From equality to hierarchy”
Simon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson

The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic
SFI Press (with “From Virus to Symptom” by Simon DeDeo)

“Boredom and Flow: An Opportunity Cost Theory of Attention-Directing Motivational States”
Zachary Wojtowicz, Nick Chater, & George Loewenstein

“Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution”
Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David H. Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey, & Timothy A. Kohler 

“Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”
Johan Chu and James Evans
“Will A Large Complex System Be Stable?”
Robert May

Related Podcast Episodes:

• Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy

• Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds

• On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

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

• Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities

• David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method

• Science in The Time of COVID: Michael Lachmann & Sam Scarpino on Lessons from The Pandemic

• Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs

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

Mentioned:

David Spergel, Zachary Wojtowicz, Stuart Kauffman, Jessica Flack, Thomas Bayes, Claude Shannon, Sean M. Carroll, Dan Sperber, David Krakauer, Marten Scheffer, David Deutsch, Jaewon Shin, Stuart Firestein, Bob May, Peter Turchin, David Hume, Jimmy Wales, Tyler Marghetis

Where does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary genius — but ideas have precedents, and moments, and it takes two different kinds of person to have and to hype them. The popularity of “influencers” past and present obscures the collaborative social processes by which ideas are born and spread. What can new tools for the study of historical literature tell us about how languages evolve…and what might a formal understanding of innovation change about the ways we work 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 talk conclude our two-part conversation with Emory University researcher Lauren Klein, co-author (with Catherine D'Ignazio) of the MIT Press volume Data Feminism. We talk tracing change in language use with topic modeling, the role of randomness in Data Feminism, and what this work ultimately does and does not say about the hidden seams of power in society…

Subscribe to Complexity wherever you listen to podcasts — and if you value our work, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give.

You can find numerous other ways to engage with us — including books, job openings, and open online courses — 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

Related Reading & Listening:

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren Klein

“Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies” by Lauren Klein

“Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers” by Sandeep Soni, Lauren Klein, Jacob Eisenstein

Our Twitter thread on Lauren’s SFI Seminar (with video link)

“Disentangling ecological and taphonomic signals in ancient food webs” by Jack O Shaw, Emily Coco, Kate Wootton, Dries Daems, Andrew Gillreath-Brown, Anshuman Swain, Jennifer A Dunne

More resources in the show notes for Part 1: Surfacing Invisible Labor.