When you hear the word “nature,” what comes to mind? Chances are, if you are listening to this in the 21st Century, the image is one of a vast, interconnected, living network — one in which you and your fellow human beings play a complicated part. And yet, this is a relatively recent way of thinking for the modern West. It takes a special kind of thinker — and a special kind of life — to find and recognize the patterns that connect different environments around the planet. Until the pioneering research of 19th-Century explorer Alexander von Humboldt, no one had ever noticed global similarities between the climates and creatures at a given altitude, on different continents. His legendary work popularized not only a new portrait of the world and its complex inter-relatedness, but innovated vastly influential ways of doing and communicating science — including novel data visualization and interdisciplinary international collaboration methods. 

Von Humboldt, though, would bristle at the notion that he stands alone as some Great Man in history, preferring to acknowledge not just the inspiration that he drew from poets and philosophers, but also the Indigenous peoples he met and worked with in his travels. His theories beg to be examined in light of the aesthetic sensibilities with which they were communicated, as well as their sociopolitical and philosophical impact — including how they fertilized the Transcendentalist Romantics, founded what we now call ecology, and exemplified a synthesis of Art and Science at which our age of vast but fragmented knowledge can only marvel.

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 and next, we have a special two-part conversation for you with SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, author of six books — including the New York Times Bestseller The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize and too many others to name in this introduction. In Wulf’s words, “This is not a biography about this great man. This is the biography of an idea.” In part one we begin our journey in Prussia at the turn of the 19th Century — and in a rich milieu of daring minds including Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and how their philosophies formed the basis for a profound new vision of the natural world…

Subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen for part two next week.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please 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. Thank you for listening!

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Cris Moore - Complexity 51
Stefan Thurner
David Krakauer - Complexity 1
Merlin Sheldrake
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Edgar Mitchell
Rusty Schweickert
Dani Bassett - SFI Community Lecture, “Networks Thinking Themselves”
Kirell Benzi - SFI Seminar, “Data + Art = Better Science Communication”
Mark Moffett - Complexity 52
Humphry Davy
Charles Lyell
Michael Faraday

Complexity is all around us: in the paths we walk through pathless woods, the strategies we use to park our cars, the dynamics of an elevator as it cycles up and down a building. Zoom out far enough and the phenomena of everyday existence start revealing hidden links, suggesting underlying universal patterns. At great theoretic heights, it all yields to statistical analysis: winning streaks and traffic jams, card games and elevators. Boiling down complicated real-world situations into elegant toy models, physicists derive mathematical descriptions that transcend mundane particulars — helping us see daily life with fresh new eyes.

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 to SFI Resident Professor Sidney Redner, author of A Guide to First-Passage Processes, about how he finds inspiration for his complex systems research in the everyday — and how he uses math and physics to explore hot hands, heat waves, parking lots, and more…

If you value our research and communication efforts, please 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. 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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Key Links:

Sidney Redner’s SFI Webpage
Redner’s textbook, A Guide to First-Passage Processes

Papers Discussed:

Kinetics of clustering in traffic flows
Winning quick and dirty: the greedy random walk
When will an elevator arrive?
Role of global warming on the statistics of record-breaking temperatures
Understanding baseball team standings and streaks
Random Walk Picture of Basketball Scoring
Safe leads and lead changes in competitive team sports
Simple parking strategies
A Fresh Look at the “Hot Hand” Paradox
Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Review

Explainer Animations:

Simple Parking Strategies: A Primer
"Sleeping Beauties" of Science: Unseen ≠ Unimportant
When Will An Elevator Arrive?

“More than the sum of its parts” is practically the slogan of systems thinking. One canonical example is a beehive: individually, a honeybee is not that clever, but together they can function like shapeshifting metamaterials or mesh networks — some of humankind’s most sophisticated innovations. Emergent collective behavior is common in the insect world — and not just among superstar collaborators like bees, ants, and termites. One firefly, alone, blinks randomly; together, fireflies effect an awe-inspiring synchrony in large, coordinated light shows scientists are only starting to explain. It turns out that diversity is key, even in a swarm; variety improves the “computations” that these swarms perform as they adapt to their surroundings. Watch them self-organize for long enough and you might ask, “Is this what people do? What hidden patterns and emergent genius do we all participate in unawares?” If bees and fireflies inspire that kind of question in you, you’ll find yourself at home in this week’s episode…

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 conversation, we talk to SFI External Professor Orit Peleg (Google Scholar, Twitter) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute and Computer Science Department about her research into the collective behavior of bees and fireflies. These humble insects can, together, do amazing things — and what science shows about just how they do it points to deeper insights on the nature of noise, creativity, and life in our complex world.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please 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. 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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Papers Discussed:

Collective mechanical adaptation in honeybee swarms

Collective ventilation in honeybee nests

Flow-mediated olfactory communication in honey bee swarms

Self-organization in natural swarms of Photinus carolinus synchronous fireflies

Spatiotemporal reconstruction of emergent flash synchronization in firefly swarms via stereoscopic 360-degree cameras

Further Listening & Reading:

Episode 29 — David Krakauer on Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity

Episode 56 — J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

Stefani Crabtree — The archaeological record can teach us much about cultural resilience and how to adapt to exogenous threats

Annalee Newitz — Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Laurence Gonzales on Behind The Shield Podcast

Michael Mauboussin — The Success Equation

Episode 55 — James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design

@sfiscience on Orit Peleg’s research into honeybee olfactory communication

Human relationships are often described in the language of “chemistry” — does that make the beliefs and attitudes of individuals a kind of “physics”? It is, at least, a fascinating avenue of inquiry. In particular, the field of statistical mechanics offers potent tools for understanding how exactly people form their views and change their minds. From this perspective, everyone is a dynamic network of opinions and values, in a tense and ever-changing balance both with others and ourselves. The “chemistry” of social life, then, arises from multilevel interactions in our noisy minds and how they influence each other.

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 conversation, we speak with SFI Postdoc Jonas Dalege about how his research uses physics models to understand the emergence of higher-level behaviors from lower-level behaviors, both within and between people. We discuss the role of entropy in the formation of individual beliefs; statistical approaches to the study of ambivalence and cognitive dissonance; the wisdom (and challenge) of tolerating ambiguity; and the social consequences when we try to minimize internal conflict…

If you value our research and communication efforts, please 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. 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

Key Links:

Jonas’s Website | Google Scholar Page
 

Related Papers, Talks, and Complexity Podcast Episodes:

[Video] Explosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo

Falling through the cracks: Modeling the formation of social category boundaries by Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Tamara van der Does, and Henrik Olsson

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

Integrating social and cognitive aspects of belief dynamics: Towards a unifying framework by Mirta Galesic, Henrik Olsson, Jonas Dalege, Tamara van der Does, Daniel L. Stein

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack

9 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making

29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)

33 - The Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten Scheffer

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

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

55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design

Once upon a time at UC Santa Cruz, a group of renegade grad students started mixing physics with math and computers, determined to discover underlying patterns in the seeming-randomness of systems like the weather and roulette. Their research led to major insights in the emerging field of chaos theory, and eventually to the new discipline of complexity economics — which brings models from ecology and physics, cognitive science and biology together to improve our understanding of how value flows through networks, how people make decisions, and how new technologies evolve. As the human world weaves new global economic systems and sustainability looms ever-larger in importance, it is finally time to heed the warnings — and the promises — of this new paradigm of economics.

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 J. Doyne Farmer at INET Oxford, to tour his fifty years of pioneering work and current book-in-progress, The Complexity Economics Revolution. Topics include how ecology inspires novel forms of macroeconomics; how “bounded rationality” changes the narrative about rational self-interested economic actors; how leverage leads to greater instability; how new tools can help us predict emerging innovations and engineer a better banking system; the skewed incentives of science funding and venture capital; his take on cryptocurrencies; and more…

If you value our research and communication efforts, please 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. 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

Key Links:

Doyne Farmer’s Personal Website | SFI Page | INET Oxford Page | Google Scholar Page

Doyne Farmer and related talks on our YouTube channel

Complexity Economics from SFI Press

Related Complexity Podcast Episodes:

W. Brian Arthur on The History & Future of Complexity Economics

[Farmer’s PhD student] R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets
Matthew Jackson on The Science of Social Networks

Geoffrey West on Scaling and Superlinear Innovation
David Krakauer on Collapse & High-Beta Investment Strategies

In the 21st Century, science is a team sport played by humans and computers, both. Social science in particular is in the midst of a transition from the qualitative study of small groups of people to the quantitative and computer-aided study of enormous data sets created by the interactions of machines and people. In this new ecology, wanting AI to act human makes no sense, but growing “alien” intelligences offers useful difference — and human beings find ourselves empowered to identify new questions no one thought to ask. We can direct our scientific inquiry into the blind spots that our algorithms find for us, and optimize for teams diverse enough to answer them. The cost is the conceit that complex systems can be fully understood and thus controlled — and this demands we move into a paradigm of care for both the artificial Others we create and human Others we engage as partners in discovery. This is the dawn of Social Computing: an age of daunting risks and dazzling rewards that promises to challenge what we think we know about what can be known, and how…

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, I speak with SFI External Professor James Evans, Director of the University of Chicago’s Knowledge Lab, about his new work in, and journal of, social computing — how AI transforms the practice of scientific study and the study of scientific practice; what his research reveals about the importance of diversity in team-building and innovation; and what it means to accept our place beside machines in the pursuit of not just novel scientific insight, but true wisdom.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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

Key Links:

• James Evans at The University of Chicago

• Knowledge Lab

• Google Scholar

• “Social Computing Unhinged” in The Journal of Social Computing

Other Mentioned Learning Resources:

• Melanie Mitchell, “The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence”

• Alison Gopnik’s SFI Community Lecture, “The Minds of Children”

• Hans Moravec, Mind Children

• Ted Chiang, “The Life Cycle of Software Objects”

• Re: Recent CalTech study on interdisciplinarity and The Golden Age of Science

• Yuval Harari, “The New Religions of the 21st Century”

• Melanie Mitchell & Jessica Flack, “Complex Systems Science Allows Us To See New Paths Forward” at Aeon

• Complexity Episode 9 - Mirta Galesic (on Social Science)

• Compexity Episode 20 - Albert Kao (on Collective Behavior)

• Complexity Episode 21 - Melanie Mitchell (on Artificial Intelligence)

Art history is a lot like archaeology — we here in the present day get artifacts and records, but the gaps between them are enormous, and the questions that they beg loom large. Historians need to be able to investigate and interpret, to unpack the meanings and the methods of a given work of art — but even for the best, the act of reconstruction is a trying test. Can we program computers to decipher the backstory of a painting — analyzing light and shadow to guess at how a piece was made? And, even more ambitiously, can AI learn to see and tell the stories rendered in an image’s symbolic content? Recent innovations yield surprising insights and suggest a cyborg future for art scholarship, in which we teach machines to not just recognize a set of objects, but to grok their context and relationships — shining light on messages and narratives once lost to time, and deepening our study of the world of signs.

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 David Stork, who has held full-time and visiting faculty positions in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges and Clark, Boston, and Stanford Universities…as well as holding corporate positions as Chief Scientist at Ricoh Innovations and Fellow at Rambus, Inc. We talk about the what happens when computers look at art — and the implications for  art history and connoisseurship.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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

Go deeper with these additional resources:

David’s bio at International Academy, Research, and Industry Association

David’s Google Scholar Page

David’s SFI Seminar

David’s talk at The Frick Collection, “Rigorous Technical Image Analysis of Fine Art: Toward a Computer Connoisseurship”

The consequence of living in a complex world: one tiny tweak can lead to massive transformation. Set the stage a slightly different way, and the entire play might unfold differently. This path-dependency shows up in both the science fiction premise and the hypothesis of scientific research: What can we learn about the hidden order of our cosmos by adjusting just a single variable?

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, Complexity Podcast becomes its own experiment after an invasion by our sister podcast, InterPlanetary Festival’s Alien Crash Site. SFI Miller Omega Program Manager Caitlin McShea joins as guest co-host for a conversation with SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Tamara van der Does (who models belief change using techniques inspired by statistical physics) for a three-headed conversation totally befitting the subject matter: a work of speculative “sci-fi science” produced by SFI’s postdoctoral researchers during a 72-hour lock-in complex systems charette. Their question: how might an extraterrestrial civilization much like our own work if their biology required three-parent families? We discuss the interplay between individual and society, the role of counterfactuals and speculation in both scientific research and sci-fi, and what technology she’d hope to find left in the wake of an alien visitation.

Tune in two weeks from now for a return to our regularly scheduled programming...

If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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

Go deeper with these additional resources:

• Tamara’s Website, Google Scholar Page & Twitter
• InterPlanetary Festival Website
• Alien Crash Site Podcast

• In 72 hours of sci-fi, postdocs transmit parental model of alien civilization [video]
• Greetings from a Triparental Planet 72 Hours of Science Pre-Printby Gizem Bacaksizlar, Stefani Crabtree, Joshua Garland, Natalie Grefenstette, Albert Kao, David Kinney, Artemy Kolchinsky, Tyler Marghetis, Michael Price, Maria Riolo, Hajime Shimao, Ashley Teufel, Tamara van der Does, and Vicky Chuqiao Yang
• Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David H. Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey, and Timothy A. Kohler
• SFI’s VP for Science Jennifer Dunne Remembers Ecologist Bob May

• Complexity 43: Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on social science
• Complexity 24: Laurent Hébert Dufresne on network epidemiology
• Complexity 19: David Kinney on the philosophy of science

• IPFest 2019 Worldbuilding Panel with Rebecca Roanhorse, Ty Franck, Daniel Abraham, Michael Drout, and Cris Moore
• David Stout on Alien Crash Site Podcast
• Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers
• Stalker (film adaptation of Roadside Picnic) by Andrei Tarkovsky
• Anathem by former SFI Miller Scholar Neal Stephenson
• Dark Integers by Greg Egan
• Aliens comic series by Dark Horse
• UFO sculpture in cover image by R.T. Davis

Most maps of the world render landscapes in 2D — yet wherever we observe ecosystems, they stratify into a third dimension. The same geometries that describe the dizzying diversity of species in the canopies of forests also govern life in other  living systems, from the oceans to the linings of our mouths. Behind the many forms, a hidden order shapes how organisms live in and on each other — and this emerging discipline of “canopy biology”  may yield important insights into modern urban life. Human societies, like gigantic swarms of ants, are elaborately coordinated super-organisms. In these enormous in-groups, one key feature is the anonymity of members. By studying a treetop world where organisms never see the ground that humans take for granted, structural ecologists glean lessons for the denizens of concrete jungles.

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’s guest, Mark Moffett, did his doctoral work at Harvard under E.O. Wilson, helped fund decades of research with wildlife photography for National Geographic, and currently holds research positions at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and as an entomologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He has resisted conventional professorship in order to climb trees in over 40 countries and write four books on ecology and evolution. In this episode, we talk about the vertical dimension that theoretical ecology has largely overlooked, and the fruits of his investigation into the nature of societies — both ant and human.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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

More on and by Mark Moffett:

Mark’s Website & Google Scholar Page

Mark’s SFI Virtual Seminar on Canopy Biology & SFI’s Twitter Thread

Ant colonies: building complex organizations with minuscule brains and no leaders

Comparative Canopy Biology and the Structure of Ecosystems

“What’s 'up?’ A critical look at the basic terms of canopy biology” 

Supercolonies of billions in an invasive ant: What is a society?

Supercolonies, nests, and societies: distinguishing the forests from the trees

Human Identity and the Evolution of Societies

Why a Universal Society Is Unattainable

Divided We Stand: Patriotism vs. Nationalism

More related reading:

Marcus Hamilton, Robert Walker, Chris Kempes - Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures

Rodney Brooks & Anita M. Flynn - Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

Related episodes of Complexity Podcast:

10 - Melanie Moses re: ant colony scaling and 3D chip architecture

17 - Chris Kempes re: stromatolites and scaling ribosomal and genetic volumes inside cells leading to multicellularity

39 - Eddie Lee re: fractal violence

43 - Vicky Yang re: out-group formation

20 - Albert Kao re: stalemates in collective computation

35 - Geoffrey West re: overlay of social networks in geographic space vs. cyberspace

It’s tempting to believe that people can outsource decisions to machines — that algorithms are objective, and it’s easier and fairer to dump the burden on them. But convenience conceals the complicated truth: when lives are made or broken by AI, we need transparency about the way we ask computers questions, and we need to understand what kinds of problems they’re not suited for. Sometimes we may be using the wrong models, and sometimes even great models fail when fed sparse or noisy data. Applying physics insights to the practical concerns of what an algorithm can and cannot do, scientists find points at which questions suddenly become unanswerable. Even with access to great data, not everything’s an optimization problem: there may be more than one right answer. Ultimately, it is crucial that we understand the limits of the technology we leverage to help us navigate our complex world — and the values that (often invisibly) determine how we use it.

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.

We kick off 2021 with SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore, who has written over 150 papers at the boundary between physics and computer science, to talk about his work in the physics of inference and with The Algorithmic Justice Project.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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

Related Reading:

Cris Moore’s Google Scholar Page

The Algorithmic Justice Project

“The Computer Science and Physics of Community Detection: Landscapes, Phase Transitions, and Hardness"

The Ethical Algorithm by SFI External Professor Michael Kearns

“Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment” co-authored by SFI External Professor Thalia Wheatley

“The Uncertainty Principle” with SFI Miller Scholar John Kaag

SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner on play as a form of noise generation that can knock an inference algorithm off false endpoints/local optima

Related Videos:

Cris Moore’s ICTS Turing Talks on “Complexities, phase transitions, and inference”

Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency:  Lessons from predictive models in criminal justice

Reckoning and Judgment  The Promise of AI

Easy, Hard, and Impossible Problems: The Limits of Computation. Ulam Memorial Lecture #1.

Data, Algorithms, Justice, and Fairness. Ulam Memorial Lecture #2.

Related Podcasts:

Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)

Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)

Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)

Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice