COMPLEXITY
The official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute, exploring complex systems and interdisciplinary science. Each episode features conversations with researchers and thinkers who study everything from economics to evolution. Subscribe to join the exploration of complexity.
Episodes
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 6: AI’s changing seasons
Guest: Melanie Mitchell, Resident Professor, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli PhobooProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoFollow us on:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • BlueskyMore info:Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationCompetition: ARC PrizeBooks: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden B
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence?
Guests: Erica Cartmill, Professor, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University BloomingtonEllie Pavlick, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Linguistics, Brown UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie MitchellProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoFollow us on:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • BlueskyMore info:Tutorial: Fundamentals
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 4: Babies vs Machines
Guests: Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University BloomingtonMichael Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Department of Psychology, Stanford UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie MitchellProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch Mignan
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 3: What kind of intelligence is an LLM?
Guests: Tomer Ullman, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard UniversityMurray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics, Department of Computing, Imperial College London; Principal Research Scientist, Google DeepMindHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie MitchellProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoFollow us on:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedI
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 2: The relationship between language and thought
Guests: Evelina Fedorenko, Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MITSteve Piantadosi, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Head of Computation and Language Lab, UC BerkeleyGary Lupyan, Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-MadisonHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie MitchellProducer: Katherine Moncu
Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 1: What is Intelligence
Guests: Alison Gopnik, SFI External Faculty; Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley; Member of Berkeley AI Research GroupJohn Krakauer, SFI External Faculty; John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie MitchellProducer: Katherine Mo
Trailer for The Nature of Intelligence
Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence?
In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal
Physics of Life, Ep 6: Multiple worlds, containing multitudes
Guests: Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoAdditional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera SocietyFollow us on:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • BlueskyMore in
Physics of Life, Ep 5: How human history shapes scientific inquiry
Guests: David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe InstituteSean Carroll, External Professor and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoAdditional sound credits: Digifishmusic,
Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives
Guests: Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New MexicoHyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoFollow us on:Twitter
Physics of Life, Ep 3: Why is life so diverse?
Guests: Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of ArizonaPablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de ChileHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoOther m
Physics of Life, Ep 2: How do we identify life?
Guests: Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu FabraSara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex SystemsHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music by: Mitch MignanoOther music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Ae
Physics of Life, Ep 1: What can physics tell us about ourselves?
Guests: Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of PennsylvaniaGeoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music: Mitch MignanoOther Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Cr
Trailer for Physics of Life
Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute
Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Episode Title and Show Notes:106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic ParkWelcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers develo
Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology
One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of
Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic force
Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems
How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide netw
Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reason
Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neurosc
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and
Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere
What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse a
Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that the
John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
What makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about th
John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another dis
David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed,
Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin o
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and
Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and
Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
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 dat
Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
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
Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
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 d
Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
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 pheno
Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
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 eco
Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
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 un
Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
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, firm
Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)
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 f
David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
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 hono
C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
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 cont
Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
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 stron
The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
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 hid
Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
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 th
Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier
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,
Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
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 off
Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1
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
Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West
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
Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems
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 extraor
Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
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 knowle
Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 2): Tracing Linguistic Innovation
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
Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 1): Surfacing Invisible Labor
When British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow described the sciences and humanities as “two cultures” in 1959, it wasn’t a statement of what could or should be, but a lament over the sorry state of western society’s fractured intellectual life. Over sixty years later the costs of this fragmentation are even more pronounced and dangerous. But advances in computing now make it possible for historian
W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics
Can you write a novel using only nouns? Well, maybe…but it won’t be very good, nor easy, nor will it tell a story. Verbs link events, allow for narrative, communicate becoming. So why, in telling stories of our economic lives, have people settled into using algebraic theory ill-suited to the task of capturing the fundamentally uncertain, open and evolving processes of innovation and exchange?Welco
W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)
What is the economy? People used to tell stories about the exchange of goods and services in terms of flows and processes — but over the last few hundred years, economic theory veered toward measuring discrete amounts of objects. Why? The change has less to do with the objective nature of economies and more to do with what tools theorists had available. And scientific instruments — be they mat
Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
Whether in an ecosystem, an economy, a jazz ensemble, or a lone scholar thinking through a problem, critical transitions — breakdowns and breakthroughs — appear to follow universal patterns. Creative leaps that take place in how mathematicians “think out loud” with body, chalk, and board look much like changes in the movement through “music-space” traced by groups of improvisers. Society itself ap
Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry
We are all investors: we all make choices, all the time, about our allocation of time, calories, attention… Even our bodies, our behavior and anatomy, represent investment in specific strategies for navigating an evolving world. And yet most people treat the world of finance as if it is somehow separate from the rest of life — including people who design the tools of finance, or who come up with e
Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers
The popular conception of ants is that “anatomy is destiny”: an ant’s body type determines its role in the colony, for once and ever. But this is not the case; rather than forming rigid castes, ants act like a distributed computer in which tasks are re-allocated as the situation changes. “Division of labor” implies a constant “assembly line” environment, not fluid adaptation to evolving conditions
Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree and Devin White
Seventy thousand years ago, humans migrated on foot across the ancient continent of Sahul — the landmass that has since split up into Australia and New Guinea. Mapping the journeys of these ancient voyagers is no small task: previous efforts to understand prehistoric migrations relied on coarse estimates based on genomic studies or on spotty records of recovered artifacts.Now, progress in the fie
Mark Ritchie on A New Thermodynamics of Biochemistry, Part 2
This week we conclude our two-part discussion with ecologist Mark Ritchie of Syracuse University on how he and his SFI collaborators are starting to rethink the intersections of thermodynamics and biology to better fit our scientific models to the patterns we observe in nature. Most of what we know about the enzymatic processes of plant and animal metabolisms comes from test tube experiments, not
Mark Ritchie on A New Thermodynamics of Biochemistry, Part 1
Deep inside your cells, the chemistry of life is hard at work to make the raw materials and channel the energy required for growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Few systems are as intricate or as mysterious. For this reason, how a cell does what it does remains a frontier for research — and, consequently, theory often grows unchecked by solid data. Most of what we know about the enzymatic proces
Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea
The 19th Century saw many transformations: the origins of ecology and modern climatology, new unifying theories of the living world, the first Big Science projects, revolutions in the Spanish colonies, new information systems for the storage and representation of data… Many of these can be traced back to the influence of one singular explorer, Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was one of the last t
Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde
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
Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life
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 tr
Orit Peleg on the Collective Behavior of Honeybees & Fireflies
“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
Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs
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
J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution
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
James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design
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” int
David Stork on AI Art History
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 deciph
Alien Crash Site Invades Complexity: Tamara van der Does on Sci-Fi Science, with Guest Co-host Caitlin McShea
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 COMPLE
Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm
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 th
Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference
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 b
Science in The Time of COVID: Michael Lachmann & Sam Scarpino on Lessons from The Pandemic
COVID-19 hasn’t just disrupted the “normal” of everyone’s social practices in what we take for granted as “daily life.” The pandemic has also, more granularly, changed the way scientists research and publish; it has changed the way science interfaces with institutions as varied as local governments and cell phone companies; it has changed the way we host and produce this podcast. This episode, for
Artemy Kolchinsky on "Semantic Information" & The Physics of Meaning
Matter, energy, and information: the holy trinity of physics. Understanding the relations between these measures of our world are one of the big questions of complex systems science.The laws of thermodynamics tell us that entropy (loosely but somewhat inaccurately speaking, “disorder”) increases in any closed material system. But at the same time living systems constantly pump out entropy, thereby
Peter Dodds on Text-Based Timeline Analysis & New Instruments for The Science of Stories
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”– Vladimir Ilyich LeninWhen human beings saw the first pictures of the Earth from space, the impact was transformative. New instruments for taking in new vistas, for understanding our relationships and contexts at a different scale, have in some ways defined the history of not just science but the evolution of inte
Scott Ortman on Archaeological Synthesis and Settlement Scaling Theory
The modern world has a way of distancing itself from everything that came before it…and yet the evidence from archaeology supports a different story. While industrial societies tend to praise markets and advanced technologies as the main drivers of the last few centuries of change, a careful study of civilizations as distinct as Ancient Rome, Peru, and Central Mexico reveals an underlying uniformi
Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems
Organisms aren’t the only products of the evolutionary process. Cultural products such as writing, art, and music also undergo change over time, subject to both the constraints of the physical environment and the psychologies of those who make them. In recent years, the study of cultural evolution has exploded with new insights — revelations into the dynamics of how culture is transmitted, how it
David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
On the one hand, we have math: a world of forms and patterns, a priori logic, timeless and consistent. On the other, we have physics: messy and embodied interactions, context-dependent and contingent on a changing world. And yet, many people get the two confused, including physicists and mathematicians. Where the two meet, and the nature of the boundary between them, is a matter of debate — one of
Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities
Whether you live in the USA or have just been watching the circus from afar, chances are that you agree: “polarization” dominates descriptions of the social landscape. Judging from the news alone, one might think the States have never been so painfully divided…yet nuanced public polls, and new behavioral models, suggest another narrative: the United States is largely moderate, and people have much
Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Now, maybe more than ever before, it is time to learn the art of skepticism. Amidst compounded complex crises, humankind must also navigate a swelling tidal wave of outright lies, clever misdirections, and well-meant but dangerous mistaken claims….in other words, bullshit. Why is the 21st Century such a hotbed of fake news? How can we structure our networks and their incentives to mitigate disinf
Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature Detection
Is there life on Mars? Or Titan? What are we even looking for? Without a formal definition, inquiries into the stars just echo noise. But then, perhaps, the noise contains a signal… To find life elsewhere in the universe requires us to wager a defined biology, to come to terms with what it means to be alive. Looking out is looking in, to ask the hardest question ever: How do we find something we m
The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover)
One of the defining characteristics of complex systems science is the shift in emphasis from objects to relationships and processes. How is information related to matter and energy, and how do the distinct formulations of different scientific lineages braid together in a unifying pattern? This search for a more fundamental understanding drives directly into some of the biggest questions science ha
