Sign inOpen the app
Artwork for COMPLEXITY
Science

COMPLEXITY

Santa Fe Institute

The official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. Subscribe now and be part of the exploration!

SubscribeListen in podnodRSS feedShow website
  • 119 episodes
  • Updated Dec 4, 2024

Episodes119

Newest first
  • Dec 4, 2024 · 44 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 6: AI’s changing seasons

    In the final episode of the season, Abha sits down with Melanie to hear her perspective. They chat about Melanie’s career and research with Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They also discuss her opinions on LLMs’ current capabilities, what she thinks of existential questions like the alignment problem, how sustainable the industry is, the difficulty of making claims about concepts like “intelligence” and “understanding,” and what she thinks future technological development

  • Nov 20, 2024 · 48 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence?

    When it comes to assessing intelligence, people have all kinds of tests — the SAT, IQ tests, and so on. There’s controversy over how fairly these tests really measure human intelligence, but at the very least, we know that they correlate with some general reasoning skills when people take them. That assumption breaks down when we try to assess intelligence in non-humans. What does it mean when a large language model passes an intelligence test meant for humans? Does it actually have the same rea

  • Nov 6, 2024 · 38 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 4: Babies vs Machines

    There’s an argument to be made that if we train AI systems to learn the way babies do, we’ll get them closer to human-like intelligence. But how our own learning development functions in babyhood is still a mystery that researchers are untangling. We know that the information babies absorb is very different from how an LLM learns, and in today’s episode, with guests Linda Smith and Michael Frank we’ll attempt to look at the world through an infant’s eyes and examine why they’re able to do more w

  • Oct 23, 2024 · 45 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 3: What kind of intelligence is an LLM?

    Large language models, like ChatGPT and Claude, have remarkably coherent communication skills. Yet, what this says about their “intelligence” isn’t clear. Is it possible that they could arrive at the same level of intelligence as humans without taking the same evolutionary or learning path to get there? Or, if they’re not on a path to human-level intelligence, where are they now and where will they end up? In this episode, with guests Tomer Ullman and Murray Shanahan, we look at how large lang

  • Oct 9, 2024 · 37 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 2: The relationship between language and thought

    Complex language is unique to the human species. It’s part of how we evolved, the backbone of our societies, and one of the primary ways we judge others’ intellect. Is it our intelligence that leads to our language abilities, or conversely, does our ability for language enhance our intelligence, or both? How do language and thinking interact? And can one exist without the other? Guests: Evelina Federenko, Steve Piantadosi, and Gary Lupyan.

  • Sep 25, 2024 · 43 min

    Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 1: What is Intelligence

    Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence is either going to solve all humanity’s problems, or it’s going to kill us. Business leaders are getting ready for it to “disrupt” entire industries, and educators are re-thinking how to teach in the age of ChatGPT. It can feel like artificial intelligence is going to transform everything about the way we live. But in order to understand how to think about AI, it’s useful to take a step back. In today’s episode, we’re asking what it means to cal

  • Sep 19, 2024 · 3 min

    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 cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities

  • Apr 10, 2024 · 40 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 6: Multiple worlds, containing multitudes

    In the final episode of this season, we hear from a NASA researcher whose expertise spans from studying samples in deep, untouched regions of our planet all the way to organic chemistry happening in space. We consider the possibility of other, past origins of life on Earth and look at the rich potential to learn from sample return missions, including the recent OSIRIS-REx mission that retrieved samples of the asteroid Bennu. Abha also sits down with Chris to hear his perspective on the podcast a

  • Mar 27, 2024 · 33 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 5: How human history shapes scientific inquiry

    In this episode, we examine how the course of human history has shaped our scientific knowledge, why the physics community prioritizes some questions over others, and why progress in complex systems research is especially difficult. Academia continues to operate within set boundaries and students are taught certain concepts as fundamental and to skirt others completely. However, the history of science demonstrates that such concepts aren’t always set in stone. It’s possible that blowing open the

  • Mar 13, 2024 · 33 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives

    How do groups solve problems? Are there conditions that create a pathway to innovation and groundbreaking inventions? In today’s episode, we look at the science of collectives to learn about the patterns that emerge as human societies grow, the importance of a collective structure to foster ideas and create impact, and – from collectives like ants and immune systems – the importance of veering off the beaten path to become better at exploring and discovering.

  • Feb 28, 2024 · 29 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 3: Why is life so diverse?

    In the first two episodes of this season, we’ve examined how fundamental rules like scaling laws constrain evolution for all forms of life. But if everything is bound to these core rules, then why do we see exceptions? In this episode, Abha and Chris get into the incredible diversity of plants and animals on this planet, where that diversity comes from, and if it’s possible to make forecasts about the biosphere, just like we do for the weather. And, what happens when biodiversity is threatened?

  • Feb 14, 2024 · 33 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 2: How do we identify life?

    In this episode, Chris and Abha explore how life originated here on earth and how we might identify it in other parts of the universe. They ask two researchers about the signature characteristics of life and what common dynamics we might see among organisms outside our planet. They’ll also delve into assembly theory, a recent concept that looks at the construction of objects as a way to universally quantify life, which has ignited debate within the scientific community.

  • Jan 31, 2024 · 34 min

    Physics of Life, Ep 1: What can physics tell us about ourselves?

    Humans can live up to age 100, and not 1000 – why? Are there limits in how much our brains can think and compute? The laws of physics can help explain a lot, both about our own human bodies and how we are connected to life all around us.

  • Jun 30, 2023 · 1 hr 39 min

    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 Park Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions. We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years. Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn 📚Reading & Videos: The Lost World by Michael Crichton Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton The Evolution of Syntactic Communication by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations by SFI Complexity Economics by SFI Press Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar) How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed by Michael Garfield Artists Misusing Technology by NXT Museum The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk) The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer Welcome To Jurassic Park by Tink Zorg (re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains) Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine (re: Albert Kao) Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack Argument Making In The Wild by Simon DeDeo (SFI Seminar re: egregores) The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society by Jessica Flack (SFI Community Lecture re: “hourglass emergence”) Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together by Adi Livnat In The Country of The Blind (_Afterword: An Introduction to Cliology) by Michael Flynn An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David Wolpert Murray Gell-Mann - Information overload. A crude look at the whole (180/200) (re: the challenges of funding truly innovative research) The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction by W.J.T. Mitchell Ken Wilber Intelligence as a planetary scale process by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker Light & Magic (documentary series) on Disney+ Palantir Analytics The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Michael Levin Robustness of variance and autocorrelation as indicators of critical slowing down by Vasilis Dakos, Egbert H van Nes, Paolo D’Odorico, Marten Scheffer The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone by Cosma Shalizi 🎧Podcasts: Complexity Podcast 001 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science 009 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making 012 - Matthew Jackson on Social and Economic Networks 013 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics 016 - Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy 036 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? 056 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution 060 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt’s Naturegemälde 065 - Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers 067 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics 072 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology 087 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence 090 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome 92 - Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society 099 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Future Fossils Podcast 194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions 190 - Lauren Seyler on Dark Microbiology & Right Relations in Science 165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia 125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano Other music by Michael Garfield

  • Apr 5, 2023 · 1 hr 22 min

    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 innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find. Thank you for listening. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Media: Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording) Communities in Networks by Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter Mucha Social Structure of Facebook Networks by Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason Porter Critical Truths About Power Laws by Michael Stumpf & Mason Porter The topology of data by Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni Katifori Complex networks with complex weights by Lucas Böttcher & Mason A. Porter A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs by Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason Porter A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions by Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason Porter Social network analysis for social neuroscientists Elisa C Baek, Mason A Porter, & Carolyn Parkinson Community structure in social and biological networks by Michelle Girvan & Mark Newman The information theory of individuality by David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica C Flack, Nihat Ay Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility by Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo Barberá, Monica Bhole & Nils Wernerfelt Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, M.E.J. Newman Gregory Bateson (Wikipedia) Complexity Ep. 99 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. “Why Do We Sleep?” by Van Savage & Geoffrey West at Aeon Magazine Complexity Ep. 4 - Luis Bettencourt on The Science of Cities Complexity Ep. 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks Complexity Ep. 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1) Complexity Ep. 100 - Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds

  • Mar 24, 2023 · 1 hr 6 min

    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 forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics…maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence. If you value our research and communication efforts, Please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes…and thank you for listening! Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Related Reading & Listening: Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self by Andrea Wulf Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales “Nature” (1844) by Ralph Waldo Emerson Chopin’s Preludes Finnegans Wake by James Joyce InterPlanetary Voyager (Interactive Golden Record Liner Notes) by SFI’s InterPlanetary Festival Blue Planet (BBC) with David Attenborough

  • Mar 9, 2023 · 1 hr 6 min

    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 network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this episode we speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. For HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes. Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information. There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th. Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist. You can also join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Links: Carlos publishes the Complexity Digest Newsletter. His SFI Seminars to date: A Brief History of Balance Emergence, (Self)Organization, and Complexity Criticality: A Balance Between Robustness and Adaptability Festina lente (the slower-is-faster effect) Antifragility: Dynamical Balance W. Ross Ashby & The Law of Requisite Variety Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton How can we think the complex? by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy by Carlos Gershenson Complexity and Philosophy by Francis Heylighen, Paul Cilliers, Carlos Gershenson Heterogeneity extends criticality by Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, Octavio Zapata, Omar K, Pineda, Gerardo Iñiguez, and Carlos Gershenson When Can we Call a System Self-organizing? by Carlos Gershenson and Francis Heylighen Temporal, Structural, and Functional Heterogeneities Extend Criticality and Antifragility in Random Boolean Networks by Amahury Jafet López-Díaz, Fernanda Sánchez-Puig, and Carlos Gershenson When slower is faster by Carlos Gershenson, Dirk Helbing Self-organization leads to supraoptimal performance in public transportation systems by Carlos Gershenson Dynamics of ranking by Gerardo Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, & Albert-László Barabási Self-Organizing Traffic Lights by Carlos Gershenson Dynamic competition and resource partitioning during the early life of two widespread, abundant and ecologically similar fishes by A. D. Nunn, L. H. Vickers, K. Mazik, J. D. Bolland, G. Peirson, S. N. Axford, A. Henshaw & I. G. Cowx Towards a general theory of balance by Carlos Gershenson A Calculus for Self-Reference by Francisco Varela On Some Mental Effects of The Earthquake by William James Self-Organization Leads to Supraoptimal Performance in Public Transportation Systems by Carlos Gershenson Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. Complexity Ep. 99 Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology Complexity Ep. 72 David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method Complexity Ep. 45 The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand Michael Lachmann Stuart Kauffman Andreas Wagner Cosma Shalizi Nassim Taleb Does Free Will Violate The Laws of Physics? Big Think interviews Sean Carroll

  • Feb 24, 2023 · 1 hr

    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 turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn (SOME) Mentioned & Related Links: David Krakauer Mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics by Nicolas Gisin Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math by Natalie Wolchover The Principle of Least Action Path Integral Formulation Closed Timelike Curve The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Kip Thorne James Gleick Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman The Physicist and The Philosopher by Jimena Canales Ted Chiang “Story of Your Life” Arrival Exhalation Russian Doll (TV series) “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” David Wolpert Complexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication Complexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain Intuitionist Mathematics

  • Feb 9, 2023 · 1 hr 12 min

    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 reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.) Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time! Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more. Space is limited! The application deadline has been extended to March 1st. OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science. OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students. (OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!) Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Mentioned & Related Links: Transparency Is Surveillance by C. Thi Nguyen The Seductions of Clarity by C. Thi Nguyen The Natural Selection of Bad Science by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving by Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro Pérez Velilla, Mikkel Werling The Division of Cognitive Labor by Philip Kitcher The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I. by Melanie Mitchell Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott Jim Rutt Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science by Johan Chu and James Evans The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative by Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles Peter Turchin In The Country of The Blind by Michael Flynn 82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01) 83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02) 84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03) 91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04) 97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)