Shows
COMPLEXITYMason Porter on Community Detection and Data TopologyOne 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 di...2023-04-051h 22
COMPLEXITYComplex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James GleickAnd 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...2023-02-241h 00
COMPLEXITYSteven 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 desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wicked problem help us walk the system back into a healthy balance?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of th...2022-09-021h 11
COMPLEXITYDavid 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 honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring Emergent Political Economies, we dedicate this new sub-series of Complexity Podcast to conve...2022-04-2152 min
COMPLEXITYMultiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is politicized. But thinking across scales offers answers, insights, better questions…Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the dee...2022-01-2746 min
COMPLEXITYReflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestIf you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs — whether it’s...2021-12-221h 10
COMPLEXITYJonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & BeliefsHuman 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 Comp...2021-04-0947 min
Big BiologyCROSSOVER: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Complexity podcast from the Santa Fe Institute)This podcast was originally broadcast by Complexity, a podcast from the Santa Fe Institute on April, 20 2020.Big Biology has featured several scientists connected to the Santa Fe Institute, and now SFI has its own podcast called Complexity.You can listen to all of their episodes here: https://complexity.simplecast.com/This episode, as well as show notes, are available here: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/29Complexity features wide-ranging conversations with the Santa Fe Institute’s scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and artists who are trying to understand the deepest my...2020-08-2644 min
COMPLEXITYBetter Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)Mathematical models of the world — be they in physics, economics, epidemiology — capture only details that researchers notice and deem salient. Rather than objective claims about reality, they encode (and thus enact) our blind spots. And the externalities created by those models — microscopic pathogens invisible to the naked eye, or differences in the social network structures of two neighborhoods, or food webs disrupted by urban development — have a way of biting back when we ignore them. Structural inequality created by an insufficient model jeopardizes not just the ones left off the map, but the entire systems in which they participate. Science fic...2020-06-0840 min
COMPLEXITYExponentials, Economics, and Ecology with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 6)If COVID-19 has made anything obvious to everyone, it might be how the very small can force the transformation of the very large. Disrupt the right place in a network and exponential changes ripple outward: a virus causes a disease that leads to economic shocks and other social impacts that, in turn, re-open urban spaces to nonhuman animals and change the course of evolution.Adapting to these changes will require a different kind of understanding: one of nonlinear dynamics, feedback loops, extended selves, and the tiered and interwoven ecological and economic systems of our planet. By studying...2020-05-1147 min
COMPLEXITYEmbracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)It takes effort to embrace complexity. Simple models, simple narratives seem easier up front, their consequences only obvious in retrospect. When we talk about COVID-19 transmission rates, we’re using averages that do not offer crucial insights into how those rates may vary. When we target complex ailments with silver-bullet pharmaceuticals, we don’t address the underlying systems-level problems. Radical uncertainty resists attempts at easy answers, forcing changes in the pace at which we take shots in the dark. Sometimes, as with infection testing, we can’t seem to take shots fast enough.But understanding systems helps identi...2020-05-0544 min
COMPLEXITYRethinking Our Assumptions During the COVID-19 Crisis with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 4)COVID-19 has delivered an extraordinary shock to our assumptions, be they in how we practice education, business, research, or governance. When we base forecasts on bad data, even solid logic gives us unreliable results. Centralized authority is good for organized coherent action but isn’t agile or fine-grained enough to deal with local variance and rapidly evolving novel challenges. Surveillance can save lives but also threatens privacy upon which a diverse society depends. A longer memory might cost more to maintain, but also save more by preventing even larger economic burdens down the road.How we adapt to...2020-04-2751 min
Humans On The Loop75 - David Krakauer (Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute)This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem solving worthy of our species in this century.About SFI and the Interplanetary Project:https://santafe.edu/research/in...2018-05-291h 06