The coronavirus pandemic is in one sense a kind of prism: it reveals the many interlocking systems that, until disrupted, formed the mostly invisible backdrop of modern life, challenging the economy and our models of the world at the same time that it threatens individual and social health. The virus acts on, and invites new understanding through, the complexity we only take for granted at our peril. 

In SFI’s new essay series on the crisis, Transmission, our international community of scientists explores a spectrum of perspectives on COVID-19 to share a myriad of complex systems insights on our unprecedented situation. In this special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer, we discuss and find the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.

Read the Transmission series articles we discuss in this episode:

000: David Krakauer on Citizen-Based Medicine
001: David Kinney on Why Scientists Must Make Value Judgments in a Complex Crisis
002: Luu Hoang Duc and Jürgen Jost on Making the Most of Bad Data
003: John Harte on Reducing Conflicting Advice on Allowable Group Size
004: Simon DeDeo on Thinking out of Equilibrium

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Podcast Theme Music by Mitch Mignano.

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