Humans often mistake metrics for core values, which distorts understanding and behavior.
Many key values don’t have simple metrics, complicating governance and collective wisdom at large scales.

insights

INSIGHT

Perverse Incentives vs. Value Capture

Perverse incentives influence behavior without necessarily changing one's core values.
Value capture occurs when external simplified versions of values replace genuine motivation.

question_answer

ANECDOTE

University Rankings Impact

US News and World Report university rankings caused a two-stage impact on legal education.
Initially resisted, later administrators fully embraced rankings, changing institutional goals.

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Is It a Good Idea to Be on the Same Show?

05:04 • 5min

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Why I Still Think the US News and Rule Report Rankings Are Bad Science

10:31 • 4min

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Are You Having a Problem With Measurability?

14:42 • 3min

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Is It Hard to Achieve a Pluralistic Goal in an Educational Institution?

17:14 • 5min

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The Importance of Diversity in Organizational Structures

22:08 • 5min

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The Importance of Ambiguity as a Strategic Communication Device

26:42 • 3min

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I've Probably Oversupplied Everything

29:27 • 5min

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Is There a Good Reason Why Mathematics Shouldn't Be?

34:31 • 5min

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Is There a Package of Metrics?

39:11 • 3min

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Is There a Metric to Judge Success?

42:27 • 4min

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Is There Always a Metric?

46:44 • 3min

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Is There a Big Bottleneck in Organizational Behavior?

49:36 • 3min

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Are We Going Past the Ideal Scale of Humanity?

52:52 • 3min

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Is Complex Systems Stable?

55:50 • 2min

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The Affordance of Information Gathering in Science and Philosophy and the Arts

58:11 • 6min

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Quantitative Models of the Social World

01:03:42 • 2min

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Transparency Is Surveillance

01:05:23 • 4min

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Is the Answer to Act in Secrecy?

01:08:56 • 4min

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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.

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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.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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