Episode guests
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Quick takeaways
- Democracy is a complex system vulnerable to unanticipated digital influences, requiring understanding and mitigation of threats.
- Policy recommendations for democracy include improving diversity, monitoring feedback, and emphasizing transparency in decision-making processes.
- Technology should aim to bridge the societal gap between privileged and marginalized populations and prioritize inclusion and equity in design.
Deep dives
Importance of Understanding Society for Technology Design
Sophia Noble emphasizes that designing technology for society without knowledge of society is inappropriate. Technologists often design technology without understanding how society works, leading to post-hoc fixes. Alternative forms of democracy like citizen assemblies or liquid democracy are emerging due to dissatisfaction with the current system. The power dynamics and incentives around power play a crucial role. Technology design should consider complex systems and teach computer scientists about them.
Challenges to Democracy and Stability
Democracy faces challenges from digital communications, media, economic forces, and algorithms impacting societies. Loss of diversity due to polarization undermines cooperation and provision of public goods. Democracy is a complex system with feedback loops, memory, and tipping points. Democratic processes are vulnerable to unanticipated digital influences. Research explores instability and backsliding in democracies and examines how complex system science can help understand and mitigate threats to democracy.
Policy Recommendations for Democracy
Policy recommendations for democracy include improved diversity by regulation, monitoring feedback, ensuring connectivity, recruiting credible communicators, recognizing limits of message control, and emphasizing persistence. These recommendations aim to address issues like lack of diversity, feedback loops, and transparency. It highlights the importance of inclusive and transparent decision-making processes in democratic systems.
Complexity in Democracy and Data-driven Societies
Democracy as a complex system requires transparency and accountability. However, transparency is often lacking in important areas like data collection and algorithmic decision-making. The quality of measurements, the complex consequences of mismeasurements, and the limits of existing social theories pose challenges to understanding and improving democracy. The impact of algorithmic processes and the need for transparency and ethical considerations in the digital age are areas of ongoing research.
Closing the Gap and Ensuring Marginalized Voices are Heard
The societal gap between privileged and marginalized populations is wide, and technology should aim to close this gap. Designing technology that benefits marginalized communities and helps amplify their voices is crucial. Bridging this gap requires a deep understanding of the realities and experiences of marginalized groups, and a commitment to inclusion and equity in technology design.
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 extraordinary pressure from the unanticipated influences of digital communications media, rapidly evolving economic forces, and the algorithms we’ve let loose into society.
In a new special feature at PNAS co-edited by SFI Science Board Member Simon Levin, fifteen international research teams map the jeopardy faced by democracies today — as Levin and the other editors write in their introduction to the issue, “the loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society.” And yet humankind has never been more well-equipped to understand the problems that we face. What can complex systems science teach us about this century’s threats to democracy, and how to mitigate or sidestep them? How might democracy itself transform as it adapts to our brave new world of extremist partisanship, exponential change, and epistemic crisis?
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 Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor Tina Eliassi-Rad, Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, about her complex systems research on democracy, what forces stabilize or upset democratic process, and how to rigorously study the relationships between technology and social change.
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/give. Please also be aware of our new SFI Press book, The Complex Alternative, which gathers over 60 complex systems research points of view on COVID-19 (including those from this show) — and that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna. Learn more at SFIPress.org and SantaFe.edu/Gains, respectively. Thank you for listening!
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Related Reading & Listening:
Tina’s Website & Google Scholar Page
“What science can do for democracy: a complexity science approach”
Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornette, Karim Thébault & Karoline Wiesner
“Stability of democracies: a complex systems perspective”
K Wiesner, A Birdi, T Eliassi-Rad, H Farrell, D Garcia, S Lewandowsky, P Palacios, D Ross, D Sornette and K Thébault
“Measuring algorithmically infused societies”
Claudia Wagner, Markus Strohmaier, Alexandra Olteanu, Emre Kıcıman, Noshir Contractor & Tina Eliassi-Rad
1 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science
7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice
35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West
38 - Fighing Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (Garland, Galesic, Olsson)
43 - Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities
51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice and The Physics of Inference
“Stewardship of global collective behavior” - Joe Bak-Coleman et al.
Michelle Girvan - Harnessing Chaos & Predicting The Unpredictable with A.I.
Transmission T-015: Anthony Eagan on Federalism in the time of pandemic
Transmission T-031: Melanie Moses and Kathy Powers on models that protect the vulnerable
Also Mentioned:
Simon DeDeo
Elizabeth Hobson
Danielle Allen
Alexander De Tocqueville
Stewart Brand
Safiya Noble
Filippo Menczer
Jessica Flack
Rajeev Gandhi
Scott Adams
David Brin
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