Cody Moser

In this episode, Razib Khan interviews Cody Moser, an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. They discuss the connection between population size and innovation, the benefits of fragmentation for fostering innovation, the preference for parsimony in science, the use of agent-based modeling in behavioral economics, and the differences in education and skills of immigrant populations in the US. They also explore network topology, the importance of considering evolution beyond genes, and recommend books on modeling social behavior and social evolution.

Cody Moser, author of the paper 'Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality,' discusses transient diversity, group performance vs agent level, effects of sharing intermediate results, Gini coefficient for measuring inequality, higher performance in less equal networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, generative entrenchment, implications for internet platform design, and more.

Cody Moser, a PhD candidate and Fletcher Jones Fellow at UC Merced, dives into fascinating topics about collective intelligence and cultural innovation. He unpacks how social networks influence the emergence of new ideas and the roles of diversity and inequality in innovation. Moser discusses the intricate dance between individual cognition and group dynamics, with insights from animal behavior and neural processes. He also highlights the process of cumulative cultural evolution and the unique aspects of infant communication, demonstrating how these concepts shape our social structures.