Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexity of driving comes into ever-sharper and more daunting focus. In 2022, even the most capable robotic cars aren’t self-determining agents but linked into swarms and acting as the tips of a vast and hidden web of design, programming, legislation, and commercial interest. Infrastructure is more than the streets and signs but includes licensing requirements, road rules, principles of product liability, and many other features that form the landscape to which driverless cars continue to adapt, and which they will increasingly alter.While most ethical debates about them seem to focus on the so-called “Trolley Problem” of how to teach machines to make decisions that minimize human casualties, there are many other wicked problems to consider:Is automated driving a technological solution or a policy solution? Should policymakers have the same expectations for automated and conventional driving? How safe must an automated vehicle be for deployment? Should humans or computers have ultimate authority over a given action? Should harm that a human could have prevented somehow outweigh harm that a human caused? Given that a hacker could infect entire fleets, maps, or real-time communication between cars, how much new risk are we willing to take to reduce the more traditional safety hazards with which we are familiar? And, perhaps most surreally: How do you ticket a robot, and who should pay?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 to Bryant Walker Smith (Twitter) at the University of South Carolina School of Law and The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford, whose work centers on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. We link up to explore the myriad complexities — technological, regulatory, and sociocultural — surrounding the development and roll-out of new mobility platforms that challenge conventional understanding of the boundaries between person, vehicle, institution, and infrastructure. Buckle up and lean back for a dynamic discussion on the ever-shifting locii of agency, privacy and data protection, the relationship between individuals, communities, and corporations…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.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInDiscussed:• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Transport• Who is driving driverless cars?• From driverless dilemmas to more practical commonsense tests for automated vehicles• Who’s Responsible When A Self-Driving Car Crashes?• How Do You Ticket a Driverless Car?• Controlling Humans and Machines• Regulation and the Risk of Inaction• Government Assessment of Innovation Shouldn’t Differ for Tech Companies• New Technologies and Old Treaties• It’s Not The Robot’s Fault! Russian and American Perspectives on Responsibility for Robot HarmsMentioned:Melanie Mitchell - A.I.: A Guide for Thinking People + Complexity ep. 21Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses on The Complexity of Harm, Complexity ep. 75Cris Moore on Algorithmic Injustice, Complexity ep. 51Luis Bettencourt on Urban Networks, Complexity ep. 4Sabine Hauert on Swarming Robots, Complexity ep. 3Kevin Kelly - Out of ControlEmergent EngineeringCory DoctorowJake Harper (formerly of Zoox)InterPlanetary FestivalJose Luis BorgesW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of Technology + Complexity ep. 13Ricardo HausmannAmazon Prime Video - UploadCharles Stross - Halting StateDoyne Farmer on Market Malfunction, Complexity ep. 56Marten Scheffer on Autocorrelation & Collapse, Complexity ep. 33

Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The society itself is a kind of individual that gathers information and adapts to its surroundings by encoding stable environmental features in the power relationships between its members. But what works for the society at large often results in violence and inequity for its members; as the founder of this field of research put it, “A grave seriousness lies over the chicken yard.” Over the last hundred years, the science of dominance hierarchies has bloomed faster than a saloon brawl — branching out for deeper understanding of the lives of everything from fish to insects, apes to parakeets. Today, amidst clashing national and corporate titans, systemic economic inequality, and legitimacy crises in the institutions that once served to maintain (admittedly unfair) order, the time is ripe to turn to and learn from what science has discovered about the fundamental mechanisms that underly both human nature and the rest of it: who loses and who wins, and why, and at what cost?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 former ASU-SFI Fellow Elizabeth Hobson (Website | Twitter), now an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, about the last century of pecking order research. Dobson just co-edited an issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B devoted to this topic, and we unpack her and others’ contributions to this volume — including retrospectives, literature reviews, quantitative analysis, and a look at the current state and frontiers of the science of what we can colloquially call “punching up and down”…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.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInPapers & People Discussed Include:• The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchiesEli D. Strauss, James P. Curley, Daizaburo Shizuka and Elizabeth A. Hobson• Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy researchElizabeth A. Hobson• DomArchive: a century of published dominance dataEli D. Strauss, Alex R. DeCasien, Gabriela Galindo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Daizaburo Shizuka and James P. Curley• Social hierarchies and social networks in humansDaniel Redhead and Eleanor A. Power• Dominance in humansTian Chen Zeng, Joey T. Cheng and Joseph Henrich• From equality to hierarchySimon DeDeo and Elizabeth A. Hobson• More is DifferentPhil Anderson• Environmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela, Eric Libby, Jeremy Van Cleve, Florence Débarre, Maxime Deforet, William R. Harcombe, Jorge Peña, Sam P. Brown, Michael E. Hochberg• Jessica Flack• Michael Mauboussin• Joshua Bell• Robert Kegan• Thorleif Schjelderup-EbbeRelated Podcast Episodes Include:• Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life• Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology• Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers• Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs• Fractal Conflicts & Swing Voters with Eddie Lee• Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)• Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks• Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is vast; some sci-fi writers pay less tribute to the line between the possible and the impossible. Others, though, adopt a far more sober tactic and write “hard” sci fi that does its best to stay within the limits of our current paradigm while rooting visions of the future that can grow beyond and beckon us into a bigger, more adventurous reality.The question we might ask, though, is: which one is which? Our bounded rationality, our sense for what is plausible, is totally dependent on our personal life histories, cultural conditioning, information diet, and social network biases. One person’s linear projections seem too conservative; another person’s exponential change seems like a fantasy. If we can say one thing about our complex world, it might be that it always has, and always will, defy our expectations…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 join up with Caitlin McShea and the InterPlanetary Project’s Alien Crash Site podcast for a wild discussion with SFI Trustee, technologist, and philosopher Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey. This book takes readers forward more than a century into a highly automated, highly-stratified post-climate-change world in which our protaganist defies the rigid norms of his society to follow fundamental questions about mind, life, purpose, meaning, consciousness, and truth. It is a perfect backdrop to our conversation on the role of complex systems science in our understanding of both present-day society and the futures that may, or may never, come to pass…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.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInGo Deeper With These Related MediaScience:Paul Smaldino: The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societiesGeoffrey West: ScaleBob May: Will a Large Complex System be Stable?Melanie Mitchell: The Collapse of Artificial IntelligenceMelanie Mitchell: On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in AIElisa Heinrich Mora et al.: Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United StatesSFI ACtioN Climate Change Seminar: Complexity of SustainabilityRaissa D’Souza: The Collapse of NetworksDavid Krakauer: Preventative Citizen-Based MedicineSimon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson: From equality to hierarchyPeter Turchin: The Double Helix of Inequality and Well-BeingSpeculative Fiction:2019 IPFest World Building Panel Discussion with Rebecca Roanhorse, James S.A. Correy, and Cris MooreRobin Hanson: Age of EmAyn Rand: Atlas ShruggedPeter Watts: BlindsightIsaac Asimov: FoundationThe Strugatsky Brothers: Roadside PicnicPodcast Episodes:Complexity 10: Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationComplexity 14: W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The EconomyComplexity 19: David Kinney on the Philosophy of ScienceComplexity 21: Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't KnowComplexity 22: Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & SongbirdsComplexity 36: Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Complexity 51: Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of InferenceThe Jim Rutt Show 152: Gary Bengier on Hard Sci-Fi Futures

COVID 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 deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on Complexity, we conclude our conversation (recorded on December 9th last year) with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico.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). Learn more at SFIPress.org. Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated Reading & Listening:“Spatially distributed infection increases viral load in a computational model of SARS-CoV-2 lung infection”by Melanie E. Moses et al. incl. Stephanie Forrest“Sunsetting As An Adaptive Strategy”by Roberta Romano and Simon A. Levin“The Virus That Infected The World”by David Krakauer & Dan RockmoreA Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination ProgramLegacies of Harm, Social Mistrust & Political Blame Impede A Robust Societal Response to The Evolving COVID-19 PandemicHow To Fix The Vaccine RolloutModels That Protect The VulnerableComplexities in Repair for Harm (Kathy’s SFI Seminar)"The inevitable shift towards science as crisis response is a call to arms for complexity science. How well we will be able to meet these challenges will determine the future path of humanity."- Miguel FuentesAlso Mentioned:Jessica Flack, James C. Scott, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Joseph Henrich, Luis Bettencourt, Matthew Jackson, David Kinney

Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, acting on, and being acted upon by the same nested networks. Our fates are intertwined, but our destinies diverge like weather forecasts, hingeing on small variations in contingency: the circumstances of our birth, the changing contexts of our lives. Seen through a complex systems science lens, the problem of unfairness — in economic opportunity, in health care access, in susceptibility to a pandemic — stays wicked. But the insights therein could steer society toward a much better future, or at least help mitigate the worst of what we’re left to deal with now. This is where the rubber meets the road — where quantitative models of the lung could inform economic policy, and research into how we make decisions influences who survives the complex crises of this decade.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, in a conversation recorded on December 9th 2021, we speak with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. In the first part of a conversation that — like COVID itself — will not be contained, and spends much of its time visiting the poor and under-represented, we discuss everything from how the network topology of cities shapes the outcome of an outbreak to how vaccine hesitancy is a path-dependent trust fail anchored in the history of oppression. Melanie and Kathy offer insights into how to fix the vaccine rollout, how better scientific models can protect the vulnerable, and how — with the help of complex systems thinking — we may finally be able to repair the structural inequities that threaten all of us, one boat or many.  Subscribe for Part Two in two weeks!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!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated Reading & Listening:A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vaccination ProgramLegacies of Harm, Social Mistrust & Political Blame Impede A Robust Societal Response to The Evolving COVID-19 PandemicHow To Fix The Vaccine RolloutModels That Protect The VulnerableComplexities in Repair for Harm (Kathy’s SFI Seminar)How a coastline 100 million years ago influences modern election results in Alabama @ Reddit🎧 Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)🎧 Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference🎧 Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making🎧 Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks🎧 Luis Bettencourt on The Science of CitiesMentions Include:Johan Chu, James Evans, Sam Scarpino, Simon DeDeo, Tony Eagan, Matthew Jackson, Mirta Galesic, Stuart Firestein, David Kinney, Jessica Flack, Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Cris Moore, Miguel Fuentes, Stephanie Forrest, David Krakauer, Luis BettencourtMany additional resources in the show notes for the next episode!  Stay tuned…

If 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 N95 mask distribution, log-jammed shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, superspreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks. Ultimately, the effects go even deeper: How has COVID changed our understanding of individuality — the self and its relationship to other selves?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.In this special year-end wrap-up episode, we speak with  SFI President David Krakauer and former SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about The Complex Alternative, a new SFI Press volume gathering the perspectives of over 60 members of the complex systems research community on COVID-19 — not just the disease but the webbed and embedded systems it revealed.Complexity Podcast will take a winter hiatus over the holidays and return on Wednesday, January 12th. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe 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 that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna, Austria. Learn more at santafe.edu/gains.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated Reading & Listening:The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 PandemicSelected contributions from that volume:David Kinney - Why We Can’t Depoliticize A PandemicSimon DeDeo - From Virus To SymptomOn Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of CrisisCristopher Moore on the heavy tail of outbreaksSidney Redner on exponential growth processesAnthony Eagan - The COVID-19-Induced Explosion of Boutique NarrativesCarrie Cowan on the future of educationMelanie Mitchell - The Double-Edged Sword of Imperfect MetaphorsDanielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi - Prediction and Policy in a Complex SystemAdditional Media:John Kaag - What Thoreau can teach us about the Great ResignationKyle Harper - The Fall of the Roman Empire (SFI Talk)Niall Ferguson’s Networld, Part 1 “Disruption” feat. Geoffrey WestNeal Stephenson, SFI Miller ScholarThe Limits of Human Scale - David Pakman interviews Geoffrey WestSamuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin - The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrativeJonathan Rausch - The Constitution of KnowledgeLaurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & InterventionsScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)New Directions in Science Emerge from Disconnection and Discordby Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei WuScaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United Statesby Elisa Heinrich Mora, Jacob J. Jackson, Cate Heine, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Christopher P. Kempes

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!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated 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-Rad1 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West38 - Fighing Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (Garland, Galesic, Olsson)43 - Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities51 - 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 pandemicTransmission T-031: Melanie Moses and Kathy Powers on models that protect the vulnerableAlso Mentioned:Simon DeDeoElizabeth HobsonDanielle AllenAlexander De TocquevilleStewart BrandSafiya NobleFilippo MenczerJessica FlackRajeev GandhiScott AdamsDavid Brin

What makes a satisfying explanation? Understanding and prediction are two different goals at odds with one another — think fundamental physics versus artificial neural networks — and even what defines a “simple” explanation varies from one person to another. Held in a kind of ecosystemic balance, these diverse approaches to seeking knowledge keep each other honest…but the use of one kind of knowledge to the exclusion of all others leads to disastrous results. And in the 21st Century, the difference between good and bad explanations determines how society adapts as rapid change transforms the world most people took for granted — and sends humankind into the epistemic wilds  to find new stories that will help us navigate this brave new world.This week we dive deep with SFI External Professor Simon DeDeo at Carnegie Mellon University to explore his research into intelligence and the search for understanding, bringing computational techniques to bear on the history of science, information processing at the scale of society, and how digital technologies and the coronavirus pandemic challenge humankind to think more carefully about the meaning that we seek, here on the edge of chaos…If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you  listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInWorks Discussed:“From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning”Zachary Wojtowicz & Simon DeDeo (+ SFI press release on this paper)“Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism”Simon DeDeo (SFI lecture video)“From equality to hierarchy”Simon DeDeo & Elizabeth HobsonThe Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 PandemicSFI Press (with “From Virus to Symptom” by Simon DeDeo)“Boredom and Flow: An Opportunity Cost Theory of Attention-Directing Motivational States”Zachary Wojtowicz, Nick Chater, & George Loewenstein“Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution”Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David H. Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey, & Timothy A. Kohler “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”Johan Chu and James Evans“Will A Large Complex System Be Stable?”Robert MayRelated Podcast Episodes:• Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy• Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds• On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer• Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World• Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities• David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method• Science in The Time of COVID: Michael Lachmann & Sam Scarpino on Lessons from The Pandemic• Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs• Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & MathematicsMentioned:David Spergel, Zachary Wojtowicz, Stuart Kauffman, Jessica Flack, Thomas Bayes, Claude Shannon, Sean M. Carroll, Dan Sperber, David Krakauer, Marten Scheffer, David Deutsch, Jaewon Shin, Stuart Firestein, Bob May, Peter Turchin, David Hume, Jimmy Wales, Tyler Marghetis

Where does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary genius — but ideas have precedents, and moments, and it takes two different kinds of person to have and to hype them. The popularity of “influencers” past and present obscures the collaborative social processes by which ideas are born and spread. What can new tools for the study of historical literature tell us about how languages evolve…and what might a formal understanding of innovation change about the ways we work together?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 we talk conclude our two-part conversation with Emory University researcher Lauren Klein, co-author (with Catherine D'Ignazio) of the MIT Press volume Data Feminism. We talk tracing change in language use with topic modeling, the role of randomness in Data Feminism, and what this work ultimately does and does not say about the hidden seams of power in society…Subscribe to Complexity wherever you listen to podcasts — and if you value our work, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give.You can find numerous other ways to engage with us — including books, job openings, and open online courses — at santafe.edu/engage.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInRelated Reading & Listening:Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren Klein“Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies” by Lauren Klein“Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers” by Sandeep Soni, Lauren Klein, Jacob EisensteinOur Twitter thread on Lauren’s SFI Seminar (with video link)“Disentangling ecological and taphonomic signals in ancient food webs” by Jack O Shaw, Emily Coco, Kate Wootton, Dries Daems, Andrew Gillreath-Brown, Anshuman Swain, Jennifer A DunneMore resources in the show notes for Part 1: Surfacing Invisible Labor.

When British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow described the sciences and humanities as “two cultures” in 1959, it wasn’t a statement of what could or should be, but a lament over the sorry state of western society’s fractured intellectual life. Over sixty years later the costs of this fragmentation are even more pronounced and dangerous. But advances in computing now make it possible for historians and engineers to speak in one another’s languages, catalyzing novel insights in each other’s home domains. And doing so, the academics working at these intersections have illuminated hidden veins in history: the unsung influence and cultural significance of those who didn’t write the victors’ stories. Their lives and work come into focus when we view them with the aid of analytic tools, which change our understanding of the stories we’ve inherited and the shape of power in our institutions. One strain of the digital humanities called data feminism helps bring much-needed rigor to textual study at the same time it reintroduces something crucial to a deeper reconciliation of the disciplines: a human “who” and “how” to complement the “what” we have inherited as fact.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 we talk to Emory University researcher Lauren Klein, co-author (with Catherine D'Ignazio) of the MIT Press volume Data Feminism. In Part 1 of a two-part conversation, we discuss how her work leverages the new toolkit of quantitative literary studies and transforms our understanding of historical dynamics — not just in the past, but those in action as we speak…For Part 2 in two weeks, subscribe to Complexity wherever you listen to podcasts — and if you if you value our research and communication efforts, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give.You can find numerous other ways to engage with us — including job openings and open online courses — at santafe.edu/engage.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Related Reading & Listening:Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren Klein“Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies” by Lauren KleinOur Twitter thread on Lauren’s SFI Seminar (with video link)Cognition all the way down by Michael Levin & Daniel DennettComplexity 34 - Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social JusticeComplexity 42 - Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven WorldComplexity 45 - David Wolpert on the No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific MethodComplexity 64 - Reconstructing Ancient Superhighways with Stefani Crabtree & Devin White Mentions Include:Ruha Benjamin, Joy Buolamwini, Julia Lefkowitz, Ted Underwood, Derrick Spires, David Wolpert, Farita Tasnim, Stefani Crabtree, Devin White, Donna Haraway, Carl Bergstrom, Joe Bak-Coleman, Michael Levin, Dan Dennett