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.
OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.
OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students.
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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
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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
On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I.
by Melanie Mitchell
Seeing Like A State
by James C. Scott
Jim Rutt
Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science
by Johan Chu and James Evans
The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative
by Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles
Peter Turchin
In The Country of The Blind
by Michael Flynn
82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)
84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
Alien Crash Site Invades Complexity: Tamara van der Does on Sci-Fi Science, with Guest Co-host Caitlin McShea
Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm
Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference
Science in The Time of COVID: Michael Lachmann & Sam Scarpino on Lessons from The Pandemic
Artemy Kolchinsky on "Semantic Information" & The Physics of Meaning
Peter Dodds on Text-Based Timeline Analysis & New Instruments for The Science of Stories
Scott Ortman on Archaeological Synthesis and Settlement Scaling Theory
Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems
David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
Introducing Alien Crash Site, a new SFI Podcast with host Caitlin McShea
Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & Identities
Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West on Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature Detection
The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover)
Fractal Conflicts & Swing Voters with Eddie Lee
Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)
The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales
Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)
Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)
Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)
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