COMPLEXITY
Santa Fe Institute
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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best COMPLEXITY episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to COMPLEXITY for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite COMPLEXITY episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
03/13/24 • 33 min
Guests:
- Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New Mexico
- Hyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern University
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes
Producer: Katherine Moncure
Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano
Follow us on:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky
More info:
SFI programs: Education
Complexity Explorer:
Fractals and Scaling: Toward a Theory of Urban Scaling
Introduction to Complexity: Ant Foraging and Task Allocation
- Books:
- Scale by Geoffrey West
- Complexity: a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
Talks:
- Toward a Scientific Theory of Cities by Hyejin Youn
Papers & Articles:
- “Synergy in ant foraging strategies: memory and communication alone and in combination,” in GECCO’13: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (July 6, 2013), doi.org/10.1145/2463372.2463389
- “In vivo, in silico, in machina: Ants and Robots balance memory and communication to collectively exploit information,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012
- “What makes individual I’s a Collective We; coordination mechanisms & costs” in arXiv (November 20, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.02113
- “How does innovation push its boundaries?” in 43 Visions for Complexity, Exploring Complexity: Volume 3 (January 2017), doi.org/10.1142/9789813206854_0043
5 Listeners
06/30/23 • 99 min
Episode Title and Show Notes:
106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.
We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. 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 SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.
Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
📚Reading & Videos:
The Lost World
by Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen
InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
by SFI
Complexity Economics
by SFI Press
Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)
How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
by Michael Garfield
Artists Misusing Technology
by NXT Museum
The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)
The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer
Welcome To Jurassic Park
by Tink Zorg
(re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains)
Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine
(re: Albert Kao)
Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack
Argument Making In The Wild
by Simon DeDeo
(SFI Seminar re: egregores)
Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
COMPLEXITY
02/24/23 • 60 min
And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental 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.
In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism.
Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more...
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.
If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!
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 Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students.
(OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!)
Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
Episode c...
2 Listeners
04/10/24 • 40 min
Guests:
- Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes
Producer: Katherine Moncure
Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano
Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera Society
Follow us on:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky
More info:
Apply for the 2024 Complexity Global School at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia
SFI programs: Education
- Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life: Introduction| Chris Kempes (Link to full playlist)
- Enroll for the course: Origins of Life
Videos:
- Asteroids, Agnostic Biosignatures, & Experimental Rock Opera with Dr. Heather Graham
- Heather Graham on Katherine Johnson
Papers & Articles:
- “Investigating the impact of x‐ray computed tomography imaging on soluble organic matter in the Murchison meteorite: Implications for Bennu sample analyses” in Meteoritics & Planetary Science (December 2023), doi.org/10.1111/maps.14111
- “The Vacant Niche Revisited: Using Negative Results to Refine the Limits of Habitability,” in bioRxiv (Nov 8, 2023), doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.06.565904
- “Observations of Elemental Composition of Enceladus Consistent with Generalized Models of Theoretical Ecosystems,” in bioRxiv (Oct 29, 2023), doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.29.564608
- “Planetary Subsurface Science and Exploration: An Integrated Consortium to Understand Subsurface Sources of Energy and the Unique Energetics of Subsurface Life,” in Mars Extant Life: What’s Next? (Nov 2019), hou.usra.edu/meetings/lifeonmars2019/pdf/5047.pdf
- “Detecting life on Earth and the limits of analogy,” in Planetary Astrobiology (June 16, 2020)
- “Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry,” in chemRxiv (Nov 16, 202), chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/resource/item/60c751e59abda27c1af8dce4/original/identifying-molecules-as-biosignatures-with-assembly-theory-and-mass-spectrometry.pdf
- “The Grayness of the Origin of Life,” in Life (May 29, 2021) doi.org/10.3390/life11060498
- “Generalized stoichiometry and biogeochemistry for astrobiological applications,” in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (July 2021), link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11538-021-00877-5
2 Listeners
10/23/19 • 50 min
If you’re a human in this century, the odds are overwhelming that you are a city-dweller. These hubs of human cultural activity exert a powerful allure – and most people understand that this appeal is due to some deep link between the density, pace, wealth, and opportunity of cities. But what is a city, really? And why have the vast majority of human beings migrated to these intense and often difficult locations? Cities breed not just ideas but also crime, disease, and inequality. We live amidst a shift in what a normal human life looks and feels like, akin to the transition from our lives as nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers — only this time, it is happening before our eyes. How can we cultivate the best that cities offer and minimize the predicaments they pose? A powerful new science of the city has emerged in just the last few years, connecting the metropolis through physics to the properties that govern animal metabolisms, ecological diversity, and economics.
This week’s guest is Luis Bettencourt, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. We spoke while he was visiting Santa Fe to lead SFI’s Global Sustainability Summer School to talk about what makes a city such a fertile zone for innovation of all kinds, and how to help ensure the future of the city is one human beings want to live in.
Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.
Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.
Visit The Mansueto Institute's Website.
Watch a short video on Bettencourt’s work to eliminate slums.
Here are the three papers we discussed in this episode:
"Toward cities without slums: Topology and the spatial evolution of neighborhoods" in Science Advances.
"The Origins of Scaling in Cities" in Science.
“Towards a statistical mechanics of cities” in Science Advances.
Learn more about SFI's Global Sustainability Summer School.
Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
2 Listeners
2 Comments
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04/05/23 • 82 min
One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order...what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers?
Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we 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 speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life.
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.
I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find.
Thank you for listening.
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
Mentioned & Related Media:
Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)
Communities in Networks
by Mason Porter, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, & Peter Mucha
Social Structure of Facebook Networks
by Amanda Traud, Peter Mucha, & Mason Porter
Critical Truths About Power Laws
by Michael Stumpf & Mason Porter
The topology of data
by Mason Porter, Michelle Feng, & Eleni Katifori
Complex networks with complex weights
by Lucas Böttcher & Mason A. Porter
A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs
by Abigail Hicock, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, & Mason Porter
A multilayer network model of the coevolution of the spread of a disease and competing opinions
by Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, & Mason Porter
Social network analysis for social neuroscientists
Elisa C Baek...
2 Listeners
03/24/23 • 66 min
For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order...but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same.
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 engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn a great deal from a careful look at Jena and the first Romantics...maybe even how to replicate their great successes and avoid their self-implosion in the face of social turbulence.
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/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — in particular, you may wish to celebrate ten years of free online courses at Complexity Explorer with SFI Professor Cris Moore’s Computation in Complex Systems, starting March 28th. Learn more in the show notes...and thank you for listening!
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
Related Reading & Listening:
Episode 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde
Episode 61 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 2: Humboldt's Dangerous Idea
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
by Andrea Wulf
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
by Andrea Wulf
Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
by Lewis Hyde
Episode 37 - The Art & Science of Resilience in the Wake of Trauma with Laurence Gonzales...
2 Listeners
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
COMPLEXITY
02/09/23 • 72 min
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.
If you’d like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!
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.
(OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!)
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
Mentioned & Related Links:
02/14/24 • 33 min
Guests:
- Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Sara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes
Producer: Katherine Moncure
Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano
Other music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Aesterial-Arts, Dijifishmusic, Greenvwbeetle, Odilon Marcenaro, Jobro, Benboncan, Bone666138, Aiwha, Josh Berry, Rubenvvuuren, and Miksmusic
Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn • Bluesky
SFI programs:
- Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life
- Education
Books & Films:
- Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, based on book by Mary Shelley
- The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann
- Signs of life: How complexity pervades biology by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin
Talks:
- Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space by Ricard Solé
- Evolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic by Ricard Solé
- A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara Walker
Papers & Articles:
- “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” in Nature (October 4, 2023) doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9
- “Time is an object” in Aeon, May 19, 2023
- “The Algorithmic Origins of Life” in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (February 6, 2013) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869
- “Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken” in Entropy (May 9, 2022), doi.org/10.3390/e24050665
- “Unicellular–multicellular evolutionary branching driven by resource limitations” (June 2, 2022) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0018
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FAQ
How many episodes does COMPLEXITY have?
COMPLEXITY currently has 115 episodes available.
What topics does COMPLEXITY cover?
The podcast is about Epidemiology, Intelligence, Cities, Collapse, Ecology, Macroeconomics, Evolution, Future, Pandemic, Covid-19, Coronavirus, Podcasts, Physics, Mathematics, Life Sciences, Science Fiction, Science, Sociology, Science Education, Political Science, Data Science, Computer Science, Biology and Artificial Intelligence.
What is the most popular episode on COMPLEXITY?
The episode title 'Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on COMPLEXITY?
The average episode length on COMPLEXITY is 57 minutes.
How often are episodes of COMPLEXITY released?
Episodes of COMPLEXITY are typically released every 13 days, 21 hours.
When was the first episode of COMPLEXITY?
The first episode of COMPLEXITY was released on Oct 9, 2019.
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