Our histories constrain what opportunities we notice and can take in life. The genes you have define the shape your body can grow into, in concert with environmental influences. But the cards you’re dealt don’t tell you how to play your hand; for that, you have to know which game you’re playing. Natural selection acts through the relationships between an organism and ecology, a business and economy. What works in one environment may fail in others. The rub is that the rules are set by the collective action of all players, so the game keeps changing as the players change: disruptions shift the so-called “fitness landscape,” opening new possibilities, reallocating fortune.
Creation and destruction, then, are two sides of the same coin: The deeper a crisis, the bigger the opportunity. Too much opportunity precipitates a crisis. A mass extinction or a market crash can be both the effect and cause of major innovations. In these punctuations, our strategies for navigating stable worlds don’t work. Amidst catastrophe, survival hinges on evolvability. What organisms, policies, and practices will rule the post-coronavirus world? To answer this, we need to ask two further questions:
“What will the new rules be?” and “Who is already suited for this brave new world, or flexible enough to turn and face the strange?”
Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s foremost complex systems science research center. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and each 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 Transmission, SFI’s new essay series on COVID-19, our community of scientists shares a myriad of complex systems insights on this unprecedented situation. This special supplementary mini-series with SFI President David Krakauer finds the links between these articles—on everything from evolutionary theory to economics, epistemology to epidemiology—to trace the patterns of a deeper order that, until this year, was largely hidden in plain sight.
If you find the information in this program useful, please consider leaving a review at Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!
Further Reading:
Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of Crisis
Santiago Elena on a Complex Systems Perspective of Viruses
Manfred Laublichler on How Every Crisis is an Opportunity
Mirta Galesica & Henrik Olsson on Opportunities for Science Communicators
Doug Erwin on Not Letting A Good Crisis Go To Waste
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.
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Michael
So we're back for week three and I feel like the first two episodes in this miniseries have really set us up to dig into this latest set of articles and find some jewels of insight in there.
David
Yeah. This one is pretty much firmly in the complexity territories now.
Michael
So the first piece we have, which links back to your discussion of the viral action of the novel coronavirus in our first episode, is by Santiago Elena. Why don't you open this one up for us?
David
Yeah. So this certainty touches all sorts of really intriguing ideas here. So for those who don't know, scientists basically does fundamental science using the virus as a model system. So if somebody is not primarily interested in the virus as an agent for disease, but he thinks about the virus the way, say a physicist who is working in quantum mechanics would think about the hydrogen atom or a biologist would think about the worm C. elegans, in relation to development.
So it's a model system and in that respect is rather late. Darwin's finches. And I want you to mention that. So folks may remember that in 1835, Darwin gets to the Galapagos archipelago, he makes these observations on the finches, which subsequently, once back in London, he realizes working with a number of others, that the bill morphology of each of these finches varies according to the habitats in which they live, the islands and in which they live, most notably the food that they eat, leaves, seeds, vampiric, insects, and so forth.
And this became known as the Darwin Finch story, and it's a story of adaptive radiation and viruses are just like that. But instead of feeding on different plants and animals, they feed on different cells. So we talked about the coronavirus feeding on the cells in the pathway regulating cardiovascular function.
But you have viruses like parvo viruses that feed and heart cells and herpes viruses that replicate in epithelial cells or hepatitis viruses and liver cells. So in that respect, they look a lot like large charismatic birds and mammals. But then there's one very crucial difference and that is that unlike large, multicellular creatures where we describe them as being members of a species, a virus is really a member of what Eigen and Schuster called a “quasi-species.” So instead of thinking of a point in space which would be a species, a type, they occupy a cloud because they're so mutable that what we think of as the lineage is a much more amorphous population of variants rather than a single category of biological variety. Should I just continue or do you want to interject on that?
Michael
He makes a distinction that I think is important here with RNA viruses and the mutation rates that I think brings us to a key point I know you wanted to discuss.
David
Yes. So now we have this rather interesting difference between a regular species and a viral quasi-species. And the great thinker in this field was one of the early frequent visitors to the Santa Fe Institute, the Nobel Prize winner, Manfred Eigen. And he had been Werner Heisenberg's student as in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that if you know more about position, then you know much less about its conjugate variable, momentum. And this is very famous and Eigen was very inspired that way of thinking and look for something like it in living systems. And what he discovered was the error threshold that if a living lineage has a very high mutation rate, there is a possibility that it can cross a threshold and vaporize itself. So think about water being heated up and becoming water vapor. If you take a virus and you start increasing its mutation rate, that cloud I described grows and at a critical point called the error threshold, that cloud diffuses into free space and the virus disappears.
And in a paper in 2002 Manfred Eigen suggested that one way that we could eliminate a virus infection is by doing something completely counterintuitive. Instead of creating a vaccine, say that prevented its infection, we're actually going to increase its mutation rate. And you'd think that would make it more adaptable. But at that critical point of the error threshold, the virus will just vaporize, it'll do what water does when you heat the temperature up above the boiling point. And this is something that Santiago has been very interested in, and in this article, he suggests a form of viral treatment based on what are called defective interfering particles or DIPs.
So when every virus infects a cell or when every quasi-species infects a cell, it generates a ton of defective viruses because even though a coronavirus, as we said, has a relatively low mutation rate, it still generates a lot of error. And so any given cell produces viruses that are viable, that could infect future cells, and viruses that are non-viable and he wants to sort of use those non-viable viruses as decoys and stick them in cells, in order that most of the viruses appropriate defective parts. So this insight of Manfred Eigen’s, that you could push a virus over the threshold, can form the basis of a treatment in terms of these defective interfering particles.
Michael
This issue of the error threshold ties in a lot from last week's conversation to pretty much everything that we're discussing today. I feel like I'll be calling back to Miguel Fuentes’ piece on the way that they were able to detect changes in the structure of social networks through Twitter data on an impending crisis before the crisis even happens. What I see there is something like this, like you know as society itself approaches this error threshold in communication—and I might be jumping ahead here but I think you know, calling the shot before we make it might be helpful—there seems like in a discussion of the opportunity of crisis, a deep relationship between the opportunity and the crisis, because there is something about this escalation of novelty, whether it's genetic or memetic, is involved in these catastrophes. It’s key to understanding why they even occur.
David
Yeah, I think there is definitely running through today's conversation this idea of error and opportunity, collapse and rebirth, and whether it's a virus or the fossil record or the behavior of financial markets and it is extremely interesting to try and understand the nature of that nexus. The Santiago paper gives one beautiful example. Viruses need to mutate to evolve in order to infect new cells and to evade the host immune system. But there is a critical value of mutation where they obliterate themselves and so it has exactly that character you're describing. And the question is, “Can we come to understand that and intervene?” And the last thing we'd want to do, and it's one of the reasons by the way, that people never used Eigen’s original proposal for viral therapy, because it looked as if we didn't know where that threshold was and we would be inadvertently making it more evolvable as opposed to pushing it if you like to collapse.
The other one I do want to mention though, since we are on the Santiago contribution is, we talked about this also before, which is in a fundamental science versus applied science. These fundamental ideas, which seem really quite esoteric—you know, go back to Heisenberg and uncertainty and mutability and selection—that actually become the basis of therapy. But it's also in practice because Santiago's lab very quickly moved all of its polymerase chain reaction machines from their lab into biohazard secure rooms. And so the machinery of basic science could be mutated into application also. And I think that's really intriguing that these events are not only opportunities to rethink basic science, but to rethink the way that science is conducted.
Michael
Yeah, which brings us real cleanly into Doug Erwin's piece about not letting a crisis go to waste. He says in there that, “In past mass extinctions, the factors favoring survival have had little to do with those that provide an advantage during ‘normal times’.” When you think about evolution making use of what is lying around, it seems like the opportunities here are in this lovely Stephen Jay Gould word, the exaptation, the appropriation of existing parts into new uses. So let's talk about Doug's paleontological big picture view on this.
David
Yeah. So paleontologists as you well know maker or a sort of a different species, they, they think about things on much longer timescales. So while we're worrying about hundreds, thousands of years, they're worrying about millions if not billions of years. So it's a very different mindset. And Doug, interestingly in a foreshadowing of what Bill Miller will talk about is talking about mass extinctions and just as paleontologists who recognize very coarsely five major mass extinctions, Bill mentions in his own lifetime, five major stock market crashes. So that was rather interesting. Most of us are familiar with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but Doug focuses on the End-Permian extinction event, the so-called Permian-Triassic extinction event about 250 million years ago, which was much, much larger with about 90% of marine species and about 70% of land species going extinct. So it was truly catastrophic event in Earth history.
But Doug makes this point that it's not the extinction itself that interests him, but what happened afterwards. And as he points out, what happened afterwards were dinosaurs and insects and mammals and turtles and perhaps even the first flowering plants. So there was something about that cataclysmic event that sort of in some sense cleared the board and allowed for the possibility, entirely new forms of life to emerge. And the question is, what are those characteristics that lead a clade or group to go extinct? What are those characteristics that allow it to survive it? And then what are the characteristics which allow new species in groups to come into existence after the extinction event. Most people are familiar with trilobites, these little arthropods that you find in the fossil record that survive an awfully long time from over 500 million years ago up until this event and then they were disappeared completely—as opposed to things like bryozoans, which are little invertebrates look like corals that survived and prospered. And in all those new forms that we mentioned before that came into existence. And I think what Doug is suggesting is borrowing an insight from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, that mass extinction events are periods of sort of creative destruction and the aftermath of creative destruction is typically innovation. And the reason for that is by and large, because all of the competitive trophic networks that had constrained the growth of lineages are now lifted, allowing for the possibility of entirely new forms to emerge and dominate.
Michael
Yeah, I’m specially fond, in a much smaller framing, of thinking about this in an ecological sense about a mature forest canopy and a tree falling and then suddenly new light reaching the forest floor. There's one way of looking at this, that it's about available resources. Like you just said, there's less competition and in some sense more to go around. Now, I mean obviously this is a kind of a morbid paleontological angle on what, what is more to go around mean? It means everything that has just died.
David
You're absolutely right. It's, it's very strange that way because most people will be familiar with this from companies, you know, that in some sense go extinct, you know, like Research In Motion with their Blackberry phone. That in some sense allowed or established the foundations for the selective context that became the adoption of the iPhone. So it's very much a part of economic life and it's certainly a part of the life of ideas, but it's difficult to reconcile with the timescales that we live in. And that's what makes the paleontological view particularly interesting, because it points out that if you integrate over long enough periods of time, you realize that these events are crucial to the kind of Earth we've become familiar with.
Michael
Doug leaves us with this question at the end of this piece, which is, why did these particular organisms, the atheists, is the turtles, the dinosaurs, why did they succeed in the wake of the Permian extinction? And you know, I think starting to answer that question carries us into Manfred Laublichler’s piece on the evolutionary fitness landscape, which is in a sense a sort of abstraction of the channels through which evolution can flow and and reach opportunity. Although I guess that's sort of an inversion of the rugged landscape as an image.
David
Yeah. So yeah, Manfred is interested in stasis and change and evolution biologists following Gould and Eldredge and others slowly came to realize that non-change required as much explanation has change. And there are essentially two sources of constraint if you like, that Manfred introduces us to. One is external and that's what we think of as fitness or natural selection. And in the 1930s Sewell Wright introduced the idea of the fitness landscape. So think of a landscape with topographical features like peaks and valleys and think of a well-adapted species as living at the top of a peak and the valley is being maladaptive intermediates. What evolution does is over the course of time shift that landscape such that different species come to prosper at different points in time. And a mass extinction event is precisely that event that completely changes the topography of Wright's fitness landscape.
So that would be an external constraint. But in the 1940s about a decade after Sewell Wright, Conrad Waddington introduced the idea of the epigenetic landscape, and that's not an external constraint. It's an internal one. And it says that development from egg to embryo to adult morphology follows a path which is very canalized or very restricted. You can't all of a sudden, for example, develop three extra limbs that grow out of your back. It's very, very improbable. And the reason for that is that the trajectory of the phenotype from egg to embryo to adult is very constrained. What he called canalized. And this has nothing to do with fitness per se because it operates on a much shorter timescale, but to do with the constraints not of trophic networks but of regulatory networks, gene regulatory networks, and they constrain the number of possible forms that can be realized. And Manfred's question I think in this article is, how do we consider the relationship between the internal epigenetic and external fitness landscapes at times of crisis? How does one influence the other? And I think it's more a question than an answer because we don't know why a change in the topography of the fitness landscape liberates regulatory networks to explore new body types.
Michael
I was just reading last night, about research on the origins of multicellularity and some experimental work done with yeasts where they were able, over the course of a year—this was published in Science—ver the course of a year compel yeasts through predation to form multicellular, like what they called a “snowflake yeast.” This was two years ago. And one of the things that that snowflake, that very prototypical multicellular organism would do… When one of its cells, you know, the oldest cells at the edges of it, the organism as it grows from the center out had the highest rate of mutation. And so they started to see early specialization in cell types because the cells at the base of those stalks of the snowflake, would commit programmed cell death and release that mutated stock out to grow its own separate colony. I wonder whether at the intersection between those two different ideas about the fitness landscape, more or less internal developmental and external evolutionary, are basically the same thing but operating at different scales. And so that brings us back to the way that slow and fast variables are related in the last conversation.
David
Yeah, it's not known. I mean there are some simple explanations. For example, if the environment is fixed that's called normalizing selection. And so rare mutations that don't align with the selection pressures tend to disappear quickly. They don't get a foothold. And it's not that they're not there, it's just that they're largely invisible. And so when the landscape changes, all of this so-called cryptic variation becomes visible. But there are more interesting mechanisms, along the lines of perhaps the yeast had you mentioned, associated with error repair proteins like chaperone proteins. So these are proteins that help other proteins fold because not all proteins fold into their right tertiary configurations that give them their function. And if you remove those chaperone proteins or down-regulate them, all sorts of protein folding patterns appear that weren't there before, because they're not all being folded into the same shape. And this allows for the possibility of new function. And there is some data to suggest that when the environment changes, these chaperone proteins are down-regulated in order to allow more protein variation to exist, which might turn out to be beneficial. So these are very new results that suggest that there are pathways connecting the external to the internal, but we don't fully understand how they work, presumably through some means of epigenetics—that is, changes to DNA or protein that's non heritable.
Michael
So this is linked to Andreas Wagner's work, right? On applying selection pressures in the laboratory, and watching the bacterial cultures flail about for a creative solution?
David
Yeah. But with bacteria because they have also quickly, you can never be sure that the variation wasn't there to begin with, but just at very low frequencies. Whereas these epigenetic mechanisms are a direct causal line from some form of sensor in the world into the cell. And I should correct myself because of course with epigenetic modifications of the genome, they are heritable. Epigenetic modification of chromatin is not. But that's in some sense the experimental challenge. Are we seeing regular evolution where we don't have to invoke a new connection between the fitness and the epigenetic landscapes, or is it something different? And that's been very difficult to tease apart.
Michael
So there's a kind of a Hail Mary pass I want to throw to you to get us to Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson's piece, which is about affordances. What is possible in that epigenetic interrelating between the organism and its environment. And it seems like it starts to possibly answer the question that Doug leaves us with about who survives the mass extinction to flourish after…Which is something in Santiago Elena's piece about the distinction between generalist and specialist viruses. Specialist viruses are sort of, as you put it, more canalized. They are narrower in their specificity and therefore more subject to disruption and that's what you see in the record of extinctions is… When I was at the University of Kansas, our head of paleontology said if you want to survive a mass extinction live on insects, be as much of a generalist as you can, soak up what resources are available rather than subsisting on a very specific resource. So with Mirta and Henrik's piece, this kind of thinking, you look at our communication modalities and cross cultural communication and this issue of scientists communicating with new audiences that if we only speak business to business or scientist to scientist, then we are less resilient in the face of disruption to our social networks.
David
Yes, no, I think there are, I think there are definitely connections. One of which is what does a crisis like the one that we're facing do to science communication, what role does it play? How willing are people to accept facts as opposed to resist them? And the other one has to do with the internal and external constraints on credibility. So let me just mention them both. So the first point that I think connects back is this observation that Mirta and her colleagues have been making, which is that people are not only influenced by reputable centralized sources of discovery but by their neighbors, by their friends, by their family and community. And in fact in many cases when forced to make a decision between a fact as presented, you buy a reputable newspaper for example, versus your neighbors, you’ll choose the opinion of your neighbor.
And the reasons are obvious: the consequences of disagreeing with the newspaper are nearly zero, whereas the consequences of disagreeing with your friends and family can be rather catastrophic. And that is very close to the external constraints of the fitness landscape versus the internal constraints of the epigenetic landscape. And scientists would be well advised to understand that. And I think we've all been seeing this in other catastrophic areas like climate change. Just presenting people with the facts and hoping that there will be in some sense absorbed and acted on is never enough, because there are other forces at play that constrain people's abilities to accept them. And the big connection to this particular episode is what happens in crisis, because in crisis, those internal epigenetic constraints are relaxed and all of a sudden more people are trusting the authority of scientists, as they point out in their article.
Medical practitioners now are considered reputable sources of information for very good reasons. And so the bigger push is, “Look, if this is true, now is the time not to become despondent about our inability to deal with the challenge, but actually to present the facts as best as we know them and ask everyone to collaborate in a rational empirical debate about how to move forward. And to extend it beyond the coronavirus to other issues like climate, which for related reasons people have been resistant to accept.” And so again, this is that “crisis in opportunity.” What happens post cataclysm? And I think they're being rather optimistic, which is nice. And considering the possibility that we'll have a different attitude towards reason.
Michael
There was something in Mirta and Henrik's piece about abstraction and how the shift in the costs of disagreeing with your community versus disagreeing with scientific authority are about how the phenomenon becomes evident to people. Like you were saying, it's a shifting in the external fitness landscape. But you had another point you said there were two pieces.
David
Yeah. So I guess one piece was this question of who is a reliable source of information, and why do local forces dominate global forces? In other words, the beliefs of your neighbor, family and friends over the beliefs of a community of putative experts. And the second point was why during a crisis, the balance of forces area shifted such that the external source of information could come to dominate. And I think that's what we've seen now. And I think you make the point, Michael, exactly that the reason why that could happen is because what felt like a very remote consideration was domesticated, because our friends and family are suffering from this disease. And so we can see it at the local level. It's become an “epigenetic” phenomenon, in that metaphorical sense and now that opens up the opportunity for us to think in a much more rational, empirical way about how best to proceed.
Michael
I'm curious how you see this linking to Bill Miller's piece because Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson are talking about a conversation that we're observing fold over itself. In an important way it's distinct—again, the Miguel Fuentes piece, part of what we're seeing is the information explosion—and I'm curious, this is the trust in scientific authority seems to be a kind of innovation at the edge of chaos like we were talking about with Santiago Elena and viral evolution. There's this threshold of social coherence. How do you see that linked to Bill’s?
David
So I think if you look at this catastrophe, it has many different elements, and for most of us it's dominated by two factors: concerns about our health and concerns about our economic prosperity. So somehow the world of a virus, the microscopic world has become aligned with the macroscopic market, and very few people have any understanding of how that connection works. And of course the history of our scholarship is a history of silos and departments and disciplines. So it's so rare to see an economist talking with an epidemiologist and I think it's again one of those creative destructions that we've seen with the coronavirus, that that is now happening. It's something of course that we've been doing at SFI for a long time and I'm extremely gratified to see it. Now his contribution from Bill is about that the market and trying to understand what's going on now.
I should just say a few words about Bill. Of course, he was the former chairman of our board. Someone we know very well, I've often thought of Bill is the Alex Honnold, the free solo climber of investment, in the sense that he can rise, you know, faster and further than anyone else, but he can also take very dramatic plunges. And so he has a very unique attitude towards risk. And he's pointed out many times that the market is a machine. It's a machine for pricing goods and services. And in order for the machine to work, it has to have the right inputs. And those are the costs of manufacture and the values that we assign to these goods and services. But when faced with uncertainty, the market does something very strange. It always assumes the worst and that produces very rapid downturns. But it also means that as soon as that input, which is that information at once becomes available, you can get very rapid upturns.
And that in part explains why the market is so volatile. Now Bill makes the point that in the course of his own career, he's seen five (including this one) major stock market crashes, which he in the Schumpeterian paleontological mode refers to as opportunities. The first in ’73, ’74 during war in the Middle East, during the Vietnam war, another in 1982, and other 1987 a fourth in 2008-2009, which for many of us experienced, and now of course the most recent. And the first is an insight into Bill as a very special kind of species. He was at the time a lieutenant in the army in Munich, in Germany, and when the market was at its worst, he went into a local Merrill Lynch office. This was long before he was in any sense involved with investment and bought shares near the market bottom and he was doing exactly what his hero, John Maynard Keynes suggested, which is that “every serious investor has to learn how to suffer grievous losses with great equanimity.”
His view was when the market is at its worst is when the investor should get up and become involved and he makes this point that just isn't the fossil record. There are new species that emerge after a mass extinction event. It is also true that in markets subsequent to a stock market crash, you see extraordinary innovation in the production of goods and services. So he introduces us to this notion of “high beta.” I have to ask everyone to sort of visualize the following graph. If you were to plot over some appropriate unit of time on the Y axis, the returns in some stock and on the X axis, the returns to the market in general, if they were perfectly correlated and you fitted a regression line through that data, the slope of that line would be one and your stock would behave, just let the market.
But if your stock is more volatile than the market, then that beta is greater than one. So a small change in the market corresponds to a very big change in your particular stocks. And Bill describes himself as a high beta investor, which means that he will pick typically cyclical stock, which has certain characteristics, which make them rather volatile in times of uncertainty, but with the possibility that they'll do extraordinarily well. He’s one of these people that has the ability to in some sense consider the long timescale. Now not all of us can do that. I mean I'm not in that position. But if you do and you can see through to the end of the cataclysm, typically you're positioned to do extraordinarily well.
And this is an insight that John Templeton made when he said you always buy at the point of maximum pessimism, which feels counter to our instinct, but is the adaptive thing in the cultural setting to do. So I think Bill is presenting us with a kind of an insight into the mind of a free solo investor who has done extraordinarily well by understanding fast and slow timescales and the behavior of markets and how things that might do badly during a crisis might do extraordinarily well after it. And so in some sense we want to develop this long temporal vision to sustain these periods of uncertainty. And consider what we imagined might do well in an entirely new context.
Michael
So to elaborate that extinction and evolution metaphor into Bill's piece, there’s a couple things here. One is he talks about, he says, “Going into 2020, I thought economic risk was low and that if the market was going to decline, it would be either because of geopolitical events or some exogenous shock,” and that “we got the exogenous event in the form of a global pandemic.” So, exogenous. This gets us back to this question of the internal and external fitness landscapes. It is an attack from within the body, but it's an attack from beyond the models that we had…or at least a lot of people had.
David
That’s right, Michael. I think people have pointed this out that there are significant differences between perturbations that reveal true endogenous structural deficiencies in markets—like for example, subprime mortgages—versus exogenous perturbations. And there is this rather interesting empirical data set that suggests that perturbations that are endogenous tend to persist longer than perturbations that are exogenous. So that would be analogous to a mass extinction event that was primarily driven by some change in the environment versus some deficiency in the genetic architecture of life itself. That meant that it was extremely difficult to now adapt back to the new conditions of existence.
Michael
Yeah, so this sort of B point with Bill's piece is, when I hear him say, for example, “The commonly offered advice in a steep market decline such as we are experiencing to buy quality names on sale is a great prescription for under-performance in a recovery.” What I hear there is, don't over-fit your model. This is again, possibly a prescription for generalist strategies, evolutionarily. You don't want to over specialize in one sector. You want to hedge the bets and that's a bad strategy when things are normal, like Doug was saying: if you try to fill every niche in a relatively mature, robust ecosystem, you're going to be out competed by specialists that are able to do it more efficiently. But if you're a raccoon or a cockroach, if you're willing to sort of throw darts all over the board, then that strategy which kept the mammals under the feet of dinosaurs for 150 million years ended up being what brought them to prominence after the dinosaurs went out.
David
Yeah, and that is in some sense, what you've described is the microbial mode of living, the quasi-species that we started with, which is the better description of microbial species than the concept of a species—that is the cloud versus the point or the particle. It’s exactly this high mutation, high risk, high return strategy. And viruses do very well in a crisis. And I think what we're hearing from everyone in this particular episode—whether it's science communication, the way that we mobilize laboratories, what we learned from the history of life is that you sort of have to adapt in that way and explore the possibility of variant ideas at a much higher temperature, than you would during periods of stability. And I think that's an important message. It's extremely difficult to do, but it is an opportunity for a society to be more experimental than it otherwise would be.
Michael
To double down on Mirta and Henrik's optimism, I'm pleased to see that this seems to be the way that society is responding to this. Everyone I see is talking about the creative opportunity that this provides. And I know that you and I have stressed, it's important not to be Pollyannaish about this. It's important to understand longterm optimism is not in competition with short term pessimism, but at least people are generally displaying a sort of native intuitive understanding that now is the time to try something fresh.
David
Yeah, and I think that where we started the whole series—with inner citizen based medicine and citizen based science… If science is anything, it's the rigorous pursuit of new ideas, and the idea that the world now is entertaining a variety of new ideas is extraordinarily refreshing and necessary in order to be, as you say, a longterm optimist.
Michael
So what fresh ideas will we be discussing next week?
David
Next week here are some of the topics we'll be discussing. One will be related to today in terms of centralization and decentralization, taking a perspective on the evolution of society through the lens of the Constitution. Another will be issues of surveillance and technology. As we see tech companies stepping up and assisting society and tracking test results, we’re also very aware that these companies have not always shown the greatest, moral probity when it comes to the use of that information in the long term. Issues about education: this is not just a communication opportunity for science, but an educational one because now we have to take these insights that we've learned about all these systems being connected and perhaps reconsider what we think of as the disciplines and the curriculum. We'll be talking about the statistics of false positive and false negative rates and how we can develop an intuition for what those mean for each of us in our lives.
Michael
Excellent. Just a reminder to everyone listening, if you haven't already signed up, the InterPlanetary Festival team has been putting out these wonderful little workbooks on each of these weeks of material, summarizing the essays, putting them together in quiz form, making them something that you can work through with your families or whoever you happen to be cooped up with the interplanetaryfest.org. Every Wednesday they send out a new one of these workbooks.
David
Great.
Michael
Thank you, David.
David
Thank you, Michael. Thank you, everybody.