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.
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Related Reading & Listening:
The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic
Selected contributions from that volume:
David Kinney - Why We Can’t Depoliticize A Pandemic
Simon DeDeo - From Virus To Symptom
On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)
Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of Crisis
Cristopher Moore on the heavy tail of outbreaks
Sidney Redner on exponential growth processes
Anthony Eagan - The COVID-19-Induced Explosion of Boutique Narratives
Carrie Cowan on the future of education
Melanie Mitchell - The Double-Edged Sword of Imperfect Metaphors
Danielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi - Prediction and Policy in a Complex System
Additional Media:
John Kaag - What Thoreau can teach us about the Great Resignation
Kyle Harper - The Fall of the Roman Empire (SFI Talk)
Niall Ferguson’s Networld, Part 1 “Disruption” feat. Geoffrey West
Neal Stephenson, SFI Miller Scholar
The Limits of Human Scale - David Pakman interviews Geoffrey West
Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin - The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
Jonathan Rausch - The Constitution of Knowledge
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19
Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions
Scaling 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 Discord
by Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei Wu
Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States
by Elisa Heinrich Mora, Jacob J. Jackson, Cate Heine, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Christopher P. Kempes
Machine transcription by podscribe.ai, edited by Aaron Leventman:
David Krakauer (0s):
There have been methods developed at SFI and elsewhere that allow us to go down this path of coarse grained regularity. That is average regularity for complex systems. And that's been very successful in network science, been very successful simplifying, but not too much human interactions where we're not good is how do we put in agency and reflexivity. We're not particles and fields. We have beliefs and desires and superstitions. And I think the great lesson of the last two years was that we don't know how to do it. And we got frustrated and the way we manifested our own limitations, I think as scientists is to say, look how rational people are.
David Krakauer (42s):
Well, yes, but that's what it means to be human. I mean, we know that that's not a shock. What we were really saying is we don't know how to in a reasonably parsimonious way, theorize human agency. And you know, it's clearly going to be the future. A lot of complexity science,
Michael Garfield (1m 23s):
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 I'll 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 beyond the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs, whether it's N 95 mask distribution log jammed, shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fowchee, super spreader events or narrative rupture COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks.
Michael Garfield (2m 13s):
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 at 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 Jeffrey 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 web and embedded systems.
Michael Garfield (3m 3s):
It revealed complexity podcast. We'll 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@applepodcastsandorconsidermakingadonationatsantafe.edu slash give. Please also be aware that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuition lists. Summer 2022 SFI gains residential program in Vienna, Austria, learn more@santafe.edu slash games. Lastly, please excuse the technical issues we had with Jeffrey's microphone in the first nine minutes of this conversation, things rapidly and markedly improve.
Michael Garfield (3m 49s):
Thank you for listening gentlemen. It's a pleasure. I'm excited to have you both on the show at the same time. I suspect the soul. Take us some interesting places. We have a kind of a three body problem here. So let's start by first giving a bit of background, a chronology of work that led into this new SFI press volume, a history of SFS relationship to epidemiology and the complex systems concerns that sort of halo the discussion of COVID-19. So,
David Krakauer (4m 22s):
Right. So just to be clear, this whole phenomenon started the end of 2019 with a series of sort of pneumonia cases in Wu Han. And it wasn't until about March of 2020 that it was declared a global pandemic. And in March of 2020, we began our transmission series asking our community to engage with COVID not just as a viral infection, but as a assault on the infrastructure and society, right? The economy, how it would change human behavior, how it would have implications for other aspects of health and so forth.
David Krakauer (5m 2s):
So SFI, the key was that SFI would respond not just as immunologist, rapid immunologists. We had a long history in those fields, but it's a complexity problem. And I think we're still reckoning with that.
Geoffrey West (5m 15s):
Yeah, I think it was even recognized way at the beginning there that a funny way of putting it maybe, but this was an opportunity for us because it was a kind of a complex adaptive system in action over an extraordinary short period of time that something, that one thing solvers in terms of the narrow confines of disease and the spreading of disease, it would have been logical issues and it's not actually had extraordinary implications on all possible walks of life, all aspects of life, very essence of a complex system that's. So it was very natural, I think, as of high to stop getting sort of proactively involved in the sense of providing a forum for people who talk about the abuse of it from multiple perspectives, not just as a school or a health issue.
David Krakauer (6m 17s):
And, and that led to this book, the complex alternative, and that it means the alternatives to simplicity. And we get into that, what simplicity means both in science and society, but the book essentially compiles our early articles on COVID our reflections on what we got, right? What we got wrong and then longer contributions of essayistic contributions to COVID and complexity more generally, and why we think it matters for society. And that it's actually existential at this point that we understand complexity, not just another contribution to disciplinary science.
Michael Garfield (6m 56s):
One of the things I like about this introduction is its focus on the need as you put it to investigate the enduring allure of the simple. And, you know, I think it was just this last episode, talking with Simon today about the relationship between a revolution in physics, you know, and, and the, the development of a new Concilium theory with conspiracy theory and the, you know, the, the desire to find an encompassing portrait of something, something that, that explains everything. And that's sort of twinned with this, this other desire for a silver bullet and you talk about in this, you say simplicity wants to reduce the multidimensional complexity of the pandemic to one or two simple factors and how every one of these factors are explanations and many more represents an interactive interdependent component of the complex systemic phenomenon we call COVID-19.
Michael Garfield (7m 51s):
So there's there's attention, not only, you know, as Jeffrey, as you say, the, the multiple perspectives are not just sin chronic, right? There's not just 60 plus people all provide their own position, but then a diachronic in that 60 plus people are also now reflecting on what they got, right. And what they got wrong. And it's interesting just to know, even in this community, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about just how much and what kind of simplicity matters and understanding these phenomena. So where do you personally see us as a research community having identified salient simplicities and where do you see us as having identified their requisite balance?
Geoffrey West (8m 41s):
Yeah, so yeah, that's of course a very challenging question because it, it, it actually, it's not just about this pandemic. It's about the science we do at SFI is to what extent is it goes from one extreme. You could imagine when you're thinking of a high complex system, that's evolving, adapting with huge numbers of components and actors. And so, you know, everywhere. So to speak the kitchen sink model, we throw everything in, which is not typically what most of us want to do all the way to what you could call simplicity, where you try to reduce it to just a few dominant variables.
Geoffrey West (9m 25s):
I don't think I, I don't like the word simplicity there as much as just this, this phrase of being course green, low resolution, or what Margo men call sort, you know, accrued look at the whole. And that's what we want to get. It's sort of two extremes and sort of in between those two poles, the one of course, grained trying to identify what are the dominant variables? What are the essential features that one pole, the other pole being everything in the kitchen sink goes into it in between is the whole question of variation and stochastic behavior probability and so on. And, and, and SFI, I think researchers at SFI cover that spectrum.
Geoffrey West (10m 8s):
And I think that's why when we come up against in real time, something like the pandemic, then of course you get these very different expressions of what that spectrum is. And I think that's been, I think in the end when we distill all this, I think that's going to be enormously healthy for the Institute, the science we do here, but for complexity in general, you know, thinking about how we attack such problems. Yeah.
David Krakauer (10m 39s):
You can sort of triangulate this right. SFI is approach between two extremes. So the world that Jeffrey came from of high energy physics, particle physics, that's completely beholden to notions of symmetry and Minnie malty and harmony elegance, all those kinds of terms that are all in some sense, surrogates for understanding, right. That we want to be able to grasp something in our mind. On the other hand, now we were in the world with machine learning algorithms and just to make this very concrete take the standard model of physics. So this is the model that organizers, most of matter, as we know it. And one of its particles and their interactions that as of today has about 25 free parameters, GPG three, which is a language model that doesn't organize the universe.
David Krakauer (11m 28s):
It organize a bit of text, has 175 billion free parameters. Okay. And I think the question is now another way of saying this, right, is that the standard model is the model of the universe of the non-living universe. And GP T3 is the model of adaptive reality. And to get to Jeffrey's point, what's the mid point for complexity what's core screen theory look like it's not going to look like the standard model, but it sure as hell should not look like GPG three. And that's the big sort of philosophical conundrum. And one of the limitations I think, and we could discuss this of some of the simple epidemiological models is they want to look like the standard.
Geoffrey West (12m 13s):
Yes, no, I think that's exactly right, David. And it's very elegant, actually, the, the Sr model of epidemiology, which was developed, you know, over a hundred years ago, it's not much change really, except for a few bells and whistles, but it is it's in the traditional paradigm of physics. You know, it's very deterministic. It has, the actual model has no probability in it or statistics and it's certainly pays no attention to, you know, the vagaries of human interaction and social behavior.
Geoffrey West (12m 52s):
And one of the things that we've learned, especially in the last year or 18 months is that that's been a crucial element in dealing with the pandemic. So that brings up a lot of very challenging questions for those, those of us that work in complexity, science, whatever our background is. However, we came to this and I think the challenge for all the kinds of work that we do is finding that middle ground. And I do like the idea of core screening that is meaning that you, you, you maintain some of the ideas in this simplicity that is, there's a finite, hopefully smallish number of variables or degrees of freedom capturing the essential features.
Geoffrey West (13m 35s):
But you use that as a baseline or a point of departure for then adding more and more complexity or bore bore a high, higher, and higher resolution of the problem. And I think that's a, that's a fruitful way of attacking many of the kinds of problems we deal with. And as far as I know, it actually hasn't been done. I mean, that sort of strategy was not employed during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it's been Willy nilly and I think epidemiologists have been very slow. I'm not blaming them, but to, you know, adapt so to speak to the enormity of the problem that we're facing.
Michael Garfield (14m 12s):
So, you know, in, in talking about coarse grain versus fine grain, there's an imperfect analogy with like top down, bottom up governance, you know, even in the earliest discussions that we had on the show about this, you know, I'm thinking about samskara Pino and Laura Habad at the front, talking about the, the role of behavior and belief in the spread of this, you know, it became clear that there are massive problems with the conceit of technocratic governance being able to solve this as well as paired or complimentary problems with markets solving this on their own.
Michael Garfield (14m 53s):
And so in terms of not only our understanding, but our ability to act on our understanding, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, on that. And specifically like the lessons for people that are used to a pursuit of truth when faced by a problem of essentially like functionality or practicality that is off to one side of this purely empirical concern. Yeah.
David Krakauer (15m 21s):
I mean, one thing to say here, I mean, just connecting those two discussions is that there have been methods developed at SFI and elsewhere, including by Jeffrey that allow us to go down this path of of course, grained regularity that is average regularity for complex systems. And that's been very successful in network. Science has been very successful simplifying, but not too much human interactions where we're not good is how do we put in agency and reflexivity. We're not particles and fields. We have beliefs and desires and superstitions. And I think the great lesson of the last two years was that we don't know how to do it.
David Krakauer (16m 5s):
And we got frustrated and the way we manifested our own limitations, I think as scientists is to say, look how rational people are. Well, yes, but that's what it means to be human. I mean, we know that that's not a shock. The question is what we were really saying. I think the subtext of that criticism is we don't know how to in a reasonably parsimonious way, theorize human agency. And, you know, it's clearly going to be the future, a lot of complexity science, because we don't want to go down the path of machine learning. I mean, it's valuable, but it's not comprehensible, you know, you sacrifice clarity for the opacity of the predictive algorithm.
David Krakauer (16m 47s):
So I think that's the thing that you're getting at from the complexity science point of view is how do we theorize about agency?
Geoffrey West (16m 54s):
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, put it in sort of very simplistic terms. And one of the things that one recognizes is that in addressing a question of understanding something like the pandemic or question of dealing with global sustainability or climate change, is that, you know, in the end, in terms of solving these problems for society, it's a political problem. I mean, they're the ones that have the, you know, and so, and so how do you put that into your equations kind of question is making it into a sort of a cartoon version of that, you know, and so, you know, the traditional methodology or mode of behavior is what I said.
Geoffrey West (17m 38s):
I think it near the beginning is that many of us take the attitude. Well, we're supply the basic science, you know, that informs the policy makers and practitioners. And I think, yes, we, we need to do that. And so on, but there's this sub, this, this, this funny gray area, this gap in between there all those human beings as you doing their things, their desires, their wants their needs, their irrationality and so on. And trying to somehow put that into a scientific framework in a way that is useful, I think is going to be one of the great challenges of, of advancing the usefulness of complex adaptive systems.
Geoffrey West (18m 25s):
And it's thinking
David Krakauer (18m 26s):
It's quite interesting to get to the book. I mean, I just make a point about this, the way this works, right, is that it compiles these original articles and then the authors reflections on what they got right. And wrong. So we wanted to know, what's shocked you after two years of having watched this unfold. And it's quite interesting, I mean, do this discussion, it's quite split. I mean, there are those who will say we have to get behavior into the mathematical models. Otherwise they're going to be useless, right. And we've talked about this before the early phase of infection being quite biological and well-behaved exponentially, and then going nuts and then human behavior dominating rather than biology.
David Krakauer (19m 9s):
But then there are others who said, no, we just have to find the new core screen models. I mean, John Mack to makes this point, right. Cause more mixes printed retina means no, we just have to be more sophisticated drop the deterministic mass action, put the stochasticity in. And as you know, then we get the causality out. We don't get prediction out, but we get causality out. So there it's even the community is internally riven on the question of what the right response should be.
Michael Garfield (19m 39s):
So maybe rather than having you both spend this entire conversation, speaking for everyone, the next step would be to invite each of you to reflect on what you got right. And wrong. And, you know, I, I know that, you know, David, in your piece, I remember even though you personally cautioned me against anything, even remotely resembling a kind of sang wine view of the silver lining of this event, that you nonetheless started with a real optimistic outlook on our ability to, self-organize a kind of anti flash mob for disease containment. And that your reflection is one in which you kind of throw up your hands and accept the fact that maybe the only way that people can coordinate is on a much longer timescale with much more time to process.
Michael Garfield (20m 30s):
And, and that, you know, really citizen-based preventative medicine has to be preventative. And so, yeah, I, I'm curious to hear you talk about that and then about also what you know, where you see this sort of thresholds for when it ceases to become appropriate, to examine a particular phenomenon with the tools of prediction versus the tools of understanding, like where do you see the balance point in the respect, like the various domains around this issue?
David Krakauer (21m 2s):
So, yeah, so, I mean, I would say the last few years have been a failure of understanding and no number of epidemiological models published in epidemiological journals will change that. So I just don't find them useful in terms of dealing with the core concern. I, yeah, I felt that it took about agency, that the fact that humans, we could actually be a part of the solution would be very incentivizing. You know, if I get a disease like a cancer, there's not much I can do. And I have to essentially resigned myself to the expertise of a physician and trust that they have the abilities or knowledge that I don't have.
David Krakauer (21m 46s):
Whereas in this case I could act on it. I could be a part of the solution. I just, I'm going to get vaccinated and I'm going to isolate and so on. I can, and I can communicate to others who don't understand that. Why? So there was this active dimension to COVID, but it wasn't realized in the way that I'd hope. Right. And I think the reason is the timescale was off is to your point, you know, I call this sort of the Klaus of its principle. I mean, cause that was, if it said, you know, politics is war by other means. And I think that the strategy has to be worked out before the battle and all of the basic lack of understanding that we've been dealing with should have been a part of a systematic educational effort for decades.
David Krakauer (22m 30s):
And to expect people to understand what an RNA vaccine is during an epidemic is extremely optimistic. So when I say it should be preventative medicine, what I mean is, you know, it's like exercise did John's article, right? Like good diet, like sleeping. Well, all of those things that are preventative, we have to adopt the same attitude towards the next crisis and an enumeration that list of what those should be is interesting, but that's where I am now. I just don't think you can act rationally in the heat of the moment.
Geoffrey West (23m 2s):
Yeah, no, I agree with that quite strongly. And I'm not, I must say I, until the pandemic, I was not very familiar at all with questions of both pandemics and epidemics and so on in terms of, you know, I had the attitude in many did that, you know, we sorta had it under control. You know, we understood it. We understood the dynamics that the governments knew how to react and so on and so forth. And indeed, you know, what we discovered was we were totally unprepared in a very disgraceful way and it wasn't just the United States. It was sort of globally, totally unprepared, which in some respects is remarkable.
Geoffrey West (23m 45s):
I mean, given of course the classic case of the flu epidemic, but some of the other things that are propped up in the last, you know, 20, 30 years, and I will give it to the epidemiologists and others who were already telling us that we should be prepared for something like this, some random mutation. And I th that would cause this kind of chaos. So I think that is a remarkable failing. And I think one of the things that hopefully will happen is both globally and nationally, we will now be in a sort of standby mode in the same way that we have a standing army.
Geoffrey West (24m 27s):
We have, you know, two or 3 million soldiers, I mean, or army air force, Navy personnel who are in standby all the time to keep us secure in some sense. So there should be obviously some analog to that. I'm not sure that the war is the right metaphor, that's for sure. But there should be in, in, in the sense of being prepared for another kind of pandemic. The other thing though that I think is more personal interest was again, what I think was clear near the beginning was that this wasn't just a health issue.
Geoffrey West (25m 8s):
And I think in the article that David and I wrote was that, that it was so much more than that. And it was sort of obvious near the beginning that it was going to have tentacles everywhere. And again, the lack of appreciation of that I think is, is really too bad by the way, not just in terms of politicians and policy makers and the various practitioners, but I run a CLI throughout the academic community. It was sort of like, turn it over to the epidemiologists. They know what they're doing. Anthony Fowchee will tell us what to do. That's it guys. I mean, that was sort of the attitude in the first months and you know, something, it still persists.
Geoffrey West (25m 53s):
I saw Fowchee last night on PBS news and he was, he's very good. I think actually, but you know, it was sort of that's it, that they only turned to Anthony Fowchee, you know, whereas it's a problem covering the entire spectrum.
David Krakauer (26m 11s):
I do, I do want to add, I mean, it does get to something that in David Kenny writes about in the book and he cites, I think slogans the illusion of knowledge, which is sort of how much we outsource, how much we think we understand. I mean, most people don't know how a television works, right. And yet they use it daily and it raises this very interesting moral question almost, which is what can you not outsource? And we've got so used to that, right? It's saying, well, it's worked that far. I don't have to know how a vaccine works. I don't have to know how a television was. I don't know how a combustion engine works still can drive my car, but in this case it mattered.
David Krakauer (26m 52s):
It actually does matter if you know how a vaccine works. If you believe that a vaccine can be transmitted electromagnetically in a 5g network and that buying a USB stick would be a 5g shield, there's something fundamentally wrong with that. And so I actually think one of the educational pedagogical implications of the entire crisis is what can we not black box? And, you know, that's really the whole AI debate really,
Geoffrey West (27m 20s):
But he goes, actually goes further than that. I mean, one of the shocking things I think to many of us was the rise of the anti-vaccination movement in its multiple forms. And I think that was a great shock to me personally, you know, I certainly have been vaccinated. I don't know how many times in my life it gets many things. And I see that as one of the great triumphs of science in the last couple of hundred years. And I, I had naively taken it for granted that that's what everybody felt. I mean, obviously would be something. I mean, I, we, we know about the protests against getting measles vaccination for kids.
Geoffrey West (28m 3s):
And so, but it's a small minority. So one would, might've expected a few percent instead of 40% or 30%, which is extraordinary. And of course, one of the tragedies of that is that if you have 30, 40% people refusing to get vaccinated, that puts the rest of us continuously at risk.
David Krakauer (28m 25s):
But it's funny. It's one thing to serve at that, which yes and no, I've read a lot about that. You know, our shock and many of the contributors in our book express it. But when Semmelweiss first suggested that we should be washing our hands in maternity clinics, he was resisted. He was Austro-Hungarian the British didn't make it. Cause it wasn't a British idea, the French and Germans didn't like the kid, the politics and xenophobia of the early half of the 19th century meant need denied a self-evident cheap remedy. And so we've been here before that's over 150 years old.
David Krakauer (29m 10s):
And so in a sense, right, we should not be surprised because right. And I think that, that, that, I'm a little shocked by our shock, I guess.
Geoffrey West (29m 19s):
No, but I, I completely agree with you that yes, there's this history of fear against vaccines and so on, but our fear against something new like that, that impacts our health and impacts our bodies. You know, I, and I think, but for many of us growing up, it was sort of taking for granted the vaccination. I mean the polio vaccine was hailed as one of the great triumphs during the fifties and we all embraced it. It was sort of considered like a miracle and that kind of set the cultural stage and somehow it, it only sang so fine to the culture.
Geoffrey West (30m 2s):
And this fear of changing habits in terms of health of body really has, is to me, was a surprise that maybe it shouldn't have been from what you said, that when you saw talking about messing around with your own body people, someone from the outside is going to mess around with my body, whether it's washing it or injecting it with something there's kind of a visceral reaction, I think, and that has set in. And I think that was much deeper than many of us thought. And that was expressed as you say, in the, by many of our colleagues, but that is exactly the kind of thing that a and that one is probably much easier to incorporate into bottles, but that's the kind of thing that, you know, w wasn't in the mathematical models of epidemiology.
Michael Garfield (30m 55s):
So y'all are orbiting something very deep here. I want to, I want to take this and loop it back or return to trying to smear this question over all the comments that you've just made in the last few moments, because David, you're asking about like, what can you not outsource or black box? How much can we just sort of rescind our understanding? And then Jeffrey, you're talking about this deep visceral concern about bodily, autonomy and sovereignty. That seems related to sort of questions around the body politic and this rise of, yeah. Again like a visceral disgust or repulsion that manifested itself collectively in conversations around border closures and the looming specter of climate migration compounding this problem.
Michael Garfield (31m 43s):
And so on, it definitely feels like over the last two years, human civilization has reacquainted itself with the benefits of inconvenience. And when you're talking about everybody looking to Anthony Fowchee for some sort of guidance from on high, we're talking about choke points and many people in this community have commented on the way that COVID was sort of arguably created as a pandemic by our monomaniacal obsession, with connecting everything, to everything else, someone on Twitter coming today about your conversation with David Pakman on his podcast and quoted Mike Ford is saying everything is connected.
Michael Garfield (32m 24s):
That's why it shorts out so often. So I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about this in terms to start with you, David, of the conversation that we had last year in which we were talking about bill Miller's contribution to this, this collection and the way that he thinks about investment strategies and you know, how that looks when you look at something like a viral quasi species, not having a fixed address. And when there are sort of regimes or circumstances in which reserves are punished by the ecosystem versus when they're, they're encouraged. So yeah, like in thinking about, you know, supply chain failures, communication bottlenecks, when it is the right time to prepare when we want brown fat reserves, this is also true in terms of this interest that people seem to, you know, more and more people are surprising their organizations by saying, or their communities by saying, I don't want to return to the old normal there, there seems to be a resurgent appreciation of inconvenience.
Michael Garfield (33m 22s):
And in some cases, isolation, you know, like even in that sort of mistaken first glimmer of optimism for coordination, there was this idea that yeah, like together, we can all recognize that we're all willing to take a hit for a collective benefit. So I'm curious about your, you know, your thoughts on that and about this sort of seems like it only amplified or accelerated a conversation that I was already seeing going on with respect to the fragmentation of the internet and the polarization of society broadly as not necessarily being a bad thing.
David Krakauer (33m 57s):
No, I see. So, okay. So just this whole question of different species of polarization and fragmentation and so on and its relationship to robustness almost. I mean, it was interesting just to get to the Miller question. Bill made the point very early, right? That one expects there to be a divergence in the response of wall street and main street. And his argument essentially is that mainstream is dominated by short term, psychological decision-making, whereas wall street integrates. And so wall street sort of knew that there would be a vaccine. And so why then wouldn't the market recover.
David Krakauer (34m 39s):
It had that knowledge. We had that knowledge, it's hard for us to act on that knowledge on our day to day basis. So that was the first interesting divergence that I think shocked a lot of people. How can there be so much unemployment and all of these stocks have riding so high and builds sort of nailed that one. This more general question though, I find very interesting of, we know it from biology that there's high density connectivities work that Jeffrey does in cities and sort of city is accelerates everything. And it's very interesting. I don't know what Jeffrey thinks about this. I don't think political polarization is a good idea, but does a sort of a sense of community that's not fully connected to the world.
David Krakauer (35m 20s):
Is that important for the survival, a survival and B the growth of rare ideas that won't be dominated by the population, average idea? So you're right. I think it's quite interesting. I mean, just a final point on this. SFI is on a mountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a very low density state. And I think it's critical to the production and persistence of novel ideas. I think if we were in a city, it couldn't work and people have tried and failed. So there is an argument for it for a kind of isolation, but hopefully isolation doesn't have to be equal to intolerance.
Geoffrey West (36m 1s):
Yeah, well, there's a lot of you brought up a lot of very interesting issues and questions and conundrums really, but this question about the coherence of the whole and the collective behavior and feeling part of that collective and social conscience and so on versus the sort of the breakup, which need not be polarized by the way, just different. And, and a city is a good example in a way, because it is a collective and you can think of it as a whole, but of course it has neighborhoods and it has, you know, it has very different has different communities within it that behave differently.
Geoffrey West (36m 42s):
And as sometimes an opposition to one another and all sometimes polarized, but they do act that way. And cities are sort of this interesting cauldron or, or which sort of chemical reaction that is bringing people together, accelerating. And that comes across from, you know, people's interactions being mostly positive feedback mechanisms like we're doing here. We're sort of building on something together and, you know, cities have been marvelously successful in creating ideas, innovation, entrepreneurship, wealth, and so on, but that comes at a cost because when you increase the rate of interaction, you also increase the rate of all the bad things that people do, like killing each other or crime and transmitting disease.
Geoffrey West (37m 36s):
And so there's always these kinds of trade-offs. And one of the interesting questions about the spread of disease, in some ways, it is like the spread of ideas, but it's also of course a very different kind of phenomenon, but it has something in common with that. And it does bring up something that David just brought up. You know, we have one on that image that I just said, you're bringing people together as a social reactor creating ideas. And so on, on the other hand, you also have this image of, you know, someone going up on the mountain top and thinking great thoughts, and coming back with the 10 commandments kind of thing, you know, all alone.
Geoffrey West (38m 19s):
And those are the two extremes and, and it may be, and I don't know what the science of this is, but it could be that a, you know, when the, when the collective breaks up into pieces and allows for more freedom of interaction amongst smaller groups in, in, even down to the individual, maybe that is even more productive than just the Willy nilly, sort of a gas of 10 million people sort of bumping into each other. That, so I don't know, I don't know the answer to that and I don't, but it's a very interesting question about the origins of innovation and creativity in terms of the structure of the social networks and, and the physicality of the system that those networks are built on what that is, how that structure plays into it.
Geoffrey West (39m 12s):
So it's a very interesting question of itself.
David Krakauer (39m 15s):
No, just to talk about an SFI affiliated faculty member on this topic is James Evans. Hey, you should, you should. Yeah, you should. You should interview him on this recent paper published this year in nature. And it's, it's exactly on this Jeffrey and what they do is I can't remember something like these 65 million papers or so you're talking about
Michael Garfield (39m 35s):
The 1.8 billion sites slowed canonical progress in large fields of science.
David Krakauer (39m 38s):
Yeah, well, no, the more recent pain. Oh no, it's a more recent paper on disruption versus citation. So they write, so they studied essentially the effective group size on the uptake and impact of papers as measured by citations versus how disruptive that paper is. And we could get into how they met. It's quite straightforward actually, how they measure it. But the finding which came out of tens of millions of papers was that there's a trade-off here. There is a, an empirical law that the larger the group that have the more co-authors or whatever you measure, the more likely the paper has to be sacred, but the, but the less likely it is to be disruptive, right.
David Krakauer (40m 21s):
Needing, and they measure this, essentially, as if you write a paper, you had to write a paper, Michael, do subsequent papers, say you predominantly, or the papers you site. So a disruptive paper implies I'm citing you and not what came before you. And they show there's just an inverse relationship between those two. And so small groups, meaning two or one or the most disruptive, but no one listens. So large groups on the other hand have large networks and they get cited. So I think to Jeffrey's point, it's almost as if we want to be periodic and move between those two states.
Michael Garfield (40m 59s):
So, you know, this is an invitation to speculate, you know, Geoffrey. One of the things that I, I feel has to be mentioned in this conversation is the paper that you co-authored on a team with Eliza Maura, the scaling of urban income inequality in the United States. And this, even though this may not have, I don't know, this may not have felt like an about face for you. It certainly marks a punctuation in the rhetoric around urban scaling and what a city is doing. And this, you know, you mentioned in the abstract also worth noting the SFS Vicky gang and Chris campus worked this. We show that income in the least wealthy desk style scales, close to linearly with city population while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly super linear exponent.
Michael Garfield (41m 43s):
So more, more than per capita wealth cities are breeding poverty. And that as people like Nick Hanauer have pointed out, undermines the interests of the ultra rich. So there's a tension there and, and it's been interesting to watch people going back and forth. You know, it seemed earlier on in the pandemic that that a lot of people were expecting a kind of urban flight. And while that has happened also, it's obviously it's been complicated by, you know, the kinds of offers employers are willing to make for people to relocate, et cetera. But yeah, I'm curious about this concept of this periodicity with respect to the utility of cities themselves.
Michael Garfield (42m 28s):
And you've got people like Ricardo Houseman who is just championing the return, you know, the importance of mobility and business travel and, and, you know, reconnecting everything. And then you've got a lot of people that are like, I don't ever want to go back to the office. Why should I have to, so yeah, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the concerns surrounding this particular issue as regards everything we've talked about so far in this conversation about our ability to actually coordinate, prepare for and mobilize against the next global crisis.
Geoffrey West (43m 5s):
Well, let me just address that inequality paper quickly. That was interesting. And it actually came out of sort of discussions like the one we've just been having, namely, we think of the city, if you use the word city, you sort of have a homogeneous image of it, but of course it's highly inhomogeneous and it has what neighborhoods, but it certainly should be deconstructed. And it's just turns out it's very hard actually to gather data, to really delineate what that is. But one of the things we did at the beginning was looking at this question of inequality, because that's a good metric for that. And we discovered this really interesting result.
Geoffrey West (43m 46s):
That was a very disturbing was, as you say, that, you know, one of the things we've been championing is that cities have this kind of super linear behavior, meaning the bigger you are, the more you have per capita, more social interactions, leading to more wealth and higher standards of living and so on and so forth, but also more disease. But so what we discovered was that only happens if you're in the top deciles, so to speak. I mean, if you're the lowest deciles are close to linear, meaning you're getting nothing out of the city, I mean a simplistic way of thinking. You're getting nothing. You know, there's no point in being there in that sense.
Geoffrey West (44m 27s):
You're not getting that benefit. That's come from the, the positive feedback in social interaction. And whereas the rich, the top deciles are getting more than their shares, so to speak. And that's very distressing. And, and I think, I don't know any one that's analyzed the data. I think that gets reflected in, in some ways in kinds of the questions of what this pandemic did during the last couple of years, but it does bring up, it does beg some of these questions about also the way in which we attack many of these problems is it goes to questions of just, you know, when we start thinking of course, screening, we also have to recognize there's great in homogeneity is in these systems and which is very difficult often to take into account, by the way, one of the things it's just a sort of tangential comment that is interesting is even though this is deconstructing a system into its parts and looking at the way those parts behave, there is a systematic behavior to that.
Geoffrey West (45m 33s):
So it gives you hope that, you know, you could still have a scientific framework for attacking some of these much broader issues. So let's see. The last part of your question was your comment was,
Michael Garfield (45m 49s):
Well, I mean, it was sort of to a conversation David and I had earlier in this series about Tony Egan's contribution and that the idea of a dynamic constitutions and you know, this idea of how do we adapt the code that we're
Geoffrey West (46m 2s):
I know, no, I was, no, I knew what I was I picked up on. I'm sorry. It was this really interesting question about work, you know, and that's huge question you're the future of work is now big issue. And so on in this question, that, that, because one of the things that the good thing may be the camera to the pandemic was people to recognize that, you know, it's good to be at home and you don't have to be a workaholic and, you know, you could do it integrated more, the, kind of the dominance of your, of the workplace. It integrated that with the tradition of, I use the word home life, but, you know, whatever it is, whatever your life is, the domesticated life you have at home.
Geoffrey West (46m 50s):
And, and I think the onus is on employers and companies and universities, and so on to really adapt to that. And I, and, and I must say it's a very, it's a big challenge for SFI, I think because one of the great things about the set of Institute was it brings together this community of scholars from around the globe basically. And one of the things that we tout is that we bring together the anthropologists with the economists, with the physicists mathematicians here in this building. And we talked to one another and we meet a tea and so on, and now we're not doing that physically and where we're doing version like everybody else on zoom, but it ain't the same.
Geoffrey West (47m 33s):
And I, in that sense, Ricardo, Houseman's concern was a concern of mine from the very beginning, losing that. And I just give you a little anecdote. I have a collaboration with some of the people that wrote for this Chris Kemper's Manfred lavish, and his postdoc, Derek painter at Arizona state. And we have been working on some questions to do with Anthropocene, but doesn't matter what it is exactly, but it's been extremely interesting. And we've been doing for zoom for the last year and we make progress and we wrote a paper and so on. And then when we had that little window, when the pandemic looked like it might be over kind of thing.
Geoffrey West (48m 15s):
You know, whenever that was in early in the year, we met here in this very room that we're sitting. Now, we did more in that hour and a half. We felt in tons of ideas and excitement and writing things down. And so on that we felt we had done in the previous year meeting essentially every week. And it was a real eye-opener to all of us. And, and we were tremendously excited by that and hoping that now we would really take off and so on. So that's just a little personal anecdote, but I think there's a feeling of that. That is the, the people missing, but it it's tempered by this also this recognition that I can enjoy a more relaxed life by staying at home and not being in the workplace and being feeling that anxiety and pressure of producing whatever it is, whatever you do now, of course, by the way, one last remark on that.
Geoffrey West (49m 11s):
When we talk in those terms, we're talking about people whose jobs are amenable to being at home. Whereas there is a huge number of people. I don't know what the percentage is that have to be at a place. You have to be a factory worker. I got to be at the bloody factory and on the line and so on. Or if you're a janitor, you have to sweep the building and so on. So it's a little elitist to only talk in those terms about the future of work,
David Krakauer (49m 39s):
But let me, let me connect. Actually, those issues, issues of say wage labor versus entrepreneurial work to the issues of heavy tail distributions of advantage. And non-linearity, I mean, they're connected complexity. Economics comes out of SFI. Part of complexity. Economics was the attack by people like Brian, Arthur and others on the Aero Dobro framework, essentially a linear framework arguing that things like positive returns would lead to heavy tails, right? That's and you can then ask what mechanisms support those kinds of broken symmetries, right?
David Krakauer (50m 24s):
And these platforms that we've been building from Uber right through to various online trading platforms, or essentially mechanisms that allow for the possibility of highly skewed equilibria. And I think that hasn't really been investigated carefully and have people like Sam Baldwin, you can't, others do worry about that. A great deal Suresh. And I do this. Is there something about the technologies that we're building? And I would include cities in that space, these accelerators of human invention that lead to highly skewed distributions because they are essentially nonlinear engines and that light to push things to these sort of winner takes all outcomes.
David Krakauer (51m 17s):
And I think there's something that needs to be understood here that we've taken for granted because as Jeffrey said, Jeffrey started as a bit of a Pollyanna, right? With the cities, they were these general accelerators, everyone benefits. And then you look carefully at the data and you realize, no they're much more like some of these online winner takes all platforms where the tails are differentially, where there are large tails, there are differentially benefiting. So I think there's a very Santa Fe Institute research project here.
Michael Garfield (51m 43s):
So just to turn a little bit and reference a couple of the other contributions to this book, there seems to be an edge between the reflection by Melanie Mitchell and the reflection by Daniel Allen, Glenn whale and Rajeev Sethi. Melanie says like refusing to wear a mask issuing vaccines is not like refusing to wear a seatbelt or a life jacket since the decision affects not just you, but your whole community above and beyond the point she's making about our reliance on imperfect analogy, she's pointing to something that became increasingly clear, which, and reflected in the, the discourse around interventions, which was the way that what we have conventionally understood as a matter of private or personal health is actually a public health concern.
Michael Garfield (52m 28s):
And then Alan Whalen set the are saying most police homicides ought to be handled more like failures of air, traffic controlled and crimes resulting in an evaluation of organizational systems alongside prosecution for unlawful conduct where appropriate. So there is this sense, again, to draw on Simon today or pointing to the virus, the way that our understanding shifted from the virus as the thing to a symptom of this much larger, largely hidden thing, there's this, and we, you and I talked about this Jeffrey when, when I had you on the show the first time about the human as a hyper object and the way that, you know, server farms and all of these outboard mechanisms are contributing to our very, very deviant appropriation of metabolic energy based on the, the coarse-grained expectations.
Michael Garfield (53m 17s):
And so, you know, this, I guess this relates to everything that we've discussed so far in that it seems like there is a burning question right now manifesting in all of these different ways about basically who am I, you know, what is an individual? I mean, you know, we're always bringing up the information theory of individuality, that paper on this show. And I think to the extent that that's a, that's a core thread that runs through a lot of these SFI discussions. I'd love to know from the two of you, your, your thoughts on how COVID has changed our understanding of the self and its relationship to these larger systems in which it finds itself.
Michael Garfield (53m 58s):
And that's very broad and, and we can edit out the amount of time you spend ruminating on this.
David Krakauer (54m 6s):
Well, I mean, it's quite interesting. I mean, I imagine throughout most of human history, individuals did not have much agency at all. I mean, it's probably a blip in recent history, sort of the Neo liberal ideal, you know, that we, you know, we are the agents of our own destiny and, you know, whatever. And so empirically, I think that's obviously an illusion, but in some domains it may be true. So that's one element of this. The other question I think you're absolutely right about, which is punishment, retribution, and blame. We like to blame people and we're not good at blaming systems.
David Krakauer (54m 47s):
And that's what makes socio-economic reform hard because that's what has to be fixed. It's not a person. So we'd like to fire people and elect new presidents under the illusion that that's going to change everything. But of course it doesn't change much. We know that. And so again, it's very much an SFI preoccupation, which is we have to develop new intuitions for thinking about systems and all of these psychological dispositions that we've historically oriented to people have to somehow be reoriented to the system. And I don't know if you have ideas about how to do that, but I think that's part of what we need to do is rethink the notion of agency in this highly connected sense.
Michael Garfield (55m 28s):
It's like the, the bumper sticker that says I'll believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one,
David Krakauer (55m 35s):
That kind of thing.
Michael Garfield (55m 36s):
How does Texas execute a corporation? This is a pressing question right now.
Geoffrey West (55m 41s):
Yeah, no, I think I can really agree with David. I think he said it all in a way, first of all, I think it's a, it's probably true that the individual in terms of his or her agency is a relatively modern phenomenon having true control over your own life and destiny in the way we think about it. It's clearly both historically and culturally dependent. And it relied probably when, once we formed sizeable communities, only the elite might, you know, it, it probably existed amongst some of the elite, you know, certainly, you know, the king so to speak or the emperor presumably felt that.
Geoffrey West (56m 28s):
But you know, the, the,David Krakauer (0s):
There have been methods developed at SFI and elsewhere that allow us to go down this path of coarse grained regularity. That is average regularity for complex systems. And that's been very successful in network science, been very successful simplifying, but not too much, human interactions. Where we're not good is how do we put in agency and reflexivity. We're not particles and fields. We have beliefs and desires and superstitions. And I think the great lesson of the last two years was that we don't know how to do it. And we got frustrated and the way we manifested our own limitations, I think as scientists, is to say, look how rational people are.
David Krakauer (42s):
Well, yes, but that's what it means to be human. I mean, we know that. That's not a shock. What we were really saying is we don't know how to in a reasonably parsimonious way, theorize human agency. And it's clearly going to be the future of a lot of complexity science.
Michael Garfield (1m 23s):
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 will 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 beyond the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs, whether it's N 95 mask distribution log jammed, shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, super spreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks.
Michael Garfield (2m 13s):
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 at 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 web and embedded systems it revealed.
Michael Garfield (3m 3s):
Complexitypodcast. We'll 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 @ applepodcasts and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuition lists, summer 2022 SFI Gains Residential Program in Vienna, Austria. Learn more @ santafe.edu/games. Lastly, please excuse the technical issues we had with Geoffrey's microphone in the first nine minutes of this conversation, things rapidly and markedly improve.
Michael Garfield (3m 49s):
Thank you for listening gentlemen. It's a pleasure. I'm excited to have you both on the show at the same time. I suspect this will take us some interesting places. We have a kind of a three-body problem here. So let's start by first giving a bit of background, a chronology of work that led into this new SFI press volume, a history of SFS relationship to epidemiology and the complex systems concerns that sort of halo the discussion of COVID-19.
David Krakauer (4m 22s):
So just to be clear, this whole phenomenon started the end of 2019 with a series of sort of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. And it wasn't until about March of 2020 that it was declared a global pandemic. And in March of 2020, we began our transmission series asking our community to engage with COVID not just as a viral infection, but as an assault on the infrastructure and society, the economy, how it would change human behavior, how it would have implications for other aspects of health and so forth.
David Krakauer (5m 2s):
So the key was that SFI would respond not just as immunologist, rapid immunologists. We had a long history in those fields, but as a complexity problem. And I think we're still reckoning with that.
Geoffrey West (5m 15s):
Yeah, I think it was even recognized way at the beginning there that a funny way of putting it maybe, but this was an opportunity for us because it was a kind of a complex adaptive system in action over an extraordinary short period of time that something that one thing solvers in terms of the narrow confines of disease and the spreading of disease, it would have been logical issues and it's not actually had extraordinary implications on all possible walks of life, all aspects of life, very essence of a complex system. So it was very natural, I think, SFI to stop getting sort of proactively involved in the sense of providing a forum for people who talk about the abuse of it from multiple perspectives, not just as a school or a health issue.
David Krakauer (6m 17s):
And, and that led to this book, The Complex Alternative, and that it means the alternatives to simplicity. And we get into that, what simplicity means both in science and society, but the book essentially compiles our early articles on COVID, our reflections on what we got, what we got wrong and then longer contributions of essayistic contributions to COVID and complexity more generally, and why we think it matters for society that it's actually existential at this point that we understand complexity, not just another contribution to disciplinary science.
Michael Garfield (6m 56s):
One of the things I like about this introduction is its focus on the need as you put it to investigate the enduring allure of the simple. I think it was just this last episode, talking with Simon DeDeo about the relationship between a revolution in physics, and, and the, the development of a new Concilium theory with conspiracy theory and the the desire to find an encompassing portrait of something that explains everything. And that's sort of twinned with this other desire for a silver bullet and you talk about in this, you say “simplicity wants to reduce the multidimensional complexity of the pandemic to one or two simple factors and how every one of these factors are explanations and many more represents an interactive interdependent component of the complex systemic phenomenon we call COVID-19.”
Michael Garfield (7m 51s):
So there's attention, not only as Geoffrey, as you say, the multiple perspectives are not just sin chronic. There's not just 60 plus people all provide their own position, but then a diachronic in that 60 plus people are also now reflecting on what they got right and what they got wrong. And it's interesting just to know, even in this community, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about just how much and what kind of simplicity matters and understanding these phenomena. So where do you personally see us as a research community having identified salient simplicities and where do you see us as having identified their requisite balance?
Geoffrey West (8m 41s):
That's of course a very challenging question because it actually, it's not just about this pandemic. It's about the science we do at SFI is to what extent is it goes from one extreme. You could imagine when you're thinking of a high complex system that's evolving, adapting with huge numbers of components and actors. And so everywhere so to speak, the kitchen sink model, we throw everything in, which is not typically what most of us want to do all the way to what you could call simplicity, where you try to reduce it to just a few dominant variables.
Geoffrey West (9m 25s):
I don't like the word simplicity there as much as just this phrase of being course green, low resolution, or what ____ call accrued look at the whole. And that's what we want to get. It's sort of two extremes and sort of in between those two poles, the one of course, grained trying to identify what are the dominant variables? What are the essential features? That one pole, the other pole being everything in the kitchen sink goes into it in between is the whole question of variation and stochastic behavior probability and so on. And SFI, I think researchers at SFI cover that spectrum.
Geoffrey West (10m 8s):
And I think that's why when we come up against in real time, something like the pandemic, then of course you get these very different expressions of what that spectrum is. And I think that's been, I think in the end when we distill all this, I think that's going to be enormously healthy for the Institute, the science we do here, but for complexity in general, thinking about how we attack such problems.
David Krakauer (10m 39s):
You can sort of triangulate this. SFI is approach between two extremes. So the world that Geoffrey came from of high energy physics, particle physics, that's completely beholden to notions of symmetry and minimality and harmony elegance, all those kinds of terms that are all in some sense, surrogates for understanding. That we want to be able to grasp something in our mind. On the other hand, now we were in the world with machine learning algorithms and just to make this very concrete take the standard model of physics. So this is the model that organizers, most of matter, as we know it and one of its particles and their interactions that as of today has about 25 free parameters, GPG three, which is a language model that doesn't organize the universe.
David Krakauer (11m 28s):
It organize a bit of text, has 175 billion free parameters. And I think the question is now another way of saying this, right, is that the standard model is the model of the universe of the non-living universe. And GP T3 is the model of adaptive reality. And to get to Geoffrey's point, what's the mid- point for complexity? What's core screen theory look like? It's not going to look like the standard model, but it sure as hell should not look like GPG3. And that's the big sort of philosophical conundrum. And one of the limitations I think, and we could discuss this of some of the simple epidemiological models is they want to look like the standard.
Geoffrey West (12m 13s):
I think that's exactly right, David. And it's very elegant, actually, the SR model of epidemiology, which was developed over a hundred years ago, it's not much change really, except for a few bells and whistles, but it is it's in the traditional paradigm of physics. It's very deterministic. The actual model has no probability in it or statistics and it's certainly pays no attention to the vagaries of human interaction and social behavior.
Geoffrey West (12m 52s):
And one of the things that we've learned, especially in the last year or 18 months is that that's been a crucial element in dealing with the pandemic. So that brings up a lot of very challenging questions for those of us that work in complexity science, whatever our background is, however, we came to this and I think the challenge for all the kinds of work that we do is finding that middle ground. And I do like the idea of core screening that is meaning that you maintain some of the ideas in this simplicity that is, there's a finite, hopefully smallish number of variables or degrees of freedom capturing the essential features.
Geoffrey West (13m 35s):
But you use that as a baseline or a point of departure for then adding more and more complexity or more and more a higher and higher resolution of the problem. And I think that's a fruitful way of attacking many of the kinds of problems we deal with. And as far as I know, it actually hasn't been done. I mean, that sort of strategy was not employed during the pandemic, unfortunately. It's been willy- nilly and I think epidemiologists have been very slow. I'm not blaming them, but to, you know, adapt so to speak to the enormity of the problem that we're facing.
Michael Garfield (14m 12s):
In talking about coarse grain versus fine grain, there's an imperfect analogy with like top down, bottom up governance. Even in the earliest discussions that we had on the show about this, you know, I'm thinking about Sam Scarpino and Laurent Hebert-Dufresne, talking about the role of behavior and belief in the spread of this, it became clear that there are massive problems with the conceit of technocratic governance being able to solve this as well as paired or complimentary problems with markets solving this on their own.
Michael Garfield (14m 53s):
And so in terms of not only our understanding, but our ability to act on our understanding, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. And specifically like the lessons for people that are used to a pursuit of truth when faced by a problem of essentially like functionality or practicality that is off to one side of this purely empirical concern.
David Krakauer (15m 21s):
I mean, one thing to say here, just connecting those two discussions is that there have been methods developed at SFI and elsewhere, including by Geoffrey that allow us to go down this path of course grained regularity that is average regularity for complex systems. And that's been very successful in network science has been very successful simplifying, but not too much, human interactions. Where we're not good is how do we put in agency and reflexivity. We're not particles and fields. We have beliefs and desires and superstitions. And I think the great lesson of the last two years was that we don't know how to do it.
David Krakauer (16m 5s):
And we got frustrated and the way we manifested our own limitations, I think as scientists is to say, look how rational people are. Well, yes, but that's what it means to be human. I mean, we know that. That's not a shock. The question is what we were really saying. I think the subtext of that criticism is we don't know how to in a reasonably parsimonious way, theorize human agency. And, it's clearly going to be the future of a lot of complexity science, because we don't want to go down the path of machine learning. I mean, it's valuable, but it's not comprehensible. You sacrifice clarity for the opacity of the predictive algorithm.
David Krakauer (16m 47s):
So I think that's the thing that you're getting at from the complexity science point of view is how do we theorize about agency?
Geoffrey West (16m 54s):
I think that's exactly right. And I think put it in sort of very simplistic terms. And one of the things that one recognizes is that in addressing a question of understanding something like the pandemic or question of dealing with global sustainability or climate change, is that in the end, in terms of solving these problems for society, it's a political problem. How do you put that into your equations kind of question is making it into a sort of a cartoon version of that, and so the traditional methodology or mode of behavior is what I said.
Geoffrey West (17m 38s):
I think it near the beginning is that many of us take the attitude, well, we're supply the basic science, you know, that informs the policy makers and practitioners. And I think, yes, we need to do that. And so on, but there's this funny gray area, this gap in between there all those human beings as you doing their things, their desires, their wants, their needs, their irrationality and so on. And trying to somehow put that into a scientific framework in a way that is useful, I think is going to be one of the great challenges of advancing the usefulness of complex adaptive systems and it's thinking.
David Krakauer (18m 26s):
It's quite interesting to get to the book. I mean, I just make a point about this, the way this works, right, is that it compiles these original articles and then the authors reflections on what they got right and wrong. So we wanted to know, what's shocked you after two years of having watched this unfold. And it's quite interesting, I mean, to this discussion, it's quite split. I mean, there are those who will say we have to get behavior into the mathematical models. Otherwise they're going to be useless. And we've talked about this before, the early phase of infection being quite biological and well-behaved exponentially, and then going nuts and then human behavior dominating rather than biology.
David Krakauer (19m 9s):
But then there are others who said, no, we just have to find the new course grain models. I mean, John Mack makes this point. We just have to be more sophisticated drop the deterministic mass action, put the stochasticity in. And as you know, then we get the causality out. We don't get prediction out, but we get causality out. So there it's even the community is internally riven on the question of what the right response should be.
Michael Garfield (19m 39s):
So maybe rather than having you both spend this entire conversation, speaking for everyone, the next step would be to invite each of you to reflect on what you got right and wrong. I know that David, in your piece, I remember even though you personally cautioned me against anything, even remotely resembling a kind of sanguine view of the silver lining of this event, that you nonetheless started with a real optimistic outlook on our ability to self-organize a kind of anti-flash mob for disease containment. And that your reflection is one in which you kind of throw up your hands and accept the fact that maybe the only way that people can coordinate is on a much longer timescale with much more time to process.
Michael Garfield (20m 30s):
And that really citizen-based preventative medicine has to be preventative. I'm curious to hear you talk about that and then about also where you see this sort of thresholds for when it ceases to become appropriate to examine a particular phenomenon with the tools of prediction versus the tools of understanding. Where do you see the balance point in the respect, like the various domains around this issue?
David Krakauer (21m 2s):
I would say the last few years have been a failure of understanding and no number of epidemiological models published in epidemiological journals will change that. So I just don't find them useful in terms of dealing with the core concern. I felt that talk about agency, that the fact that humans, we could actually be a part of the solution would be very incentivizing. If I get a disease like a cancer, there's not much I can do. And I have to essentially resigned myself to the expertise of a physician and trust that they have the abilities or knowledge that I don't have.
David Krakauer (21m 46s):
Whereas in this case I could act on it. I could be a part of the solution. I'm going to get vaccinated and I'm going to isolate and so on. I can communicate to others who don't understand that. So there was this active dimension to COVID, but it wasn't realized in the way that I'd hope. And I think the reason is the timescale was off is to your point. I call this sort of the Clausewitz Principle. I mean, because that was, politics is war by other means. And I think that the strategy has to be worked out before the battle and all of the basic lack of understanding that we've been dealing with should have been a part of a systematic educational effort for decades.
David Krakauer (22m 30s):
And to expect people to understand what an RNA vaccine is during an epidemic is extremely optimistic. So when I say it should be preventative medicine, what I mean, it's like exercise, John's article, like good diet, like sleeping. Well, all of those things that are preventative, we have to adopt the same attitude towards the next crisis and an enumeration that list of what those should be is interesting, but that's where I am now. I just don't think you can act rationally in the heat of the moment.
Geoffrey West (23m 2s):
I agree with that quite strongly. And I must say, until the pandemic, I was not very familiar at all with questions of both pandemics and epidemics and so on. I had the attitude in many did that, you know, we sort of had it under control. You know, we understood it. We understood the dynamics that the governments knew how to react and so on and so forth. And indeed, you know, what we discovered was we were totally unprepared in a very disgraceful way and it wasn't just the United States. It was sort of globally, totally unprepared, which in some respects is remarkable.
Geoffrey West (23m 45s):
Given of course the classic case of the flu epidemic, but some of the other things that are propped up in the last 20, 30 years, and I will give it to the epidemiologists and others who were already telling us that we should be prepared for something like this, some random mutation that would cause this kind of chaos. So I think that is a remarkable failing. And I think one of the things that hopefully will happen is both globally and nationally, we will now be in a sort of standby mode in the same way that we have a standing army.
Geoffrey West (24m 27s):
We have 2 or 3 million soldiers, or Army Air Force, Navy personnel who are in standby all the time to keep us secure in some sense. So there should be obviously some analog to that. I'm not sure that the war is the right metaphor, that's for sure. But there should be in the sense of being prepared for another kind of pandemic. The other thing though that I think is more personal interest was again, what I think was clear near the beginning was that this wasn't just a health issue.
Geoffrey West (25m 8s):
And I think in the article that David and I wrote was that, that it was so much more than that and it was sort of obvious near the beginning that it was going to have tentacles everywhere. And again, the lack of appreciation of that I think is really too bad by the way, not just in terms of politicians and policy makers and the various practitioners, but ironically throughout the academic community. It was sort of like, turn it over to the epidemiologists. They know what they're doing. Anthony Fauci will tell us what to do. That's it ,guys. I mean, that was sort of the attitude in the first months and you know, something, it still persists.
Geoffrey West (25m 53s):
I saw Fauci last night on PBS news and he was very good, I think actually, but you know, it was sort of that's it, that they only turned to Anthony Fauci, whereas it's a problem covering the entire spectrum.
David Krakauer (26m 11s):
I do want to add, I mean, it does get to something that in David Kenny writes about in the book and he cites, I think slogans the illusion of knowledge, which is sort of how much we outsource, how much we think we understand. I mean, most people don't know how a television works. And yet they use it daily and it raises this very interesting moral question almost, which is what can you not outsource? And we've got so used to that. It's saying, well, it's worked that far. I don't have to know how a vaccine works. I don't have to know how a television was. I don't know how a combustion engine works, still can drive my car, but in this case it mattered.
David Krakauer (26m 52s):
It actually does matter if you know how a vaccine works. If you believe that a vaccine can be transmitted electromagnetically in a 5g network and that buying a USB stick would be a 5g shield, there's something fundamentally wrong with that. And so I actually think one of the educational pedagogical implications of the entire crisis is what can we not black box? And that's really the whole AI debate really,
Geoffrey West (27m 20s):
But it actually goes further than that. I mean, one of the shocking things I think to many of us was the rise of the anti-vaccination movement in its multiple forms. And I think that was a great shock to me personally. I certainly have been vaccinated. I don't know how many times in my life against many things. And I see that as one of the great triumphs of science in the last couple of hundred years. And I had naively taken it for granted that that's what everybody felt. I mean, obviously would be something. We know about the protests against getting measles vaccination for kids.
Geoffrey West (28m 3s):
but it's a small minority. So one would, might've expected a few percent instead of 40% or 30%, which is extraordinary. And of course, one of the tragedies of that is that if you have 30, 40% people refusing to get vaccinated, that puts the rest of us continuously at risk.
David Krakauer (28m 25s):
But it's funny. It's one thing to serve at that, which yes and no, I've read a lot about that and many of the contributors in our book express it. But when Semmelweiss first suggested that we should be washing our hands in maternity clinics, he was resisted. He was Austro-Hungarian the British didn't make it because it wasn't a British idea. The French and Germans didn't like it, the politics and xenophobia of the early half of the 19th century meant need denied a self-evident cheap remedy. And so we've been here before that's over 150 years old.
David Krakauer (29m 10s):
And so in a sense, we should not be surprised because I think that I'm a little shocked by our shock, I guess.
Geoffrey West (29m 19s):
No, but I completely agree with you that yes, there's this history of fear against vaccines and so on, but our fear against something new like that, that impacts our health and impacts our bodies. But for many of us growing up, it was sort of taking for granted the vaccination. I mean the polio vaccine was hailed as one of the great triumphs during the fifties and we all embraced it. It was sort of considered like a miracle and that kind of set the cultural stage and somehow it only sang so far into the culture.
Geoffrey West (30m 2s):
And this fear of changing habits in terms of health of body really is to me, was a surprise that maybe it shouldn't have been from what you said, that when you saw talking about messing around with your own body people, someone from the outside is going to mess around with my body, whether it's washing it or injecting it with something there's kind of a visceral reaction, I think, and that has set in. And I think that was much deeper than many of us thought. And that was expressed as you say, by many of our colleagues, but that is exactly the kind of thing that one is probably much easier to incorporate into bottles, but that's the kind of thing that wasn't in the mathematical models of epidemiology.
Michael Garfield (30m 55s):
So y'all are orbiting something very deep here. I want to take this and loop it back or return to trying to smear this question over all the comments that you've just made in the last few moments, because David, you're asking about what can you not outsource or black box? How much can we just sort of rescind our understanding? And then Geoffrey, you're talking about this deep visceral concern about bodily, autonomy and sovereignty. That seems related to sort of questions around the body politic and this rise of again like a visceral disgust or repulsion that manifested itself collectively in conversations around border closures and the looming specter of climate migration compounding this problem.
Michael Garfield (31m 43s):
It definitely feels like over the last two years, human civilization has reacquainted itself with the benefits of inconvenience. And when you're talking about everybody looking to Anthony Fauci for some sort of guidance from on high, we're talking about choke points and many people in this community have commented on the way that COVID was sort of arguably created as a pandemic by our monomaniacal obsession with connecting everything, to everything else. Someone on Twitter coming today about your conversation with David Pakman on his podcast and quoted Mike Ford is saying everything is connected.
Michael Garfield (32m 24s):
That's why it shorts out so often. So I'm thinking about this in terms to start with you, David, of the conversation that we had last year in which we were talking about Bill Miller's contribution to this collection and the way that he thinks about investment strategies and how that looks when you look at something like a viral quasi species, not having a fixed address. And when there are sort of regimes or circumstances in which reserves are punished by the ecosystem versus when they're, they're encouraged. So in thinking about supply chain failures, communication bottlenecks, when it is the right time to prepare when we want brown fat reserves, this is also true in terms of this interest that people seem to more and more people are surprising their organizations by saying, or their communities by saying, I don't want to return to the old normal. There seems to be a resurgent appreciation of inconvenience.
Michael Garfield (33m 22s):
And in some cases, isolation, even in that sort of mistaken first glimmer of optimism for coordination, there was this idea that like together, we can all recognize that we're all willing to take a hit for a collective benefit. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that and about this sort of seems like it only amplified or accelerated a conversation that I was already seeing going on with respect to the fragmentation of the internet and the polarization of society broadly as not necessarily being a bad thing.
David Krakauer (33m 57s):
So just this whole question of different species of polarization and fragmentation and so on and its relationship to robustness almost. I mean, it was interesting just to get to the Miller question. Bill made the point very early that one expects there to be a divergence in the response of Wall Street and Main Street. And his argument essentially is that mainstream is dominated by short term, psychological decision-making, whereas Wall Street integrates. And so wall street sort of knew that there would be a vaccine. And so why then wouldn't the market recover.
David Krakauer (34m 39s):
It had that knowledge. We had that knowledge. It's hard for us to act on that knowledge on our day to day basis. So that was the first interesting divergence that I think shocked a lot of people. How can there be so much unemployment and all of these stocks have riding so high and builds sort of nailed that one? This more general question though, I find very interesting of, we know it from biology that there's high density connectivities work that Geoffrey does in cities and sort of city is accelerates everything. And it's very interesting. I don't know what Geoffrey thinks about this. I don't think political polarization is a good idea, but does a sort of a sense of community that's not fully connected to the world.
David Krakauer (35m 20s):
Is that important for the survival, a survival and B, the growth of rare ideas that won't be dominated by the population, average idea? So, you're right. I think it's quite interesting. I mean, just a final point on this. SFI is on a mountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a very low density state. And I think it's critical to the production and persistence of novel ideas. I think if we were in a city, it couldn't work and people have tried and failed. So there is an argument for it for a kind of isolation, but hopefully isolation doesn't have to be equal to intolerance.
Geoffrey West (36m 1s):
You brought up a lot of very interesting issues and questions and conundrums really, but this question about the coherence of the whole and the collective behavior and feeling part of that collective and social conscience and so on versus the sort of the breakup, which need not be polarized by the way, just different. And, a city is a good example in a way, because it is a collective and you can think of it as a whole, but of course it has neighborhoods and it has very communities within it that behave differently.
Geoffrey West (36m 42s):
And as sometimes an opposition to one another and all sometimes polarized, but they do act that way. And cities are sort of this interesting cauldron or which sort of chemical reaction that is bringing people together, accelerating. And that comes across from people's interactions being mostly positive feedback mechanisms like we're doing here. We're sort of building on something together and cities have been marvelously successful in creating ideas, innovation, entrepreneurship, wealth, and so on, but that comes at a cost because when you increase the rate of interaction, you also increase the rate of all the bad things that people do, like killing each other or crime and transmitting disease.
Geoffrey West (37m 36s):
And so there's always these kinds of trade-offs. And one of the interesting questions about the spread of disease, in some ways, it is like the spread of ideas, but it's also of course a very different kind of phenomenon, but it has something in common with that. And it does bring up something that David just brought up. We have on that image that I just said, you're bringing people together as a social reactor creating ideas and so on. On the other hand, you also have this image of, you know, someone going up on the mountain top and thinking great thoughts, and coming back with the 10 Commandments, kind of thing, you know, all alone.
Geoffrey West (38m 19s):
And those are the two extremes and it may be, and I don't know what the science of this is, but it could be that when the collective breaks up into pieces and allows for more freedom of interaction amongst smaller groups, even down to the individual, maybe that is even more productive than just the willy-nilly, sort of a gas of 10 million people sort of bumping into each other. So I don't know, I don't know the answer to that and I don't, but it's a very interesting question about the origins of innovation and creativity in terms of the structure of the social networks and the physicality of the system that those networks are built on what that is, how that structure plays into it.
Geoffrey West (39m 12s):
So it's a very interesting question of itself.
David Krakauer (39m 15s):
Just to talk about an SFI affiliated faculty member on this topic is James Evans. You should interview him on this recent paper published this year in Nature. And it's, it's exactly on this Geoffrey and what they do is I can't remember something like these 65 million papers or so you're talking about
Michael Garfield (39m 35s):
The 1.8 billion sites slowed canonical progress in large fields of science.
David Krakauer (39m 38s):
The more recent paper. It's a more recent paper on disruption versus citation. So they studied essentially the effective group size on the uptake and impact of papers as measured by citations versus how disruptive that paper is. It's quite straightforward actually, how they measure it. But the finding which came out of tens of millions of papers was that there's a trade-off here. There is an empirical law that the larger the group that have the more co-authors or whatever you measure, the more likely the paper has to be cited, but the, but the less likely it is to be disruptive, right.
David Krakauer (40m 21s):
Needing, and they measure this, essentially, as if you write a paper, you had to write a paper, Michael, do subsequent papers, say you predominantly, or the papers you site? So a disruptive paper implies I'm citing you and not what came before you. And they show there's just an inverse relationship between those two. And so small groups, meaning two or one or the most disruptive, but no one listens. So large groups on the other hand have large networks and they get cited. So I think to Geoffrey's point, it's almost as if we want to be periodic and move between those two states.
Michael Garfield (40m 59s):
So, this is an invitation to speculate. Geoffrey. One of the things that I, I feel has to be mentioned in this conversation is the paper that you co-authored on a team with Elisa Mora, The Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States. And this, even though this may not have felt like an about face for you, it certainly marks a punctuation in the rhetoric around urban scaling and what a city is doing. You mentioned in the abstract also worth noting the SFS Vicky Yang and Chris Kempes worked this. We show that income in the least wealthy desk style scales, close to linearly with city population while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly super linear exponent.
Michael Garfield (41m 43s):
So more, more than per capita wealth cities are breeding poverty. And that as people like Nick Hanauer have pointed out, undermines the interests of the ultra-rich. So there's a tension there and it's been interesting to watch people going back and forth. It seemed earlier on in the pandemic that that a lot of people were expecting a kind of urban flight. And while that has happened also, it's obviously it's been complicated by the kinds of offers employers are willing to make for people to relocate, et cetera. But I'm curious about this concept of this periodicity with respect to the utility of cities themselves.
Michael Garfield (42m 28s):
And you've got people like Ricardo Hausmann who is just championing the return, the importance of mobility and business travel and reconnecting everything. And then you've got a lot of people that are like, I don't ever want to go back to the office. Why should I have to? I'm curious what your thoughts are on the concerns surrounding this particular issue as regards, everything we've talked about so far in this conversation about our ability to actually coordinate, prepare for and mobilize against the next global crisis.
Geoffrey West (43m 5s):
Well, let me just address that inequality paper quickly. That was interesting. And it actually came out of sort of discussions like the one we've just been having, namely, we think of the city. If you use the word city, you sort of have a homogeneous image of it, but of course it's highly inhomogeneous and it has what neighborhoods, but it certainly should be deconstructed. And it's just turns out it's very hard actually to gather data, to really delineate what that is. But one of the things we did at the beginning was looking at this question of inequality, because that's a good metric for that. And we discovered this really interesting result.
Geoffrey West (43m 46s):
That was a very disturbing was, as you say, that one of the things we've been championing is that cities have this kind of super linear behavior, meaning the bigger you are, the more you have per capita, more social interactions, leading to more wealth and higher standards of living and so on and so forth, but also more disease. But so what we discovered was that only happens if you're in the top deciles, so to speak. I mean, if you're the lowest deciles are close to linear, meaning you're getting nothing out of the city, I mean a simplistic way of thinking. You're getting nothing. You know, there's no point in being there in that sense.
Geoffrey West (44m 27s):
You're not getting that benefit that's come from the positive feedback in social interaction. And whereas the rich, the top deciles are getting more than their shares, so to speak. And that's very distressing. And, I think, I don't know any one that's analyzed the data. I think that gets reflected in some ways in kinds of the questions of what this pandemic did during the last couple of years. But it does bring up, it does beg some of these questions about also the way in which we attack many of these problems is it goes to questions of just when we start thinking of course, screening, we also have to recognize there's great in homogeneity is in these systems and which is very difficult often to take into account. By the way, one of the things it's just a sort of tangential comment that is interesting is even though this is deconstructing a system into its parts and looking at the way those parts behave, there is a systematic behavior to that.
Geoffrey West (45m 33s):
So it gives you hope that you could still have a scientific framework for attacking some of these much broader issues. So let's see. The last part of your question was..
Michael Garfield (45m 49s):
Well, I mean, it was sort of to a conversation David and I had earlier in this series about Tony Eagan's contribution and that the idea of a dynamic constitutions and you know, this idea of how do we adapt the code that we're…
Geoffrey West (46m 2s):
I know what I was I picked up on. I'm sorry. It was this really interesting question about work, and that's huge question you're the future of work is now big issue because one of the things that the good thing may be the camera to the pandemic was people to recognize that it's good to be at home and you don't have to be a workaholic and you could do it integrated more the kind of the dominance of of the workplace. It integrated that with the tradition of, I use the word home life, but whatever it is, whatever your life is, the domesticated life you have at home.
Geoffrey West (46m 50s):
And, and I think the onus is on employers and companies and universities, and so on to really adapt to that. And I must say it's a very, it's a big challenge for SFI, I think because one of the great things about the set of Institute was it brings together this community of scholars from around the globe basically. And one of the things that we tout is that we bring together the anthropologists with the economists, with the physicists, mathematicians here in this building. And we talked to one another and we meet a tea and so on, and now we're not doing that physically and where we're doing version like everybody else on Zoom, but it ain't the same.
Geoffrey West (47m 33s):
And I, in that sense, Ricardo Hausmann's concern was a concern of mine from the very beginning, losing that. And I just give you a little anecdote. I have a collaboration with some of the people that wrote for this Chris Kemper's Manfred Lavish, and his postdoc, Derek Painter at Arizona State. And we have been working on some questions to do with Anthropocene, but doesn't matter what it is exactly, but it's been extremely interesting. And we've been doing for Zoom for the last year and we make progress and we wrote a paper and so on. And then when we had that little window, when the pandemic looked like it might be over kind of thing whenever that was in early in the year, we met here in this very room that we're sitting now. We did more in that hour and a half. We felt in tons of ideas and excitement and writing things down and so on that we felt we had done in the previous year meeting essentially every week. And it was a real eye-opener to all of us. And, we were tremendously excited by that and hoping that now we would really take off and so on. So that's just a little personal anecdote, but I think there's a feeling of that that is the people missing, but it it's tempered by this also this recognition that I can enjoy a more relaxed life by staying at home and not being in the workplace and being feeling that anxiety and pressure of producing whatever it is, whatever you do now, of course, by the way, one last remark on that.
Geoffrey West (49m 11s):
When we talk in those terms, we're talking about people whose jobs are amenable to being at home. Whereas there is a huge number of people, I don't know what the percentage is that have to be at a place. You have to be a factory worker. I got to be at the bloody factory and on the line and so on. Or if you're a janitor, you have to sweep the building and so on. So it's a little elitist to only talk in those terms about the future of work,
David Krakauer (49m 39s):
But let me, let me connect. Actually, those issues, issues of say wage labor versus entrepreneurial work to the issues of heavy tail distributions of advantage and non-linearity. I mean, they're connected complexity. Economics comes out of SFI. Part of complexity. Economics was the attack by people like Brian Arthur and others on the Aero Dobro framework, essentially a linear framework arguing that things like positive returns would lead to heavy tails. That's and you can then ask what mechanisms support those kinds of broken symmetries.
David Krakauer (50m 24s):
And these platforms that we've been building from Uber right through to various online trading platforms, are essentially mechanisms that allow for the possibility of highly skewed equilibria. And I think that hasn't really been investigated carefully enough. People like Sam Baldwin, others, do worry about that a great deal. Suresh and I do. Is there something about the technologies that we're building? And I would include cities in that space, these accelerators of human invention that lead to highly skewed distributions because they are essentially nonlinear engines and that light to push things to these sort of winner takes all outcomes.
David Krakauer (51m 17s):
And I think there's something that needs to be understood here that we've taken for granted because as Geoffrey said, Geoffrey started as a bit of a Pollyanna. With the cities, they were these general accelerators, everyone benefits. And then you look carefully at the data and you realize, no they're much more like some of these online winner takes all platforms where the tails are differentially, where there are large tails, differentially benefiting. So I think there's a very Santa Fe Institute research project here.
Michael Garfield (51m 43s):
So just to turn a little bit and reference a couple of the other contributions to this book, there seems to be an edge between the reflection by Melanie Mitchell and the reflection by Danielle Allen, Glen Weyl and Rajiv Sethi. Melanie says like refusing to wear a mask issuing vaccines is not like refusing to wear a seatbelt or a life jacket since the decision affects not just you, but your whole community above and beyond the point she's making about our reliance on imperfect analogy, she's pointing to something that became increasingly clear, which, and reflected in the discourse around interventions, which was the way that what we have conventionally understood as a matter of private or personal health is actually a public health concern.
Michael Garfield (52m 28s):
And then Allen, Weyl, and Sethi are saying “most police homicides ought to be handled more like failures of air, traffic controlled and crimes resulting in an evaluation of organizational systems alongside prosecution for unlawful conduct where appropriate.” So there is this sense, again, to draw on Simon DeDeo or pointing to the virus, the way that our understanding shifted from the virus as the thing to a symptom of this much larger, largely hidden thing, there's this, and we, you and I talked about this Geoffrey when, when I had you on the show the first time about the human as a hyper object and the way that server farms and all of these outboard mechanisms are contributing to our very, very deviant appropriation of metabolic energy based on the coarse-grained expectations.
Michael Garfield (53m 17s):
And so, I guess this relates to everything that we've discussed so far in that it seems like there is a burning question right now that’s manifesting in all of these different ways about basically who am I? What is an individual? I mean, we're always bringing up the information theory of individuality, that paper on this show. And I think to the extent that that's a core thread that runs through a lot of these SFI discussions. I'd love to know from the two of you, your thoughts on how COVID has changed our understanding of the self and its relationship to these larger systems in which it finds itself.
Michael Garfield (53m 58s):
And that's very broad and we can edit out the amount of time you spend ruminating on this.
David Krakauer (54m 6s):
Well, I mean, it's quite interesting. I imagine throughout most of human history, individuals did not have much agency at all. I mean, it's probably a blip in recent history, sort of the Neo liberal ideal, that we are the agents of our own destiny. And so empirically, I think that's obviously an illusion, but in some domains it may be true. So that's one element of this. The other question I think you're absolutely right about, which is punishment, retribution, and blame. We like to blame people and we're not good at blaming systems.
David Krakauer (54m 47s):
And that's what makes socio-economic reform hard because that's what has to be fixed. It's not a person. So we'd like to fire people and elect new presidents under the illusion that that's going to change everything. But of course it doesn't change much. We know that. And so again, it's very much an SFI preoccupation, which is we have to develop new intuitions for thinking about systems and all of these psychological dispositions that we've historically oriented to people have to somehow be reoriented to the system. And I don't know if you have ideas about how to do that, but I think that's part of what we need to do is rethink the notion of agency in this highly-connected sense.
Michael Garfield (55m 28s):
It's like the bumper sticker that says I'll believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.
David Krakauer (55m 35s):
That kind of thing.
Michael Garfield (55m 36s):
How does Texas execute a corporation? This is a pressing question right now.
Geoffrey West (55m 41s):
I think I can really agree with David. I think he said it all in a way, first of all, I think it's probably true that the individual in terms of his or her agency is a relatively modern phenomenon having true control over your own life and destiny in the way we think about it. It's clearly both historically and culturally dependent. And it relied probably when, once we formed sizeable communities, only the elite might, it probably existed amongst some of the elite, certainly, the king so to speak or the emperor presumably felt that.
Geoffrey West (56m 28s):
But you know, the, plebs probably not so much. They had a role, the destiny was to a large extent determined. And so I think it's a modern phenomenon and it's a, I consider it a luxury and we sort of take it for granted. We've seen during the pandemic in terms of, you're quoting Melanie's article exactly that issue, that the individual feels so strongly as an individual. And it goes back to what we were just touching on in terms of the sanctity of the body, that you can't touch my body. You can't interfere with my body.
Geoffrey West (57m 9s):
Even if my body is causing damage to lots of people. You still can't touch it. And, it's a complete reversal of probably what existed in many can be most communities I would say, but the collective takes precedent over the individual and we've sort of developed this cult of the individual, which we all enjoy. I mean, I enjoy it. I think that by Sunday I indulge in that and most of us were encouraged to do it. You know, everything about our society, especially in the United States, I would say encourages the indeed the people to think of themselves as the individual and the society comes sort of second.
Geoffrey West (58m 4s):
And the way we cover that up oftentimes is in terms of all stand up for the national Anthem and song, to show that I'm really part of the community and so on, or I sign up for the military. So people do do it, but it's a minority.
David Krakauer (58m 24s):
I mean, it's interesting to see how this site-based is changing in a community that we connect to. I mean, colleagues of ours from very different political positions. I mean, let me just mention a few, you know, our friend, Neil Ferguson is one and Neil is a historian and in the last few years has embraced our work complexity science, and is, feels that we've just thought about causality completely wrong. That it's been about the great man sort of theory of history. And this is not true. I mean, Tolstoy famously put that at the end of War and Peace when he said, no, it's a kind of a statistical mechanics of history that we should be thinking about another visitor to ratify Karl Popper who they note has influenced the novelist Neil Stevenson, who talked about him at length, has it?
David Krakauer (59m 6s):
No, it's, you know, given was wrong about the decline and fall of the Roman empire. It wasn't what Trajan did or Augustus did. It's what a plague did. So there, I think there is evidence, I think, of a shift towards a systemic view of the world, including in popular culture and novels and in histories.
Geoffrey West (59m 24s):
We'll be there with that. And that is definitely a shift, but I was referring to was the structure of society in our culture now is individualistic. And the only individuals in the past have been George Washington, Julius Caesar just in that way, that that's where individuals played a role and America would not have had a revolution. It had not won the revolutionary war, had it not been for George Washington.
David Krakauer (59m 53s):
It's interesting a book that everyone is now talking about is Rausch’s book, the constitution of knowledge, and it's not about Madison and Jefferson, it's about the constitution. So in an OS if you like an operate, what we would call an OS for society, I guess, and that's an interesting shift again, that the hyperobject, if you like of the constitution is the thing that we need to understand rather than the, the psychological dispositions of the people who wrote it collectively. And I think that's very sighting actually, to move towards this sort of coupled dynamics, dynamical systems view of how the world really works, rather than the sort of single factor one dimensional view, which takes us back to the whole book, which is it's, that's not how things work.
David Krakauer (1h 0m 35s):
I mean, the complex alternative is the alternative to that.
Michael Garfield (1h 0m 38s):
So to springboard off of that, with a final question for the two of you, you've touched on this throughout the conversation. We've spent a lot of time, however, talking about surprise and failure, the post-game analysis, what we got wrong, what we could not have foreseen. What do you think SFI in the scientific community got right looking back on this? What do you see as successes of research, coordination, communication? What can we celebrate? Not, you know, not just sort of improve. I mean, a lot of this is reflected in the book.
David Krakauer (1h 1m 19s):
I'd say there's a few things to say about this. So one is not about SFI, but about the success of reason and scientific progress, which is that we have made discoveries and we have deployed them in reasonably short period of time, not a year or two, but a decade in terms of vaccine development. And that is a scientific success story however, you look at it, no doubt about it. Where I think we failed in that regard is to imagine that that's all we need it. And I think that's where SFI, I think succeeded, I think as if I said our community, that is, that's not enough. We need to understand behavior complex, contagion, the structure of networks, hydrogen energy, vulnerable populations, economic implications, all of that is what we added to the mix.
David Krakauer (1h 2m 6s):
And I think part of the frustration is that on the national media, it was all about epidemiology and that should have been one ingredient in a larger conversation. And as you know, we just, you know, but we talk about all of these other sequentially of isolation, psychological depression, various kinds of physical failures that weren't really being addressed. And it's not because we weren't pointing that out. So I think that was a success for SFI, but it was probably a failure for the rest of the world.
Geoffrey West (1h 2m 38s):
Yeah, absolutely. I think we sort of, in that sense, we had it right. At least conceptually, I mean, we didn't make predictions of various things in terms of quantitatively with numbers that was beyond what were the science was and is, but we conceptually got it right. Once it started became very clear. It wasn't just an epidemiological problem. Wasn't just a health issue, et cetera, et cetera. It was much more than that. And that's been very powerful. And my hope is that this lesson will seep itself through world sort of by diffuse itself throughout academia.
Geoffrey West (1h 3m 22s):
And it wasn't just the media that got it wrong. I mean, the politicians got it wrong and you know, the people supposedly managing this, we only hear from, as I said, we only hear from Mr. Fauci, we only hear from the world health organization. And so on. We don't hear from all the other potential agencies and actors on the world stage and on the national stage and all the local stage that I impacted in this way and see them as interconnected. And I think that's the lesson that SFI was founded on that those kinds of ideas. And I hope that that lesson will be learned and will the word will spread so to speak.
Geoffrey West (1h 4m 8s):
So I think that's been a great success for SFI and I hope it's recognized.
Michael Garfield (1h 4m 14s):
Just as a way of sort of concluding this, I'd love to know from each of you, what, if anything, you feel needs to be addressed that has not been about this book or this topic in this conversation so far and bonus points, if it happens to be like a flaming hole in your own understanding of this a burning question that remains unanswered for you?
David Krakauer (1h 4m 41s):
I think we do not understand how collective intelligence works and we had a wonderful, we were all schooled in collective stupidity, and I think we haven't even begun to understand what's going on here. That's the very exciting thing about complexity science is that we understand our stars work. So the systems work, engines work, computers work, but we really, we're not even in the foothills of understanding how complex reality works. And I think so when you say what's missing, I mean, all of that, which is very exciting for us. And I think the last few years have been in some sense, a demonstration.
Geoffrey West (1h 5m 24s):
I would say that what the pandemic did for us in a way it made, and I did a sudden urgency to some of the big questions, not just about the pandemic, but just all the ones that are complex adaptive systems in general, and that we can play a really important role, not just as I say, in the pandemic, but in questions about the biosphere and about sustainability and climate change and what that effect will have and so on. And it's a template in a way, but it illustrates for us that a we've made tremendous progress on the one hand, but as David emphasized, we've scratched the surface.
Geoffrey West (1h 6m 8s):
We're just beginning. And in a way, that's not surprising. We've been around a short time and there's been about 150 people working on it. In terms of the enormous effort and the incredible amount of money that goes into the science, especially the medical science enterprise, the amount of money and time and effort and people intelligent time has gone into these questions is absolutely miniscule. And almost all of it is here actually. And so it illustrates that we need so much more of this. We need to have that the federal agencies, the universities need to recognize this in a serious way, which brings up a whole bunch of big questions even to do with the structure of universities and academia and so on and so forth, which we haven't even touched on here.
Geoffrey West (1h 7m 4s):
But I think that's very exciting to me. And I think it shows really how crucially important SFI is on the academic landscape. I'll add one more thing to that. I think the other thing that it illustrated is one of the great things that we have at SFI, of course, is action. And that is just a little bit about connection to what is euphemistically called the real world. You know, that is the various corporations and companies that interact with SFI. And it may be that this illustrates that we need to go beyond that. We need to make that even more than it already is, but also include, some politicians and practitioners and others that aren't particularly scientific minded, but really want to solve these problems.
Geoffrey West (1h 7m 52s):
And that we somehow need to get together with them, need to be in bed with them. And really more of that. And I don't know how we do that. That's a whole new game and it may be that we can't solve these problems unless we have everybody together. It's not just the cross disciplinary transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, but into society in terms of the shakers and movers who are thinking about these problems from a completely different, and usually non-scientific viewpoint.
Michael Garfield (1h 8m 25s):
In one room breathing on each other.
Geoffrey West (1h 8m 27s):
Exactly.
David Krakauer (1h 8m 32s):
I will say that the problem has been with as, and as Geoffrey says, I mean, action is applied complexity network and SFI. The problem is as soon as you move in that direction, the great magnets of ideological alignment start to operate on you. And the other Greek problem that we have not solved is we somewhat feel comfortable with the objectivity in our domain. And we are very nervous of moving down that path that Geoffrey is saying is probably existentially necessary without then being written off as pundits for a particular political perspective.
David Krakauer (1h 9m 15s):
And I, I don't know how to solve that.
Geoffrey West (1h 9m 17s):
Huge issue, that issue coupled with, if it really went the way I just said, and it was embraced, we would get swallowed up. Even though I was sort of in a cartoon mocking way, almost say it's just 150 of us or whatever that, that's been our strength. We delight in that, that we can be together and truly interact. I mean, the collaborations have been extraordinary across a huge range of broad questions and broad disciplines and fear would be that we might lose that because that has been operationally, hugely successful.
Michael Garfield (1h 9m 60s):
Just avoid ideology like the plague, but somehow still keep your job.
Geoffrey West (1h 10m 5s):
Small, you know, small is beautiful kind of thing.
David Krakauer (1h 10m 8s):
And remain a citizen of the world.
Geoffrey West (1h 10m 10s):
It's, that's huge to they're in conflict with each other, some of these things, unfortunately,
Michael Garfield (1h 10m 18s):
That's an excellent mystery on which to end This conversation. Thank you for listening. Complexities produced by the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit hub for complex system science located in the high desert of New Mexico. For more information, including transcripts research links and educational resources, or to support our science and communication efforts, visit Santa fe.edu/podcast.