Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

So, participation is risky in that sense.

The bottom line is that small changes in the communication structure can affect decisions.

The reason is, in order for communication to be effective, it has to create what’s known as common knowledge, which is a string of embedded knowledge—you know, if you have two individuals, and I need to know that the other is going to show up to protest, the other needs to know that I’m going to show up to protest, and I need to know that he knows

it is worth noting that the term “efficiency” comes from physics. In physics, efficiency measures how energy translates into useful work; in markets, efficiency measures how information translates into stock prices.

She said much of the finance industry has too narrow a view of its strategy and goals. It often becomes a short-term, almost zero-sum game with many investors focused only on small relative gains won against each other.

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho

But this sort of omnivorous eclectic mindset, which is very much what the SFI is, that is an aspect of physics that has been built into the genome of the SFI. That’s what would be necessary to be able to go after those kinds of aspects of conventional economics, which are just sitting there and have been for over half a century. Nobody’s actually t

Markets become inefficient when one of these conditions is violated, and the most likely condition is almost always lack of diversity. We are social animals. Instead of believing different things, we correlate our beliefs.

What’s interesting about blockchain instead is that it enables “frictionless binding contracts,” to use the language of economics.