Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his c

Prices arise from the countless acts of many individuals attempting to trade in various goods. They are an emergent phenomenon.

This is a “rich get richer” sort of model in which the more a word is used in the past, the more likely it is that it will attract more use in the future.

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.

Conventional economics asks how agents’ behaviors (actions, strategies, forecasts) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these cause. It asks, in other words, what patterns would call for no changes in microbehavior, and would therefore be in stasis or equilibrium.

It seems that, from the perspective of mathematical science, there exist two natural domains. The first is the physical domain of particles, fields, and universal laws, with an associated search for elegant theories that apply everywhere in the known universe. Here, science has made great strides. The second domain is that of complex phenomena. The

Another, more intuitive way to understand urban scaling is the speed of life in cities. Life in larger cities is generally faster, meaning one can do more, both good and bad, by having more social exchanges over the same amount of time. This speed of social life is intimately connected to the spatial density of many activities, creating spaces and

Hence, we are more likely to accept a dangerous idea if it aligns with our own experiences and is supported by the people we value.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.