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

Terrorists tend to be young, rarely older than thirty and usually in their early twenties. Terrorists feel resentment toward mainstream society because of perceived or real injustices they have experienced, and they often feel frustrated that they are unable to obtain justice. Before they became violent, most terrorists spent time in close contact

In economics the particles, that is, agents, are endowed with some kind of foresight. Their image of the future affects the present.

They appear to want some of the same things most of us want: recognition from their peers and communities and better lives for the people they care about. Being

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.

social complexity ultimately emerges from people behaving in terms of the body-state imagery of their shared social metaphors. (If you habitually imagine your community as a family, and you have experienced loving parents, then surely your leaders have your best interests at heart.) In social

Also, in my own research on Tewa Pueblo origins, I’ve found that imagining the community as a garden, with women as corn plants and men as clouds, was central to the emergence of an intercommunity ceremonial system that supported permanent villages and community-level specialization

First, the economies of early civilizations were highly variable and reflected the process of local adaptation to the specific environments in which each emerged. Second, the political organizations of early civilizations also varied, falling into one of two basic types: city-states, where a large number of farmers lived with elites in urban center

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s