Sublime

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

next, to generate exponential (resource) growth.

Prigogine showed that the steady states that matter reaches in systems that are out of equilibrium tend to be organized. After chaos there is information.

Each person has their own life path, and any aggregate results will follow from the interactions of these diverse structures into social organizations over space and time.

Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call “superlinear scaling”: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you

we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

So, optimizing utility changes over many parallel worlds actually also optimizes wealth itself over time. That’s sort of the message.