Sublime

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.

David Brewster.

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions o

essence, we are dealing with disgruntled young people who do unexpected or dangerous things under the social influence of their peers and role models—a.k.a. the common adolescent. And yet, only a small fraction of disgruntled young people stumble into behaviors that are significantly more dangerous than making severe fashion statements or partying

These people with health-care talents had never studied biochemistry or pathology, but they possessed the

A closer look shows that the hierarchies are constructed on a “building block” principle: subsystems at each level of the hierarchy are constructed by combinations of small numbers of subsystems from the next lower level.

Traditionally, science seeks order by understanding the simplest parts of a system. How does a single gas particle behave given a certain temperature? Which gene in our DNA determines eye color? Scientists then try to develop theories that explain more general observations based on their detailed understanding of the individual parts.