Sublime

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.

Agent_Zero. Geoff’s work is so fantastic in this space. Cities, just like ecosystems, are more diverse as they get bigger. Why is that? Well, if you think about it from a biological perspective, there’s just more diversity carrying capacity, right? Like if I’m interested in European soccer and I live in a town of 500 people, there’s just no one to

There frankly is a hell of a lot of value in the game theory and economics literature.

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.

Wright, Robert. NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence—a deck of attributes that have proved ill suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.

The big advantage of physicists—I think Doyne Farmer may have once said this to me—is not what they have learned, the tools. It’s how they have learned to think. In particular, physicists are quite good at being very, very broad, taking tools from all over the place. That is something that economists are very, very remiss in. It is a b—tch to try t

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

Rather, after a simulation is run a thousand or a million times, such models show policy makers the range of possible futures and their relative probabilities if policies remain unchanged. Then, by altering policies in the model and running them another million times, we might begin to understand paths to better futures.