Sublime

emergent phenomena, ergodicity, radical uncertainty, and computational irreducibility.

In this sense, cities are an outstanding example of complex adaptive systems: collections of individual constituents (people, in this case) that interact in myriad ways, usually mediated by some sort of network.

The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

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.

But this sort of omnivorous eclectic mindset, which is very much what the SFI is, that is an aspect of physics that has been built into the genome of the SFI. That’s what would be necessary to be able to go after those kinds of aspects of conventional economics, which are just sitting there and have been for over half a century. Nobody’s actually

New strategies, new things are coming and going and striving to survive and do well in a situation they mutually create. We can describe this algorithmically, but not easily by equations, not just because the situation is complicated to track but because new behaviors and categories of behavior are not easily captured by equations.

It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

James Coleman,