Podcast appearances and mentions of Geoffrey West

Hello Interactors,This week, I've been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that's been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren't just struggling with transportation or housing. They're struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don't we ask that more often?STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATEDThe urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren't just systems of movement — they're systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it's shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn't new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang'an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.These weren't just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O'Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it's neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger' not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter's landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don't float in space, they're grounded in the social fabric around them.You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don't just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who's spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic. He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren't just solving inefficiencies. They're hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.The question isn't just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn't be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALMIf you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you'll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it's a policy question. For everyone else, it's about dignity.As Walker puts it, coverage isn't about efficiency — it's about “a sense of fairness.” It's about living in a place where your city hasn't written you off because you're not profitable to serve. Walker's point is that coverage isn't charity. It's a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn't about joy or euphoria. It's about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.There's a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That's what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don't say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It's a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren't luxuries — they're part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn't just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy'. They feel held.Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn't about dopamine hits — it's about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won't be stranded if you don't have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don't make it work for you.In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They're shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They're saying: we share space here. Don't be loud. Don't cut in line. Don't treat public space like it's only for you.That kind of city can't be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That's not some socialist's idea of utopia. It's just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.But sometimes we're just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it's not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.Once you've laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you've shaped what comes next. Changing course isn't impossible, but it's costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we've got.Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They've shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you're probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CAREThere's a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that's made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one's entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won't stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There's long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn't a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That's how you'd tune an engine or write software. But cities aren't machines. They're messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They're more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that's where complexity science becomes useful.People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don't have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict. Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn't just technical — it's ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system's design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can't do both. Not on a fixed budget.Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that's also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren't neutral containers. They're environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.I'm an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I've learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don't have to engage — but you're not invisible either.There's a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here's the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.Or they don't.And that's the real test of infrastructure. We've spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we've neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you're not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that's working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you're sharing something. Space. Water. Time.You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They're not luxuries — they're civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don't have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn't perform.But cities don't have to choose between quiet and joy. We don't have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There's something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.Even Jarrett Walker, who's clear-eyed about transit, doesn't pretend it solves everything. Transit isn't always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he's quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.So no, I'm not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I'm arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.REFERENCESCastellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].O'Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth'. The New York Times Magazine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with John Ioannidis, a renowned scientist and meta-researcher whose groundbreaking work has shaped our understanding of scientific reliability and its societal implications. We dive into his influential 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, explore the evolution of scientific challenges over the past two decades, and reflect on how science intersects with policy and public trust—especially in times of crisis like COVID-19. We begin with John taking us back to 2005, when he published his paper in PLOS Medicine. He explains how it emerged from decades of empirical evidence on biases and false positives in research, considering factors like study size, statistical power, and competition that can distort findings, and why building on shaky foundations wastes time and resources. “It was one effort to try to put together some possibilities, of calculating what are the chances that once we think we have come up with a scientific discovery with some statistical inference suggesting that we have a statistically significant result, how likely is that not to be so?” I propose a distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” scientific failures, and John refines this. What does failure really mean, and how can they be categorised? The discussion turns to the rise of fraud, with John revealing a startling shift: while fraud once required artistry, today's “paper mills” churn out fake studies at scale. We touch on cases like Jan-Hendrik Schön, who published prolifically in top journals before being exposed, and how modern hyper-productivity, such as a paper every five days, raises red flags yet often goes unchecked. “Perhaps an estimate for what is going on now is that it accounts for about 10%, not just 1%, because we have new ways of massive… outright fraud.” This leads to a broader question about science's efficiency. When we observe scientific output—papers, funding—grows exponentially but does breakthroughs lag? John is cautiously optimistic, acknowledging progress, but agrees efficiency isn't what it could be. We reference Max Perutz's recipe for success: “No politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people, picked by a few men of good judgement.” Could this be replicated in today's world or are we stuck in red tape? “It is true that the progress is not proportional to the massive increase in some of the other numbers.” We then pivot to nutrition, a field John describes as “messy.” How is it possible that with millions of papers, results are mosty based on shaky correlations rather than solid causal evidence? What are the reasons for this situation and what consequences does it have, e.g. in people trusting scientific results? “Most of these recommendations are built on thin air. They have no solid science behind them.” The pandemic looms large next. In 2020 Nassim Taleb and John Ioannidis had a dispute about the measures to be taken. What happened in March 2020 and onwards? Did we as society show paranoid overreactions, fuelled by clueless editorials and media hype? “I gave interviews where I said, that's fine. We don't know what we're facing with. It is okay to start with some very aggressive measures, but what we need is reliable evidence to be obtained as quickly as possible.” Was the medicine, metaphorically speaking, worse than the disease? How can society balance worst-case scenarios without paralysis. “We managed to kill far more by doing what we did.” Who is framing the public narrative of complex questions like climate change or a pandemic? Is it really science driven, based on the best knowledge we have? In recent years influential scientific magazines publish articles by staff writers that have a high impact on the public perception, but are not necessarily well grounded: “They know everything before we know anything.” The conversation grows personal as John shares the toll of the COVID era—death threats to him and his family—and mourns the loss of civil debate. He'd rather hear from critics than echo chambers, but the partisan “war” mindset drowned out reason. Can science recover its humility and openness? “I think very little of that happened. There was no willingness to see opponents as anything but enemies in a war.” Inspired by Gerd Gigerenzer, who will be a guest in this show very soon, we close on the pitfalls of hyper-complex models in science and policy. How can we handle decision making under radical uncertainty? Which type of models help, which can lead us astray? “I'm worried that complexity sometimes could be an alibi for confusion.” This conversation left me both inspired and unsettled. John's clarity on science's flaws, paired with his hope for reform, offers a roadmap, but the stakes are high. From nutrition to pandemics, shaky science shapes our lives, and rebuilding trust demands we embrace uncertainty, not dogma. His call for dialogue over destruction is a plea we should not ignore. Other Episodes Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof. Jessica Weinkle Episode 112: Nullius in Verba — oder: Der Müll der Wissenschaft Episode 109: Was ist Komplexität? Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Marco Wehr Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 94: Systemisches Denken und gesellschaftliche Verwundbarkeit, ein Gespräch mit Herbert Saurugg Episode 92: Wissen und Expertise Teil 2 Episode 90: Unintended Consequences (Unerwartete Folgen) Episode 86: Climate Uncertainty and Risk, a conversation with Dr. Judith Curry Episode 67: Wissenschaft, Hype und Realität — ein Gespräch mit Stephan Schleim References Prof. John Ioannidis at Stanford University  John P. A. Ioannidis, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, PLOS Medicine (2005) John Ioannidis, A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, weare making decisions without reliable data (2020) John Ioannidis, The scientists who publish a paper every five days, Nature Comment (2018) Hanae Armitage, 5 Questions: John Ioannidis calls for more rigorous nutrition research (2018) John Ioannidis, How the Pandemic Is Changing Scientific Norms, Tablet Magazine (2021) John Ioannidis et al, Uncertainty and Inconsistency of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical1Intervention Effects with Multiple Competitive Statistical Models (2025) John Ioannidis et al, Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed (2022) Gerd Gigerenzer, Transparent modeling of influenza incidence: Big data or asingle data point from psychological theory? (2022) Sabine Kleinert, Richard Horton, How should medical science change? Lancet Comment (2014) Max Perutz quotation taken from Geoffrey West, Scale, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2017) John Ioannidis: Das Gewissen der Wissenschaft, Ö1 Dimensionen (2024)  

Para manter a tradição de todos os anos, Cristina De Luca e Silvia Bassi selecionaram dez livros que podem ajudar a começar bem 2025, de Inteligência Artificial a ficção científica, passando por guerra tecnológica e biografias de super founders de tech que vão impactar nossa vida no novo ano.Links do episódio: 1- "Potencial oculto: Como extrair o melhor de você e dos outros", livro novo de Adam Grant para brilhar em 2025.2- "Lunáticos - Loonshots: Como cultivar ideias inovadoras capazes de mudar o mundo", de Safi Bahcall, para tirar sua idéia maluca do papel.3- "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines", de Matt Beane, para garantir que nossas habilidades humanas prosperem na era da IA.4- "Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son", de Lionel Barber, sobre um dos mais controversos investidores de tecnologia.5- "Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World", de Parmy Olsen, mergulha na grande guerra entre OpenAI e Google DeepMind. Livro do Ano do Financial Times.6- "The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant", de Tae Kim, explica como pensa o cofundador da Nvidia, a empresa que está no olho do furacão da IA.7- "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior", de Sandra Matz, para entender como os algoritmos podem influenciar nosso comportamento, para o bem e para o mal.8- "Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War", de Raj Shah e Christopher Kirchhoff, sobre a influência da tecnologia digital no futuro da guerra.9- "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies", por Geoffrey West, traz o lado científico sobre as métricas que regem a vida e a morte dos seres vivos, organismos, empresas e cidades.10- "Nada mais será como antes", de Miguel Nicolelis. Uma ficção científica fundamentada em problemas e riscos reais para a humanidade. A The Shift é uma plataforma de conteúdo que descomplica os contextos da inovação disruptiva e da economia digital.Visite o site www.theshift.info e assine a newsletter

This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft. Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast (his edit here) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. Enjoy!✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Chapters00:00 Introduction to Lifelong Collaboration and Innovation 01:18 The Role of Art and Holistic Processes in Innovation 01:37 Challenges in Fostering Collective Intelligence 03:37 The Intersection of Science and Art 03:49 Introduction to the Special Episode with Tim Adelin06:36 Exploring Technology and Human Civilization 07:27 The Importance of Trust and Dialogue in Organizations 42:41 The Rise of Wise Innovation 43:34 The Information Scaling Problem 44:49 The Epidemic of Loneliness 46:58 The Obsession with Novelty 50:21 The Role of Cultural Intelligence 53:25 The Finite Time Singularity 01:01:15 The Future of Human Collaboration✨ Takeaways* Wise innovation requires reconnecting with the purpose and mission of organizations and cultivating a field that allows for the ripening of ideas and contributions.* The tension between exploration and exploitation is a key consideration in navigating large networks and organizations.* Play, creativity, and the integration of holistic, playful, and noisy approaches are essential for innovation and problem-solving.* Deep and authentic relationships are crucial for effective communication and understanding in a world of information overload.* The need for wisdom to keep pace with technology is a pressing challenge in the modern world. Innovation is a crossroads between the need for integration and the obsession with novelty and productivity.* Different types of innovation are needed, and movement in one dimension is not equivalent to movement in another.* The erosion of values and the loss of context can occur when organizations prioritize innovation and novelty.* A tripartite regulatory structure, consisting of industry, art/culture/academia, and government, is necessary to prevent the exploitation of power asymmetries.* Small-scale governance processes and the importance of care and balance in innovation are key to a more sustainable and wise approach.✨ MentionsAlison Gopnik, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Arthur, Bruce Alderman, Andrew Dunn, Turquoise Sound, John Vervaeke, Naomi Klein, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Mignano, Rimma Boshernitsan, Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, Jim Brown, Elisa Mora, Chris Kempes, Manfred Laubichler, Annalee Newitz, Venkatesh Rao, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Yanis Varoufakis, Ferananda Ibarra, Josh Field, Michel Bauwens, John Pepper, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Landua, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Kevin Clark, Stuart Kauffman, Jordan Hall, William Irwin Thompson, Henry Andrews This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Scientists have observed that in nature, all things scale with size in a way that is mathematically predictable. Similar scaling laws hold for things like growth and lifespan. As theoretical physicist Geoffrey West explains, larger mammals generally live longer because of the inverse relationship between body size and the rate at which cells are damaged. By having this theory of scaling laws, “you can determine what the parameters are, the knobs that you could conceivably turn to change that lifespan,” says West. Instead of living to be 100 years old, humans could someday hack our cells to last for two centuries. --------------------------------------------------------------- GEOFFREY WEST: Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time's list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” Geoffrey West is the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies”, find it at https://amzn.to/2UpdHi4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: GEOFFREY WEST: All things scale in a very predictable way and they scale in a way that's non-linear. We developed this very elegant theory that what these scaling laws are reflecting are in fact the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow. I think it's one of the more remarkable properties of life actually. Just taking mammals, the largest mammals, the whale, in terms of measurable quantities, is actually a scaled up version of the smallest mammal, which is actually the shrew. They are scaled versions of one another. If you have this theory of scaling laws, you can determine what the parameters are, the knobs that you could conceivably turn to change that lifespan. So it's a fantastic effect, it's a huge effect. If you have this theory of networks underlying these scaling laws, manifesting themselves as scaling laws, you first ask, you know, is there a scaling law for lifespan? Every time you double the size of an organism, you would expect to double the amount of metabolic energy you need to keep that organism alive. Quite the contrary, you don't need twice as much metabolic energy. Systematically you only need roughly speaking 75% as much. So there's this kind of systematic 25% savings. Metabolic rate simply means how much energy or how much food does an animal need to eat each day in order to stay alive. Everybody's familiar with that as sort of roughly 2000 food calories a day for a human being. So here's this extraordinary complex process, yet it scales in a very simple way. Life span also increases following these quarter power scaling laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Big questions, eccentric minds, multiple disciplines: Inside the world's premier complexity science research center. ❍ Dispatches Episode 2:    • Finding the secret of human existence...   Complexity arises in any system in which multiple agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations. Complexity science explores all of those systems, and more. And at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the globe's smartest minds are researching across disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought to answer the biggest questions in science and philosophy. Our host Kmele Foster stepped into the Santa Fe Institute — renowned for its collaborative environment of vast disciplines and schools of thought — to speak with some of the most eccentric and genius minds in our world today. Featuring Cormac McCarthy, David Krakauer, Geoffrey West, and Chris Kempes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ❍ About The Well ❍ Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life's biggest questions, and that's why they're the questions occupying the world's brightest minds. So what do they think? How is the power of science advancing understanding? How are philosophers and theologians tackling these fascinating questions? Let's dive into The Well. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What patterns can connect and unify biology, society, and the environment? How do cities outlast empires and survive unimaginable destruction? Why do buildings and trees have natural height limits?Geoffrey West is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and also the author of the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Geoffrey and Greg discuss the intricate tapestry of complexity science, where the life of cities and the corporate world intertwine with the principles of biology. Geoffrey's expertise is in linking these seemingly disparate realms in a panoramic view of the universal laws that govern growth, innovation, and sustainability. Geoffrey explains how scaling laws inform everything from the rhythm of every heart in every animal to the pace of city life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it that companies die more quickly than cities?52:57: ​​If you look at the biology and most of the scaling curves, the points lie very close to the scaling line. Cities, there's some variance; you know, there's much more variance, but it's still pretty good. Companies, it's much broader, a much bigger band of variance. Not surprisingly, because animals have evolved over hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, cities for hundreds of years to maybe a few thousand, possibly, and companies are tens of years, if you're lucky, in some cases, it's not surprising that you get tremendous variance. So, if you believe that the scaling laws are a tendency towards optimizing something to be decided, it's not surprising that companies will have a lot of variants because, if they haven't been around very long, everything's still sort of evolving and adapting.Social interaction and the urban pace48:26: Giving rise to more social interactions, more ideas; and so on also leads to the increasing pace of life in a systematic or predictable way, as distinct from biology, where that economy of life is the slowing of the pace of life. Everything slows down the bigger you are; you live longer, and everything takes longer.The classic agglomeration effects of what city does40:36: The fundamental structure of a social network is that A talks to B, B talks to C, C talks back to A, and we build on each other. We keep building on these ideas; I mean, effectively, they may be stupid ideas, and they may be wrong, and no one gives a damn about any of it, but we forget them afterward, so in almost all cases, it's irrelevant. On the other hand, the thing that's extraordinary about that is that dynamic is what produces a theory of relativity or a Google or a Microsoft or UC Berkeley or whatever, you know, produces; that's what it does. That's what we're here for. So these are the classic agglomeration effects of what a city does, and this is just putting it into a network language; it's the interaction within these networks and the structure of those networks. The scale of life's capillary networks20:11: The thing that distinguishes you from a whale is that, in this context, we have the same capillaries, but the network is so much bigger. So that's the idea. And there's this shrew; you can barely see it's less than a millimeter, but the whale is like, you could drive a car through it, and so, but down at the capillary end, but the other end. of the network when they're the same. So that's the idea because you build up and use those as building blocks.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Economies of ScaleDiseconomies of ScaleCharles DarwinIsaac NewtonMax KleiberBrian J. EnquistMaxwell's equationsInvariantOptima for Animals: Revised EditionD'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonGalileo GalileiSigmoid FunctionLewis MumfordJane JacobsJack WelchMalthusianismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the Santa Fe InstituteWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and CompaniesGeoffrey's TED Talk

Between 1950 and 2009, 78% of companies listed on the US stock market went bankrupt. That was a finding from Geoffrey West in his book Scale. Makes the stock market seem pretty risky right?In that time, the US stock market grew 23,249%. Or, put another way, each $100 invested in 1950 turned into more than $200k. In this episode we share how you can reconcile those two numbers and ultimately why companies may die but indexes are forever. Here's what else we cover in today's episode:How indexes have changed over time Adam Dawes returns for another Pimp my PortfolioThe challenge of ETF overlap: what is it, when is it okay and how can you measure it?Resources discussed: Examine ETF overlap with ETF TrackerPick up our book Don't Stress, Just InvestHave a question? Ask via our website and we'll answer it on the podcast.Join the conversation in the Facebook Discussion Group—------In the spirit of reconciliation, Equity Mates Media and the hosts of Equity Mates Investing acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today. —------Equity Mates Investing is a product of Equity Mates Media. This podcast is intended for education and entertainment purposes. Any advice is general advice only, and has not taken into account your personal financial circumstances, needs or objectives. Before acting on general advice, you should consider if it is relevant to your needs and read the relevant Product Disclosure Statement. And if you are unsure, please speak to a financial professional. Equity Mates Media operates under Australian Financial Services Licence 540697. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded April 4 2024   Description   Based on this week's podcast episode with Geoffrey West, which covered how biological scaling applies to human economies, this week's Frankly is a reflection on what this might mean for the future of our societies. Throughout history and up to today, there are scaling patterns driving our social and infrastructural metabolism - potentially shedding light on some long debated questions about the limits of our ability to design our societies. Do we as humans have the agency to create different paths towards less resource consumption, or are we trapped within a previously hidden law of nature? Will the resource and waste limitations of our biosphere force us to live differently, regardless of our choices? More hopefully, can understanding we have a metabolism change our metabolism, and steer futures away from the current default?   Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qb-9CMM6Ac   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/59-7-meta-questions-about-our-global-metabolism

On this episode, physicist Geoffrey West joins Nate to discuss his decades of work on metabolic scaling laws found in nature and how they apply to humans and our economies. As we think about the past and future of societies, there are patterns that emerge independently across cultures in terms of resource use and social phenomena as the size of a city grows. Does Kleiber's law, which describes the increasingly efficient use of energy as an animal gets larger - also apply to human cities? How have humans deviated from this rule through excess social consumption beyond a human body's individual metabolic needs? What could we learn from these scaling laws to adjust our communities to be more aligned with the biophysical realities of energy and resource consumption? Can an understanding of social metabolism impact our social metabolism? About Geoffrey West Geoffrey West is the Shannan Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute and an Associate Senior Fellow of Oxford University's Green-Templeton College. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions ranging across physics, biology and the social sciences. His work is motivated by the search for unifying principles and the “simplicity underlying complexity”. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging & death, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, innovation and the accelerating pace of life. Most recently he has been developing a science of cities and companies, including the challenge of long-term global sustainability of the anthroposphere. He is the author of the best-selling book Scale; The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Find out more, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/117-geoffrey-west Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/my9a9Ftr7ek

Why bullies and jerks are often rewarded at work https://www.fastcompany.com/91060930/why-bullies-and-jerks-are-often-rewarded-at-work Of Monkeys and Men https://quillette.com/2024/03/23/of-monkeys-and-men-the-extraordinary-work-of-frans-de-waal/ Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED Talk https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg?si=f3IbXgjCUe-sL8Vc How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-internet-turned-us-into-content-machines leia, vale a pena: Scale, por Geoffrey West https://leiavaleapena.com/2017/09/02/leia-vale-a-pena-scale-por-geoffrey-west/ Corredores Verdes em Medellin https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3IDXBxOQhT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link projeto Cuidarme em Medellin ... Read more

Geoffrey West is a physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. His book, “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Businesses” (2017), is a masterpiece. In this episode, we talk about the power laws behind living organisms, cities, businesses, and technologies. By the end of this episode, you will know more about the power law behind the heartbeat of all mammals, the number of patents and crime in big cities compared to small cities, innovation, the way technology scales, and more. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Find me on X at @ProfSchrepel. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Scaling Theory podcast; it helps its growth. *** References Geoffrey West, ⁠Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Businesses⁠ (Penguin Books, 2017) George J. Stigler, “The Economies of Scale”, The Journal of Law & Economics 1 (1958): 54–71 Michael HR Stanley, et al. “⁠Scaling Behaviour in the Growth of Companies”, Nature 379.6568 (1996): 804-806.APA W. Brian. Arthur, “⁠Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events”, The Economic Journal 99.394 (1989): 116-131. Madeleine IG Daepp, et al. “⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Mortality of Companies⁠”, Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12.106 (2015): 20150120.APA Jiang Zhang, et al. “⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scaling Laws and a General Theory for the Growth of Public Companies⁠⁠”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10379 (2021)

In this first episode, Dr. Thibault Schrepel (@⁠ProfSchrepel⁠) introduces “Scaling Theory”, a podcast dedicated to the power laws behind the growth of companies, technologies, legal and living systems. *** References: ➝ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) ➝ Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (2011) ➝ Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (2019) ➝ John H. Miller & Scott Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (2007) ➝ W. Brian Arthur, Complexity and the Economy (2014) ➝ Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies (2017)

If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review.  The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we're doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it's well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!✨ Mentioned & Related Links:The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki's Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainable? Though apparently disparate the answer to these questions can be found in the work of theoretical physicist Geoffrey West. Geoffrey is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he was formerly the president. By looking at the network structure of organisms, cities, and companies Geoffrey was able to explain mathematically the peculiar ways in which many features scale. For example, the California Sea Lion weighs twice as much as an Emperor Penguin, but it only consumes 75% more energy. This sub-linear scaling is incredibly regular, following the same pattern across many species and an epic range of sizes. This is an example of a scaling law. The heart of the explanation is this: optimal space-filling networks are fractal-like in nature and scale as if they acquire an extra dimension. A 3D fractal network scales as if it is 4D. Geoffrey's web page Geoffrey's book: ScaleChapters(00:00) Introduction(02:56) Start of conversation: Geoffrey's Career Journey(03:25) Transition from High Energy Physics to Biology(09:05) Exploring the Origin of Aging and Death(11:20) Discovering Scaling Laws in Biology(12:30) Understanding the Metabolic Rate and its Scaling(25:40) The Impact of the Molecular Revolution on Biology(28:39) The Role of Networks in Biological Systems(49:07) The Connection between Fractals and Biological Systems(01:00:29) Understanding the Growth and Supply of Cells(01:01:07) The Impact of Size on Energy Consumption(01:01:46) The Role of Networks in Growth and Supply(01:02:30) The Universality of Growth in Organisms(01:03:13) Exploring the Dynamics of Cities(01:06:12) The Scaling of Infrastructure and Socioeconomic Factors in Cities(01:07:36) The Implications of Superlinear Scaling in Cities(01:11:50) The Future of Cities and the Need for Innovation

In the words written in 1926 by "Geoffrey West", the pseudonym of Geoffrey H. Wells: "it ["The Door in the Wall"] was often considered Wells's best short story. This short story has been the base for at least three short films: "The Door in the Wall" (1956), an experimental film directed by Glenn H. Alvey Jr., starred Stephen Murray and Ian Hunter. Dver v stene (1990) was a Soviet animation directed by Boris Akulinichev. The Door (2011) was written and directed by Andrew Steggall, and the cast included Charles Dance and Harriet Walter. Therefore "The Door in the Wall" continues influencing writers and attracting avid readers in the 21st century and surely for the "futures" to come. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-kennedy98/message

Guests: Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of PennsylvaniaGeoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris KempesProducer: Katherine MoncurePodcast theme music: Mitch MignanoOther Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Craig Smith.Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • BlueskySFI programs: Complexity Global School Complexity Explorer: Fractals & ScalingEducationBooks & Stories: Tell Me Why by Arkady LeokumScale by Geoffrey West“Funes, the Memorious” by Jorge Luis BorgesTalks: How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural Circuits by Vijay BalasubramanianThe Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey WestEnergy, Scaling & The Future of Life on Earth by Geoffrey WestComplex Time Working Group: “What is Sleep?” with Geoffrey West, Van Savage, Alex HermanPapers: “Brain Power” in PNAS (August 2, 2021) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.210702211“The Physical Effects of Learning” preprint published in biorxiv“Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development” in Science Advances (September 18, 2020) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0398“The Scales That Limit: The Physical Boundaries of Evolution” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (August 7, 2019) doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00242

→ Scale: ⁠https://www.bookmarked.club/books/scale Sponsor → Stakwork: ⁠https://stacksats.how/stakwork⁠ Summary In this conversation, Kevin interviews Geoffrey West, a physicist and author of the book 'Scale'. They discuss the concept of scaling laws and how they apply to various disciplines such as biology, networks, and cities. They explore the interconnectedness of these scaling laws and the significance of quarter power scaling. They also delve into the similarities and differences between biological systems and cities, the constraints on city growth, and the potential limitations of resource availability. The conversation touches on the role of innovation, collaboration, and technology in scaling, as well as the challenges and possibilities for stabilization in the future. Takeaways Scaling laws apply to various disciplines and are interconnected. Quarter power scaling is significant in understanding scaling phenomena. Biological systems and cities share similarities in optimization and resource allocation. Cities have unique constraints on growth compared to biological systems. Innovation, collaboration, and technology play key roles in scaling. The future of scaling requires adaptation, resilience, and potential stabilization. This show is a Lightning podcast. That means instead of asking for likes or shares, I ask for sats. The best way to show your support is to download Fountain from the App Store, load your wallet with some sats, and send them over the Lightning Network to kerooke@fountain.fm. → Fountain: https://www.fountain.fm/ → More Episodes: https://www.stacksats.how/podcast → Lightning Address: ⚡kerooke@fountain.fm → Nostr NIP-05: kr@stacker.news Links → Bookmarked: https://www.bookmarked.club/ → Stack Sats: https://www.stacksats.how/ → Twitter: https://twitter.com/kerooke

Geoffrey West is Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a theoretical physicist who has worked broadly on topics related to elementary particles and their cosmological implications. Among other topics, he has also worked on complexity theory, scaling laws in biology, and how they can be applied in other areas, such as cities and problems involving global sustainability. This is precisely what Robinson and Geoffrey discuss in this episode, with particular reference to his recent book, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (Penguin, 2017).  Scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ05syiaUxg OUTLINE 00:00 In This Episode… 00:25 Introduction 02:21 Complexity and the Santa Fe Institute 22:14 What Are Emergent Phenomena? 34:18 What is Complexity Theory? 45:51 Why Do All Animals Have the Same Number of Heartbeats in a Lifetime 01:11:43 Does Complexity Theory Tell Us How to Live Longer 01:22:49 Why Don't Cities Die Like Organisms Do? 01:59:40 The Pandemic and the Increasing Pace of Life Robinson's Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robinson-erhardt/support

This episode is a quick hitter with some thoughts on the special sauce that makes Bittensor unique. Inspired by episode 212 of Michael Garfield's Future Fossils. https://bittensor.com/ https://taostats.io/validators/bittensor-guru-podcast/ Michael Garfield's Future Fossils - Episode 212 w/ Manfred Laubichler and Geoffrey West

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week on the show I speak with physicist Geoffrey West (SFI) and evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler (ASU, SFI) about the transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere are undergoing as the “extended phenotype” of human innovation runs rampant across the surface of Planet Earth.  These two distinguished scientists are some of the most profound thinkers I've ever encountered, helping midwife a new understanding of what it means to be human and a planetary citizen. I have wanted Geoffrey West on Future Fossils since well before I even started working for SFI in 2018, so this episode is the consummation of a years-long journey and I cannot be more excited to share it with you!  It feels a little like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, but we live in an increasingly-intertwingled world, so let's make the best of it!  I wouldn't be where I am today without these two fine minds and their important work.  Enjoy…“The consequences of the Anthropocene are the product of innovations, and yet somehow we think the way out is through EVEN MORE innovation. This is a predicament…Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the OPPRESSION of innovation.”– Manfred Laubichler✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my 2008 Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify)• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!✨ Your Anthropocene & Technosphere Syllabus:More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.Phil AndersonPopulation growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine' that's changing the planetManfred LaubichlerScale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionJaeweon Shin et al.Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tippingKarine Nyborg et al.Teaching the Anthropocene from a Global Perspective (2014!)Manfred Laubichler & Jürgen RennMore from them:Seminar: Co-Evolutionary Perspectives on the TechnosphereAnthropocene Campus | Technosphere / Co-Evolution, presented by Jürgen Renn and Manfred LaubichlerThe Growth and Differentiation of Metabolism: Extended Evolutionary Dynamics in the TechnosphereSFI Community Event - Panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the AnthropoceneSander van der Leeuw, D.A. Wallach, & Geoffrey West, moderated by Manfred LaubichlerWelcome to the Future: Four Pivotal Trends You Should Be Aware OfEd William on the work of Dror PolegThe Future is Fungi: The Rise and Rhizomes of Mushroom CultureJeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith, & Merlin Sheldrake, moderated by Corey PressmanDoes the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?John Pepper at SFIThe Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and NightmaresRe: TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru & Émile TorresComplexity Literacy for a Sustainable Digital Transition: Cases and Arguments From Transdisciplinary Education ProgramsGerald SteinerRelevant episodes from my past life as the host of SFI's Complexity Podcast:Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryMelanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationChris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionThe Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten SchefferScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestMichael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It's a perfect treat for tricky times…Adam's Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!✨ A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari's Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/171-academic-words-reference-from-geoffrey-west-the-surprising-math-of-cities-and-corporations-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/ZfvgvItCx00 (All Words) https://youtu.be/dOpg21DQjDc (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/NVN_dizega0 (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Geoffrey West talking science, misinformation, laws of scale, Casablanca -- and we had a blast. Geoffrey is a theoretical physicist who is questioning universal laws of Scale (also the title of his book), and he relates these laws to our everyday life which is no small feat for someone studying elementary particles. For show notes, more on Geoffrey, and the Big Nerve challenge question check out the Theory Gang newsletter.The full video is also available on YouTube.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT   This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/   Dr. Geoffrey West is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. He is the author of several books, including Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.   In this episode, we focus on Scale. We talk about the study of scaling, and what we can learn from it. We talk about regularities (scaling laws), but also different constraints across different scales. We focus a lot on biological systems, and talk about metabolic rates, growth, longevity, and aging and death. We discuss if and how we could extend our lifespans. We also discuss why we need a science of cities and urbanization, with the future of humanity and the planet in mind. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, AND MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND VEGA G!

This week, Zohar is joined by Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist, Distinguished Professor and Past President of the Santa Fe Institute, and author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, to talk about whether universities are more like cities or companies, what makes human consciousness unique, love as a guiding force, Heidegger, longevity, interdisciplinarity, and why generative AI is all too human.

This week, Zohar is joined by Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist, Distinguished Professor and Past President of the Santa Fe Institute, and author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, to talk about whether universities are more like cities or companies, what makes human consciousness unique, love as a guiding force, Heidegger, longevity, interdisciplinarity, and why generative AI is all too human.

Episode Title and Show Notes:106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic ParkWelcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

Dr. Geoffrey West is the author of the bestselling book Scale, the Universal Laws of Life Growth and Death in Organisms, cities and Companies. He is a physicist who got fascinated by the field of aging and longevity and asked the question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. In today's episode, we dive into his research on the scaling laws in biology and longevity. Episode Show Notes: https://livelongerworld.substack.com/p/gwest Find the previous podcast episodes & subscribe to be notified: https://livelongerworld.substack.com/ Find me (Aastha) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aasthajs DR. GEOFFREY WEST LINKS: Profile: https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-west Book: https://amzn.to/3Xtl7wU CONNECT WITH AASTHA, LIVE LONGER WORLD: Newsletter: https://livelongerworld.substack.com/ Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/aasthajs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aasthajs/ Airchat: https://www.getairchat.com/aasthajs TIMESTAMPS: 1:35 Context on Dr. West's book Scale 9:00 Networks in biology & cities 22:50 Scaling laws in longevity 32:33 Upper limit to human age? 39:08 Quantifying Caloric restriction 41:52 Metabolism & Body temperature 49:05 Scaling laws in age-related damage 56:35 Scaling body sizes across species 1:01:38 Scaling laws in drug dosage (LSD & Elephants) 1:11:06 Drug dosage in children (Tylenol & babies) 1:13:44 Vaccine dosage scaling laws 1:17:51 Sleep & Aging in different organisms 1:31:22 Early stimulation for child development 1:36:35 Fasting, meal frequency & digestive time 1:39:10 Sleep demands with work & physical activity 1:43:40: Scaling laws in cities, companies & universities 2:02:00 Outro POPULAR EPSIODES: Richard Miller on Longevity Supplements: https://youtu.be/42PzfNs9egA Matt Kaeberlein on Rapamycin: https://youtu.be/BL67DhNepfg Michael Levin on Bioelectric Signals for Longevity: https://youtu.be/XboYI_wxDr8 Nir Barzilai on Metformin & Centenarians: https://youtu.be/YlkBE8N7sl8 Morgan Levine on Epigenetic Clocks: https://youtu.be/am3YKiTpCHo Thanks for watching & if you enjoy the episode, let's spread the message on longevity. You can support my work by sharing, liking, subscribing, leaving a review on Apple podcasts, or signing up as a premium member. Aging is universal. Let's unite in this fight. Stay in good health - Aastha.

O inexorável https://www.estadao.com.br/opiniao/eugenio-bucci/o-inexoravel/ leia, vale a pena: Scale, por Geoffrey West https://leiavaleapena.com/2017/09/02/leia-vale-a-pena-scale-por-geoffrey-west/ Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/microsoft_bet_on_fusion/ The Plastic Crisis Finally Gets Emergency Status https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-pollution-emergency-united-nations/ The Real Story Of Ancient Rome's Brutal Campaign Against Gaul | History Of Warfare | Odyssey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkBLrNAcKbM Astérix https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ast%C3%A9rix The Pugio: The Combat Knife of a Roman ... Read more

In this podcast, we dive into the shift towards a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci, an architect, planner, and urban enthusiast. We discuss how the modernist paradigm of deconstructing everything into individual parts and putting them back together linearly is becoming less relevant. Instead, we see a shift towards a more organic, bottom-up approach that looks at the city as a complex and multi-layered system. Joni Baboci is the founder of Layer, a spatial orchestration platform that empowers teams to govern through tactics and patterns while leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has previously served as the General Director of Planning and Urban Development for the City of Tirana and the director of Atelier Albania, a structure of the Albanian government dealing with national and regional strategic planning. Joni has executed planning, design & development projects at different scales at the national, regional and local levels. Joni shares his insights on how technological advancements such as AI and blockchain are enabling bottom-up processes in planning and thinking about cities. We also delve into the challenges of making these ideas practical and building a process of making them a reality. Joni highlights the importance of reinventing physical production through local value loops, and incentivizing the interconnection between urban and rural scapes. We also discuss how DAOs and blockchain technology can improve local governance and participation, and how cities can invest in citizen-based entrepreneurship that let them decide how to perform a job or access a service rather than relying on a top-down approach. Join us as we explore the potential of a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci. Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/joni-baboci Key highlights 

In the last few episodes, we learnt all about scaling laws or power laws and how they apply to mammals. In this episode, the final part of our discussion of scaling and complex systems, for now, we're looking even bigger.  We're joined again by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute, who in this episode will be leaving mammals behind to look at other complex systems. In particular, Geoffrey is going to explain how scaling laws apply to cities or companies.    Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In our last episode, you heard all about the relationship between a mammal's weight and its metabolic rate, and how this holds true regardless of the size of the mammal. You heard other examples of so-called scaling laws, and how these laws seem to be guided by the number four. In this episode, we're joined again by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute. Geoffrey is going to explain why when we double the size of an animal, we only increase its metabolic rate by three quarters. He's going to explain why the number four is behind these curious laws, and he's going to reveal how you and I are fractals.   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Have you ever thought about why the average human lifespan is 80 years? Or why smaller animals, like mice, live for much shorter periods compared to large animals like blue whales?  To help answer these questions, we're joined by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute. Geoffrey will introduce us to the concept of scaling in complex systems, and how it helps explain not just lifespan, but a whole range of physiological characteristics in mammals. In Parts 2 and 3, he will explain what creates these laws, and how they apply not just to mammals, but to companies and cities as well.   Resources and links: Scaling Graphs   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In dieser Episode führe ich ein äußerst interessates Gespräch mich mit Prof. Stephan Schleim. Er ist deutscher Philosoph und Psychologe, Professor für Theorie und Geschichte der Psychologie Universität Groningen. Seine Spezialgebiete sind die Theorie und praktische Anwendungen der Psychologie und Neurowissenschaften.  In seiner Forschung zur Wissenschaftskommunikation untersucht er, wie Darstellungen der Hirnforschung akademische und gesellschaftliche Debatten beeinflussen (z. B. in der Neuroethik oder dem Neurorecht). Seit 15 Jahren ist er mit seinem Blog Menschen-Bilder bei den SciLogs vertreten, dem Portal für Wissenschaftsblogs des Spektrum-Verlags. Außerdem ist er Autor mehrerer Bücher.  Ich beschäftige mich ja schon länger mit der Frage, ob unser Wissenschaftsbetrieb nicht an einigen Stellen falsch abgebogen ist und was wir tun könnten, ja müssten um diese Situation zu verbessern. Warum ist es für uns wir als Gesellschaft wichtig, diese Problemlage zu verstehen? Denn wesentliche politische Entscheidungen hängen ja von wissenschaftlichen und technischen Aussagen und Möglichkeiten ab. Wir beginnen unser Gespräch mit der Frage, ob sich die Erwartungen, die in der aus der Gesellschaft aber meist auch aus der Wissenschaft heraus an die Wissenschaft formuliert werden erfüllen? Schreitet Wissenschaft immer schneller voran? Führt dies stetig zu neuen und bahnbrechenden technischen Fortschritten? Zahlreiche Untersuchungen legen eher das Gegenteil nahe. Wie sieht es nun mit Fortschritt und Qualität wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis aus? Welche Anreizsysteme herrschen aktuell vor, nach welchen Indikatoren werden Wissenschafter gemessen, welche Definitionen von Produktivität gibt es in der Wissenschaft und was bedeutet dies für Erkenntnis und Innovation? »Lässt man Kants akademischen Werdegang kurz Revue passieren, muss man zu dem Befund kommen, dass ein Denker wie Kant im gegenwärtigen Wissenschaftsbetrieb keine Chance gehabt hätte. Im Gegenteil: Er verkörpert geradezu alles das, was dem Eifer der Universitätsreformer ein Dorn im Auge ist.«, Konrad Paul Liessmann Es gibt nur noch selten in der modernen Wissenschaft solche positiven Beispiele, etwa den 3D-Atlas des Gehirns, wo das Ergebnis jahrzehntelanger, qualitativ hochwertiger Grundlagenforschung dargestellt werden. »Die Wissenschaft befindet sich großteils in einem hermeneutisch abgeriegelten, selbstreferentiellen System.« Was sind Beispiele für die Probleme, die wir beschreiben? Die 90er Jahre waren in den USA die Dekade des Gehirns. Auch Europa hat mit dem Human Brain Project nachgezogen — unter anderem mit dem Ziel, ein Gehirn im Computer zu simulieren. Was ist das Ergebnis dieser Dekade? Wir diskutieren Erwartungen und Versprechungen vom Gedankenlesen bis zum  Lügendetektor; was waren die Folgen für die Diskussion des »freien Willen«, für Recht und Medizin? In den letzten Jahrzehnten waren auch die »bunten Bilder« des Gehirns, die aus statistischen Auswertungen von Kernspintomographen entstehen, ein Hit in wissenschaftlichen Artikeln aber auch in populärwissenschaftlichen Berichten. Man konnte fast sagen: keine Psychologie ohne »Hirnbilder«! Sind die Ergebnisse, die man mit der Kernspintomographie erhalten hat aber überhaupt vertrauenswürdig und korrekt? Beziehungsweise unter welchen Versuchsbedingungen kann man mit seriösen Ergebnissen rechnen und wurden diese in der Regel erziehlt? Also bleibt letztlich die Frage: können diese Hirnscanner, die richtig viel Geld kosten, überhaupt das Kriterium der Reproduzierbarkeit — als Mindeststandard wissenschaftlicher Qualität — erfüllen? War der Hype gerechtfertigt? »Es gibt einige gute Studien, aber in der großen Masse sind viele dieser Studien, glaube ich,  nicht vertrauenswürdig. […]  Diesen Schluss muss man ziehen.« Aber auch in zahlreichen anderen Bereichen der Psychologie und Psychiatrie erleben wir im Rückblick durchwachsene Ergebnisse, so etwa bei den wenig beeindruckenden Erfolgen der Antidepressiva in der Psychiatrie. Ich spreche dann auch andere Hype-Themen der Vergangenheit an, und frage, warum wir aus diesen relativen Fehlschlägen so wenig lernen, z.B. Richard Nixon und den Krieg gegen den Krebs, Erik Topol und seine Kritik des Human Genome Projects sowie die mangelhafte Leistung von KI-Systemen in der Covid-Behandlung. Wir diskutieren dann die Konsequenzen dieser Hypes, denn diese sind nicht einfach nur kurzfristige Irrtümer, sondern in ihnen stecken zum Teil enorme Opportunitätskosten und Kollateralschäden. Wenn wir über die aktuelle Situation hinausschauen: »Wissenschaft die auch taugt« — was könnten wir die Standards sein? Prof. Schleim bezieht sich auf einen Artikel von Thomas Kuhn: Hartnäckigkeit und Dogmatismus ist manchmal auch ein wesentliches Mittel zum Erfolg in der Wissenschaft.  Die Behandlung von Aids kann als als Erfolgs-Beispiel gelten, auch die Entdeckung der PCR durch Kary Mullis, die psychiatrische Forschung mit Verengung auf Neuro-Wissenschaft allerdings als negatives. Überhaupt ist Kary Mullis ein gutes Beispiel für einen ultra-harnäckigen Wissenschafter gewesen, der in einem engen Bereich hohe Leistung gebracht hat, darüber hinaus aber eher für fragwürdige Ideen bekannt wurde. Nun stellt sich aber die Frage: was für das Individuum des Wissenschafters gilt, gilt das auch für die Wissenschaft als Ganzes? Und wo hört die Hartnäckigkeit auf und wird zum (sanften) Betrug? Fake it till you make it — ein wissenschaftliches Erfolgsmodell? Welchen Effekt haben New Public Management, Messen, Optimieren in der Wissenschaft(sverwaltung), Zitationsfaktoren, Impact-Faktor, usw? »There is no cost to getting things wrong. The cost is not to getting them published.«, Prof. Brian Nosek Wir erleben aktuell in vielen Bereichen einen Hyperwettbewerb und Bewertung von Forschung — wenn man in kurzen Zeiträumen »Durchbrüche« darstellen muss, um überhaupt überleben zu können — was wird das für Konseqzenzen für Richtung und Qualität und Vermarktung der Forschung haben? Die Probleme, über die wir sprechen, sind bei weitem keine, die nur in den Interna der Wissenschaft Folgen haben, sondern breiten sich über Wissenschaftskommunikation und Expertenwesen in Gesellschaft und Politik aus? Hier ist auch der Aspekt zu sehen, dass die Verantwortung für diese Hypes auch an den Konsumenten liegt — eine Folge der Konkurrenz um Aufmerksamkeit. Was ist überhaupt von Wissenschafts-News zu halten? Denn die Taktung wird immer höher — ist das sinnvoll oder sogar schädlich? Wissenschaft ist selten eindeutig, vor allem nicht in komplexen Fragestellungen. Führt das nicht eher zu Verwirrung statt Information bei der Bevölkerung? Kann mehr Transparenz in den wissenschaftlichen Prozess die Situation verbessern? Können wir vom Rechtswesen lernen — was sind Folgen für wissenschaftliche Freiheit, politische Freiheit und Demokratie? Was können wir aus den Erfahrungen erfolgreicher Wissenschafter lernen? Ohne die Freiheit, "Sachen zu machen die nicht Mainstream waren", sei seine Forschungsarbeit nicht möglich gewesen, Anton Zeilinger Max Perutz, der österr. Wissenschafter, der von den Nazis nach England fliehen musste, hatte in seinem Labor neun Nobelpreisträger! Auf die Frage, wie man so erfolgreich wird antwortet er: »Keine Politik, keine Gremien, keine Berichte, keine Gutachter, keine Interviews, nur begabte, hoch-motivierte junge Menschen, ausgewählt von wenigen Männern mit gutem Blick.« Und was machen wir im heutigen Wissenschaftsbetrieb? Einer der Ursachen für die Probleme im aktuellen Wissenschaftsbetrieb ist das Publikations(un)wesen: welche Rolle spielen kommerzielle Verlage, Open Access, Preprint, sind Daten und Prozesse transparent? Welche Rolle spielt der Antrags-Irrsinn und die damit verbundene Bürokratie? Die bekannte amerikanische Tiefsee-Forscherin Edith Widder bringt den Konflikt zwischen innovativer Forschung und Finanzierung auf den Punkt:  »Die Sache ist die: In der Wissenschaft muss man den Förderstellen erklären, was man entdecken wird, bevor sie einem Geld geben. Und ich wusste nicht was ich entdecken werde. Somit bekam ich keine Unterstützung.« Wo und in welchem Umfang macht Antragswesen Sinn, in welcher Form, und wo ist es ein Hindernis für gute Wissenschaft und verhindert vor allem auch, dass gute Wissenschafter Karrieren machen. Welcher innovative und kreative Wissenschafter ist Willens 30-40% seines Alltags mit stumpfer Bürokratie und Antragschreiben zu verbringen? Welche Folgen hat dies daher für die Selektion an Universitäten?  Erik Weinstein nennt dies passend: »snap-to-grid intellectualism« Führen diese Prozesse zu kontroproduktiven Anpassungsprozessen an Indikatoren, Bürokratie, Regeln usw. Lenken wir also die verbleibende Intelligenz der Forscher weg von der Forschung hin zum Übergehen und Ausnutzen von Regeln und Bürokratie? Einfache Versprechungen und Aussagen treffen in der Realität sehr schnell an ihre Grenzen und so ist es auch nicht einfach Schritte aus der Krise zu finden. Ein erster Ansatzpunkt findet sich etwa in der Magna Charta Univesitatum. Referenzen Andere Podcast Episode 53 und Episode 54: Data Science und Machine Learning, Hype und Realität Episode 47: Große Worte Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 39: Follow the Science? Episode 28: Jochen Hörisch: Für eine (denk)anstössige Universität! Episode 19 und Episode 20: Offene Systeme Episode 18: Gespräch mit Andreas Windisch: Physik, Fortschritt oder Stagnation Stephan Schleim Homepage von Stephan Schleim Stephan Schleim auf Twitter Menschen-Bilder Blog Stephan Schleim an der Universität Groningen Universität Groningen Die Neurogesellschaft: Wie die Hirnforschung Recht und Moral herausfordert, Heise (2010) Psyche & psychische Gesundheit: Philosophen, Psychologen und Psychiater im Gespräch, Heise (2020) Wissenschaft und Willensfreiheit: Was Max Planck und andere Forschende herausfanden, Springer (2023) Stephan Schleim, Sind Hirnscans nur Kaffeesatzleserei? Fachliche Referenzen Nicholas Bloom, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020) How should medical science change, Lancet (2014) Economist: How Science goes wrong  Trouble at the lab | The Economist  Rettet die Wissenschaft,Die Zeit (2014)  Konrad Paul Liessmann, Kant — Dienst ohne Vorschrift, Der Standard (2004) Eric Topol, Human genomics vs Clinical genomics — Expectation vs. Facts  Thomas Kuhn, The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research, 1963  John P. A. Ioannidis, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)  Warum KI-Werkzeuge gegen COVID-19 bislang versagt haben, Heise (2021)  Physik Nobelpreis für österr. Quantenphysiker Anton Zeilinger (2022) Zitat Max Perutz aus Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies, W&N (2018) Edith Widder, Glowing life in an underwater world, TED-Talk  Magna Charta Univesitatum 

Strange things dwell out in the open ocean. Bobbing atop the waves, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight meet one such creature, the Portuguese Man O'War. With its bulbous air-sacs and trailing tentacles you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a jellyfish, but you'd be wrong. It's a colony, a society of tiny individual animals, who work together to eat, hunt and reproduce as one.In the Age of the Individual, we humans like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient little nodes who don't need nobody. But that perspective gets called into question when you consider where we live. Thanks to some complex maths and some incredible data-crunching, we're beginning to see the cities we inhabit in a different light. They grow, move, breathe, and die, just like a living organism, according to strict mathematical principles. Just like polyps in a Man O' War, are we really any more than cogs in a machine?Featuring Marine Biologist Dr John Copley from the University of Southampton, and Geoffrey West, Theoretical Physicist from the Santa Fe Institute.

Hello Interactors,Last week my daughter showed us a glimpse of the Empire State Building from her friend's dorm room. Every time I see that building, I think of the original black and white movie, King Kong. The image of that poor animal atop what was then world's tallest structure getting pummeled by machine gun fire sticks with me for some reason. Maybe it's because it was unfair. That creature was captured from his homeland and brought to America only to be gunned down? What kind of society does this?As interactors, you're special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You're also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let's go…FAREWELL TO THE KINGMerian C. Cooper got the idea of King Kong from the French-American explorer and anthropologist, Paul Du Chaillu. He was the first of European origin to confirm the existence of Central African gorillas in 1860. This made him a much sought-after speaker in the late 1800s, and his books were immensely popular. Cooper's uncle gifted the then six-year-old nephew with one, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. It tells of one gorilla locals noted for its “extraordinary size”:“They believe, in all this country, that there is a kind of gorilla — known to the initiated by certain mysterious signs, but chiefly by being of extraordinary size — which is the residence of certain spirits of departed natives. Such gorillas, the natives believe, can never be caught or killed.”And then, while Du Chaillu was out hunting with locals, an encounter occurred. As Du Chaillu recalls,“When he saw our party he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.”And so, they did what they believed to be impossible but predictable. Du Chaillu continues,“[The gorilla] advanced a few steps— then stopped to utter that hideous roar again- advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired, and killed him.”Cooper went on to call this creature King Kong and made a movie about him. He wanted King Kong to be portrayed as being 50-60 feet tall. After all, he was kidnapped from a fictional small island that was also home to dinosaurs.It turns out a gorilla that size is biologically impossible. For every doubling of height comes a tripling of weight. The joints and bones of a creature of this size simply could not bear his weight. King Kong was also impossible to portray on the big screen. Animators and cinematographers had difficulties portraying an animal of that size in the 1930s. Consequently, King Kong ends up appearing much smaller. Instead of weighing a couple hundred tons, let's assume this mythical beast was shorter and weighed something more like 15 tons.Still huge, that would be about two times the mass of an elephant requiring about 12,000 watts of metabolism to survive. And that is just the energy required to keep the organs running and nothing else. Around the time the original King Kong was being released, a biologist named Max Kleiber was plotting various animals' metabolic rate and mass on a graph. To his surprise, the dots on the graph loosely aligned along a straight line sloping upwards with a mouse near the origin and an elephant to the upper right.Kleiber had discovered a scaling law in nature known now as Kleiber's law. For most animals, their metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass. Put another way, for every doubling of size the energy needed to survive decreases by ¼. Theoretical physicist and former President of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West, and his colleagues, believe ¾ scaling occurs due to the nutrient distribution through the efficiency seeking fractal-like structures of the circulatory system. The ‘3' in ¾ comes about, it is believed, because the particles needed to arrange these mechanisms exists in a three-dimensional geometric universe.  Animals observed in the wild maximize their energy to survive. Every bit of energy spent above and beyond what is required for their body to function only pushes their caloric needs into debt. GPS tracked tigers, for example, reveal highly optimized search strategies over space and time in their hunt for prey. A lounging cat may appear lazy to us, but their maximizing their energy.Early human hunter-gatherers were seemingly not that different. For similar reasons, they had to be deliberate about the energy they used. However, as their cultures evolved, along with their brain, they became increasingly effective at harnessing that energy. They used some of their energy to fashion spears, arrows, and hooks out of wood, bones, and rocks. They also used wood to make fire for heating, cooking, and controlled grassland burns to promote plant harvest renewal. In doing so, they were not only expending their own energy, but also the energy stored in that wood and other forms of biomass.The appropriation of elements of the ecosystem for energy to support biological and social well-being, like plant harvesting, animal domestication, or consumption of biomass like wood and coal, is called social metabolism or sociometabolism. The social metabolism of these early societies sometimes had small effects on the ecosystem, but other times catastrophic. For example, the misuse of fire could lead to imbalances in ecosystems with detrimental cascading effects on plant and animal populations. The arrival of North America's first homo sapiens, as another example, coincided with the extinction of 33 species of large animals. Similar extinctions occurred upon the arrival of humans in South America and Australia. It turns out even the earliest human colonizers had detrimental impacts on the environment.PLOTTING THE PLODDING AND MARAUDINGBy studying existing hunter-gatherer societies, scientists can estimate the social metabolism of ancient hunter-gatherers. Geographer Yadvinder Malhi analyzed this data and determined,“The energy use per capita of a hunter-gatherer is about 300 W, and this is almost entirely in the process of acquiring food for consumption, and to a much lesser extent other materials and the use of fire. This sociometabolism is greater than the 80–120 W required for human physiological metabolism, because of the inefficiencies in both acquiring foodstuffs, and in human conversion of food into metabolic energy, and also in the use of biomass energy sources for fuel.”Malhi then plotted where a hunter-gatherer would sit on a Kleiber plot relative to the biological metabolism of other animals. A typical hunter-gatherer's combined biological and social metabolism puts them just between a human and a bull.The social metabolism of homo sapiens continued to grow steadily, and along with it their capacity to harness nature for their lifestyle. And then, 5,000-10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic revolution, a simultaneous innovation occurred around the world – farming. The start of the Holocene witnessed the emergence of agriculture in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the Yangtze valley, New Guinea, West Africa, Meso-America, and the Andes. The end of the ice age softened the earth, human language and communication had evolved and spread, and coincidently the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems.Agriculture, the colonization of plants, allowed for geographically condensed energy to be grown which could support larger populations of people. This put a huge dependency on area of land needed to support and grow plants and animals. But these new densities of biomass reduced the amount energy required to roam large distances hunting and gathering. As a result, many hunter-gatherer societies could not compete, and Iron Age plant and animal farmers came to dominate. These clusters of agrarian societies grew around the world and with them languages and cultures. Soon the age of the agrarian came to dominate human existence. Using data from a well documented 18th century Austrian agrarian society, Malhi went to work to plot where a typical ‘agriculturist' may fit on the Kleiber plot. He surmises:“Compared to the hunter-gatherer sociometabolic regime, by the 18th century human sociometabolism per capita had increased by one to two orders of magnitude.” Given the population density such a society could support, the “per unit area energy consumption” grew “three to four orders of magnitude greater than that of a hunter-gatherer society.”This plops the typical human agriculturalist below a rhino on the Kleiber plot. In other words, an active member of an 18th century agrarian society would have consumed as much energy as a resting animal nearly 10 times their mass. It seems over-consumptive human habits started early in our evolution.Agrarian societies and hunter-gather societies were both constrained by land area. While agriculturalists were more efficient with land use than hunter-gatherers, they were nonetheless constrained by land. This is especially true for their primary source of fuel for heating and cooking – trees. That all changed with the birth of the Industrial age and the discovery of coal.The potential energy in trees is stored solar energy from the relatively recent past. Coal is solar energy stored in biomass that accumulated and fossilized over millions of years in the deep layers of the earth's outer crust, the lithosphere. For the first time in history, humans could exploit energy stored in deep time. Coal could more easily be transported over great distances. In theory, this would reduce the need to further exploit land and wood, but instead their destruction increased.The Industrial age brought new forms of locomotion and transportation networks accelerated the expansion of colonization, land development, and the destruction of grasslands, swamps, and wooded areas. Healthy, thriving ecosystems were sacrificed for new and expanding cities and farms. Coal powered machines extracted elements from nature to make fertilizers, sawed, split, and planed trees into lumber, and stamped, squeezed, and shipped goods around the world feeding growing economies and their consumers. Fossil fuels accelerated and intensified the destruction of the biosphere and continue to do so to this day. The energy use of the biomass past to support today's social metabolism puts in question the biomass of the future, including its human consumers.CAPITALIZING ON A MONSTER APPETITEMalhi identifies two key factors of industrial social metabolism:The amount of biomass needed for biological metabolic survival (i.e. food) is small compared to fossil fuels and other high-density energy sources.Fossil fuels used for building transportation networks meant population centers need not be co-located with food and energy production.So where does the typical ‘industrialist' sit on the Kleiber plot? Just above an elephant. That is, the amount of metabolic energy needed for a human to lead a typical industrialized lifestyle today is the equivalent of a resting elephant. Imagine the streets of the most populated cities being roamed by humans the size and weight of an elephant. Streams of cars on the freeway being driven by a five-ton mammal with an insatiable appetite. That's us. Well, many of us, anyway.Those numbers are for the average ‘industrialist' in the UK where Malhi teaches. American's stereotypically love our exceptionalism, and we are certainly exceptional in this regard. Sorry, Canadians, you're implicated too. North American's are the King Kong's of energy consumption. Our dot on the Kleiber plot sits where a mythical 15-ton mammal would sit. The typical human in the United States and Canada consumes energy like King Kong. That's well over 100 times the mass and energy needed for basic survival and 10 times more than agriculturalists that existed just 200 years ago.When Du Chaillu and his native guides shot the king of the forest, Du Chaillu did not exploit the energy of that innocent animal as food. He instead chose to eat the deer they also killed. But the local hunters, who allegedly had long pursued the so-called king of the jungle, did. Including his brain. Eating the brain from the skull of a gorilla, Du Chaillu reported, was believed to bring “a strong hand for the hunt…and success with the women.”Perhaps this played into Cooper's storyline in King Kong. After all, it was a native tribal king on Skull Island who offered to trade six tribal women for the attractive American blonde woman, Ann Darrow, accompanying the crew on their expedition. She is then captured by a band of natives and offered up to King Kong as a sacrifice. But King Kong is felled by a gas bomb by American explorers and shipped back to New York to be put on display. King Kong then breaks from his chains and hunts down Ann. That's what leads to the iconic scene of King Kong getting massacred atop the Empire State Building. War pilots fire machine guns from their planes as King Kong swats at them like flies while intermittently fondling the captive heroin, Ann.King Kong, the movie, has since been interpreted as a story of race (King Kong as a metaphor for a Black man stolen from his homeland in bondage), sex (a white blonde woman who, fetishized as a sexual object pursued by Indigenous and Black men, must be saved), and rebellion (King Kong, as a Black man, breaks from his shackles and must be violently subdued). He has rebelled and therefore must be killed.But before this interpretation, King Kong was said to represent FDR's ‘New Deal'. Cooper was a devote anti-communist and conservatives like him regarded the New Deal as a menace – an imprisoned import of a policy from a faraway land unleashed on society. Just like King Kong. It must be killed.I'll offer my own interpretation:King Kong is an outsized mythical beast so absurdly huge that it can't bear its own weight. When it does manage to move, it destroys the environment in its path. What is erected before us, since the dawn of the Anthropocene (or is it the Capitalocene), is an over exploitive and consumptive way of life that is off the charts. It has ‘an immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms.' It has ‘fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face.'  It ‘seems to me like some nightmare vision.' What stands before us is this king of environmental destruction. And it must be killed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Our guest's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses.
 Questions he poses include: 
Why do organisms and ecosystems scale with size in a remarkably universal and systematic fashion?

Is there a maximum size of cities? Of animals and plants? What about companies?

 Can scale show us how to create a more sustainable future?

By applying the rigour of physics to questions of biology, He found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we each need. He then made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities and to the business world. These investigations have led to powerful insights into the elemental natural laws that bind us together in profound ways, and how all complex systems are dancing to the same simple tune, however diverse and unrelated they may seem. It is a great pleasure to welcome the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies” Geoffrey West

Our guest's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses.
 Questions he poses include: 
Why do organisms and ecosystems scale with size in a remarkably universal and systematic fashion?

Is there a maximum size of cities? Of animals and plants? What about companies?

 Can scale show us how to create a more sustainable future?

By applying the rigour of physics to questions of biology, He found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we each need. He then made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities and to the business world. These investigations have led to powerful insights into the elemental natural laws that bind us together in profound ways, and how all complex systems are dancing to the same simple tune, however diverse and unrelated they may seem. It is a great pleasure to welcome back the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies” Geoffrey West

"The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques."   Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, Nat and Neil are joined by Adil Majid to discuss their key takeaways from Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. This book discusses how states seek to make the territory more legible in order to guide its functioning. However, this planned social order often disregards vital features of any real, functioning social order. How do certain schemes to improve the human condition end up failing?   We cover a wide range of topics including: Government's desire for legibility vs. local control and power Infinite coastline paradox The importance of feedback loops and adaptability in a system How high modernism has been implemented and why those implementations have failed Connections between the book and cryptocurrency   And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode.   Links from the Episode:   Mentioned in the show: High modernism (5:58) Window tax (20:25) The Blind Cafe - San Francisco (35:32) The Infinite Coastline (43:22) Rise Roar Revolt (1:07:14) India's Economy Hinges on the Return of Workers Who Fled to Their Villages (1:14:58) Stepn (1:31:38) Will STEPN Bring Crypto to the Masses? (1:36:23) Slate Star Codex Book Review (1:40:57)  A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (1:42:25) The Intellectual Yet Idiot (1:42:36) Books Mentioned: Seeing Like a State Extreme Ownership (22:31) (Nat's Book Notes) Scale (23:19) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Four Thousand Weeks (37:47) Merchants of Doubt (49:49) (Nat's Book Notes) The Fourth Turning (1:08:55) (Book Episode)  The Dictator's Handbook (1:20:43) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The Conscience of a Conservative (1:39:43) People Mentioned: Nassim Taleb (9:06) Jocko Willink (22:32) Geoffrey West (23:19) Arthur Hayes (1:26:28) Barry Goldwater (1:39:44)   Show Topics: 1:04 Today we're joined by Adil Majid (previously in episodes #7, #33, #34, #35, #71, #74) to cover Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. There's often an assumption that it's the fault of the people when planned systems fail, when really it's the fault of the governing body implementing these rigid systems.   5:58 There are a few major concepts in the book. One of these main concepts is legibility. A state needs to understand what's happening on the ground and also needs a way to measure it. Scientific forestry as a way to produce timber more efficiently.   11:56 “Thus, plants that are valued become "crops," the species that compete with them are stigmatized as "weeds," and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as "pests."”    Scott argues that there's more variables than any of the high modernists can understand. A high modernist cannot acknowledge that there are more variables than they know, and that they are not in full control of those variables. You can't adjust one variable and be able to fully predict all the effects.   15:01 One of the mistakes of the high modernist desire for legibility is confusing the visual external order with internal underlying order and structure. Things can have a deep sensible underlying order that doesn't make sense from the outside. Trees as an example; The distribution of roots, stems, and leaves is efficient in capturing light and water but if a human designed a tree, it may look real different. This same idea can be applied to cities.   17:10 The systemization of last names.    19:48 There are consequences of implementing these rigid systems. Many times, the systems put in place end up changing the exact thing that they're supposed to regulate.    21:31 The government uses legibility to make things easier to understand, and it's how they gain control. The amount of control you have can depend on how many levels are within your system. This ties into Extreme Ownership where the military has different levels of hierarchy, but on the ground, you get a lot of individual freedom to execute the mission. If you try to maintain strict order all the way down, things can go poorly. If you allow things to spread out and have variation at the ends, the system tends to be more resilient.   25:11 Authoritarianism is high modernism without feedback loops and democracy is high modernism with feedback loops. Adil describes metis (local knowledge) and techne (mathematical absolute truths). Things naturally float to the top, and you have to fight to keep the local knowledge at the local level.   29:10 High modernism is suitable for techne. You need to have these slightly chaotic systems where you can experiment and fail in order to better develop. The beauty of the local knowledge is that it's experimental. Feedback loops and being able to adapt.   34:11 How did our five senses evolve to be the way they are? Our visual life is very stimulating. We lock on to things that are bright, surprising, fast-paced. Screens give us so much of that novelty that other things can appear boring to look at.   39:18 The book talks about grouping people, and they lose their individual characteristics by being dropped in the buckets based on non-representative characteristics. The map vs. the terrain.   43:08 The infinite coastline. The more you zoom into it, the more you have to add variations which makes it longer and longer. Theoretically as you zoom into something so deeply, you have an infinitely long coastline. Nat, Neil, and Adil discuss: What are the implications of higher fidelity?   46:30 High modernism works if you can convince people it's the best way forward. The element of authoritarianism; the more you try to force people to go along with an idea the more negative pushback you'll get. The recycling and no smoking movements.   51:37 Complex systems can get wrecked by very small changes. Some systems need every moving part in order to run efficiently, and just the absence of one part can throw the system for a loop.    55:22 Adding chips to farm equipment. What was the efficiency improvement? These highly industrialized systems can be good at increasing output, but one little ding in the system and it can fall apart.   1:03:45 India and their legibility efforts. Neil talks about the national ID card for banking and other purposes. A lot of underground stuff goes on in order for people to avoid getting their ID card. The government has gone as far as banning the largest paper currency note overnight and issuing a new one in hopes to get people to go to a bank to switch it or deposit it.    1:08:58 Would India be a country if the British had never come there? India was originally made up of hundreds of individual states, so there are many regional identities still today.   1:11:17 National languages and global languages: How do they come to be, and is it even possible to change them now that they're established?   1:14:48 During Covid, people in India who moved to cities for jobs ended up moving back to their villages as the cost of living wasn't worth it. Within the village is their support system. This move from a legible system back to an illegible system is a good thing for the individual, but not necessarily for a government that wants more legibility.   1:17:27 Nat summarizes the core ideas of the book. Highly authoritarian states such as China and North Korea and censorship on the internet. How North Korea has been so authoritarian for so long and has been able to keep it that way.   1:21:35 Work-to-rule: This is where employees do just the minimum that is required from them and follow all regulation and safety guidelines. This in turn can lead to a decrease in productivity as workers are no longer working during weekends, breaks, etc.    1:23:31 How does this book tie back into crypto? A lot of the early crypto crowd is inherently anti-legibility.    1:32:42 Stepn is a lifestyle app that encourages its users to “move-to-earn”. Nat shares 3 ways you can tell that it's time to exit the project so you don't lose your investment.    1:39:20 Thanks for listening! Got any book suggestions for a future episode? Hit us up on Twitter!   If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS and @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

Part 2 of this wonderful series Our guest's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses.
 Questions he poses include: 
 Why do organisms and ecosystems scale with size in a remarkably universal and systematic fashion?

 Is there a maximum size of cities? Of animals and plants? What about companies?

 Can scale show us how to create a more sustainable future?

 By applying the rigour of physics to questions of biology, he found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we each need. He then made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities and to the business world. These investigations have led to powerful insights into the elemental natural laws that bind us together in profound ways, and how all complex systems are dancing to the same simple tune, however diverse and unrelated they may seem. It is a great pleasure to welcome back the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies” Geoffrey West

Our guest's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses.
 Questions he poses include: 
 Why do organisms and ecosystems scale with size in a remarkably universal and systematic fashion? 

Is there a maximum size of cities? Of animals and plants? What about companies?

 Can scale show us how to create a more sustainable future?

 By applying the rigour of physics to questions of biology, he found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we each need. He then made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities and to the business world. These investigations have led to powerful insights into the elemental natural laws that bind us together in profound ways, and how all complex systems are dancing to the same simple tune, however diverse and unrelated they may seem. It is a great pleasure to welcome the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies” Geoffrey West

Hello Interactors,Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…HIGH FASHIONI can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernism which is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our House that elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLINGIt was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”I HAVE A CITY IN MINDSprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill. If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks……In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this (paradoxically) limits the universality of scientific claims, it also lets us draw analogies between the context-dependency of one phenomenon and others: how protein folding shapes HIV evolution is meaningfully like the way that growing up in a specific neighborhood shapes educational and economic opportunity; the paths through a space of all possible four-letter words are constrained in ways very similar to how interactions between microbes impact gut health; how we make sense both depends on how we've learned and places bounds on what we're capable of seeing.Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on Complexity, we talk to Yale evolutionary biologist C. Brandon Ogbunu (Twitter, Google Scholar, GitHub) about the importance of environment to the activity and outcomes of complex systems — the value of surprise, the constraints of history, the virtue and challenge of great communication, and much more. Our conversation touches on everything from using word games to teach core concepts in evolutionary theory, to the ways that protein quality control co-determines the ability of pathogens to evade eradication, to the relationship between human artists, algorithms, and regulation in the 21st Century. Brandon works not just in multiple scientific domains but as the author of a number of high-profile blogs exploring the intersection of science and culture — and his boundaryless fluency shines through in a discussion that will not be contained, about some of the biggest questions and discoveries of our time.If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. You'll find plenty of other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInDiscussed in this episode:“I do my science biographically…I find a personal connection to the essence of the question.”– C. Brandon Ogbunugafor on RadioLab"Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond"Brandon's February 2022 SFI Seminar (YouTube Video + Live Twitter Coverage)“A Reflection on 50 Years of John Maynard Smith's ‘Protein Space'”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in GENETICS“Collective Computing: Learning from Nature”David Krakauer presenting at the Foresight Institute in 2021 (with reference to Rubik's Cube research)“Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power”Alexander Matt Turner, Logan Smith, Rohin Shah, Andrew Critch, Prasad Tadepalli in arXiv“A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Daniel Hartl in PLOS Computational Biology“The 300 Most Common Words”by Bruce Sterling“The Host Cell's Endoplasmic Reticulum Proteostasis Network Profoundly Shapes the Protein Sequence Space Accessible to HIV Envelope”Jimin Yoon, Emmanuel E. Nekongo, Jessica E. Patrick, Angela M. Phillips, Anna I. Ponomarenko, Samuel J. Hendel, Vincent L. Butty, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Yu-Shan Lin, Matthew D. Shoulders in bioRxiv“Competition along trajectories governs adaptation rates towards antimicrobial resistance”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Margaret J. Eppstein in Nature Ecology & Evolution“Scientists Need to Admit What They Got Wrong About COVID”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED“Deconstructing higher-order interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination”Yitbarek Senay, Guittar John, Sarah A. Knutie, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in bioRxiv“What Makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIREDNot mentioned in this episode but still worth exploring:“Part of what I was getting after with Blackness had to do with authoring ideas that are edgy or potentially threatening. That as a scientist, you can generate ideas in the name of research, in the name of breaking new ground, that may stigmatize you. That may kick you out of the club, so to speak, because you're not necessarily following the herd.”– Physicist Stephon Alexander in an interview with Brandon at Andscape“How Afrofuturism Can Help The World Mend”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED“The COVID-19 pandemic amplified long-standing racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system”Brennan Klein, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Benjamin J. Schafer, Zarana Bhadricha, Preeti Kori, Jim Sheldon, Nitish Kaza, Emily A. Wang, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Samuel V. Scarpino, Elizabeth Hinton in medRxivAlso mentioned:Simon Conway Morris, Geoffrey West, Samuel Scarpino, Rick & Morty, Stuart Kauffman, Frank Salisbury, Stephen Jay Gould, Frances Arnold, John Vervaeke, Andreas Wagner, Jennifer Dunne, James Evans, Carl Bergstrom, Jevin West, Henry Gee, Eugene Shakhnovich, Rafael Guerrero, Gregory Bateson, Simon DeDeo, James Clerk Maxwell, Melanie Moses, Kathy Powers, Sara Walker, Michael Lachmann, and many others...

Theoretical Physicist Geoffrey West joins me for a multi-episode series exploring his excellent book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies." Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/GUESTGeoffrey's Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010P7Z8J0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1Geoffrey's Profile: https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-westPODCASTPodcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE?si=wgVuY16XR0io4NLNo0A11A&nd=1RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYITranscript:OUTLINE00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro00:00:08 Language as a Technology and the Discovery of the Future00:07:22 The Human Imagination as Our Most Powerful Tool00:10:36 Innovating “Imagined Orders” and the Industrial Revolution00:15:15 The City as a Scaled Representation of the Human Brain?00:20:42 Where Does the Geometric Structure of Social Networks Come From?00:24:22 The Speculation Supporting Dunbar's Number…00:29:02 Niche Construction and the Psychological Impact of Corrupt Money00:32:52 Principles of Physics Underlying the Geometry of Social Networks?00:38:03 Dynamic Network Tension Between Physical Possibility and Information Throughput00:40:36 NYDIG00:41:44 Impact of The Digital Age on Social Network Geometry00:44:10 Historical Telecommunication Revolutions00:47:54 A Historical Look at the Physical Possibility and Information Throughput of Money…00:51:03 Geoffrey's Trouble Conceptualizing Money…00:54:42 Energy Expenditure is the Mechanism which Secured Gold's Money Supply00:58:37 Free Exchange, Positive Feedback Loops, and Emergent Properties01:03:33 Social Networks are Bound by the Free Exchange of Information01:06:44 Emergent Properties as the “Whines and Squeals” of Amplified Positive Feedback Loops01:10:10 Positive Feedback Loops and the Amplification of IdeasSOCIALBreedlove Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22WiM? Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22?lang=enAll My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22​WRITTEN WORKMedium: https://breedlove22.medium.com/Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/WAYS TO CONTRIBUTEBitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Sats via Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@Breedlove22Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveDollars via Venmo: https://venmo.com/code?user_id=1784359925317632528The "What is Money?" Show Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32843101&fan_landing=trueRECOMMENDED BUSINESSESWorldclass Bitcoin Financial Services: https://nydig.com/Join Me At Bitcoin 2022 (10% off if paying with fiat, or discount code BREEDLOVE for Bitcoin): https://www.tixr.com/groups/bitcoinconference/events/bitcoin-2022-26217Automatic Recurring Bitcoin Buying: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/breedlove/Buy Bitcoin in a Tax-Advantaged Account: https://www.daim.io/robert-breedlove/Buy Your Dream Home without Selling Your Bitcoin with Ledn: https://ledn.io/en/?utm_source=breedlove&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=substack

Over the past few centuries, urbanization has rapidly accelerated, creating the largest clusters of humans the planet has ever seen. Clustering is nothing new, however, as early humans banded together to form nomadic tribes, civilizations, and even city-states. Yet, the formation of large-scale cities has brought its own complexity, and thus the conception of a collective settlement, or city, has changed. Our guest today, Dr. Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist as well as Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute, uses mathematical modeling and data on innovation and wealth creation to understand the scaling and growth of modern-day cities. A Fellow of the American Physical Society and named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2006, Dr. West has dramatically influenced the study of urban development with detailed research and model development of city structure, complexity, and evolution. In this episode, he joins us to discuss his impactful research along with potential possibilities and studies for understanding the growth of cities from the past and cities in the future.

This episode of the Mere Mortals book review covers 'Scale: The Universal Laws of Life And Death In Organisms, Cities And Companies' by Geoffrey West. This book promised to deliver so much, but unfortunately fell a little bit short. In it a theoretical physicist turned biologist tries to discover what characteristics of animal, cities and companies are similar independent of size. He manages to show this in some very convincing graphs that occur throughout the book, one of the books actual strong points.The first three chapters are very solid and draw the attention with some interesting, not well known facts (such as that the average life span of heartbeats for just about every mammal is 1.5 billion). It begins to fade in the middle section of the book as he starts beginning some personal digressions, which while entirely in his right (it's his own damn book), are just not super interesting or written in a style that will make you agree/intrigued.He ends with his look at cities and companies, which unfortunately gets bogged down and to me felt like he could have shortened these chapters or make them 'pop' more. A decent book but nothing that will ever be known as a classic. 6.5/10.If you enjoyed this review and would like to support the team, feel free to use our referral link here! https://amzn.to/3DFeU6PConnect with Mere Mortals:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcast/Support the show

Geoffrey West joins Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) and Laura Deming (@laurademing) to discuss scale, exponential growth, and cross pollination in scientific research.

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. He is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.