Category: Complexity

Congratulations to Christoph Adami (@ChristophAdami) on release day for The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains! I’m awaiting the post for my own hardcover copy. 

Replied to a post by Natalie (hcommons.social)
I started the second week of "Programming 101: An Introduction to #Python for Educators" on #FutureLearn and wrote a small quiz about Arabic verbs: https://github.com/kranatalie/Introduction-to-Python/blob/main/arabic-quiz-bot.py It was fun again and I'm actually a little proud! Would really like to recommend the course again. It's the perfect gentle introduction for me that doesn't overwhelm but still teaches enough to get an idea of what's possible. Looking forward to the final challenge this week: Building commands into your bot. Let's try this! https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/programming-101
@natalie, Thanks for the recommendation, this looks great! It looks like it may be a good companion to the Santa Fe Institute’s (free) Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics which starts on Jan 17. #DigitalHumanities 

 

I’m excited to join Dan Allosso‘s book club on How to Take Smart Notes as a means of turning my active reading, annotating, and note taking into papers, articles and books using Obsidian.md and Hypothes.is. 

Details: 

cc: Ian O’Byrne, Remi Kalir

Read The Other Invisible Hand (NOEMA)
Economics and evolution are basically in the same business: Both are all about productivity selection, though one has been at it for billions of years longer than the other. Both involve “invisible hand” magic — intricate, unplanned, “self-or...
Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.
 
I’m reminded of Kate Raworth’s excellent Donut Economics as a potential remedy.
 

Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.

Read It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong by Zeynep Tufekci (The Atlantic)
America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.
Nice piece about some of the complexity surrounding the pandemic that we’re all missing out on. Good to see some complexity theory being considered in the public sphere.
Bookmarked Ergodicity: Definition, Examples, And Implications, As Simple As Possible (Gumroad)
Some reviews of Luca's previous books"This book is like a magnificent suspension bridge, linking the science of the human brain to the practical craft of applying it in everyday life. I loved it." – Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy's Vice Chairman“A SUPERB book […] by one of the profound thinkers in our field [behavioral economics].” – Michal G. BartlettWhat's ergodicity, and why it matters?"The Most Important Property to Understand in Probability, in Life, in Anything." – Nassim Nicholas Taleb on ergodicity."I think the most under-rated idea is ergodicity." – David Perell, author.Is ergodicity the most important concept in decision-making and behavioral sciences? (Yes.)Is it relevant for you in your daily life? (Yes.)Is it possible to explain it so simply that a grandma or a high-schooler can understand it? (Yes.)Even if they know nothing about maths? (Yes.)That's because ergodicity is an important idea with so many practical applications. Sadly, most books describe it in a very technical way, making it inaccessible to most people.In this short book, 6-times author Luca Dellanna describes ergodicity as simply as possible. You will read stories about how not knowing about it destroyed his cousin’s career as a skier, or how misunderstanding it caused additional deaths during the pandemic. You will learn how to spot situations in which ergodicity matters and the three strategies to react appropriately.The book is approximately 166 pages long, of which 143 are pure content and the rest tables of content, etc.This page sells the eBook / Kindle version. Around mid-November, the paperback version will become available on Amazon and in selected stores (e.g., most Barnes & Noble).Who is this book for?This book is for readers interested in growing themselves, their career, or their business, and who want to learn about ergodicity and its practical applications without having to understand its mathematical foundation. No mathematical knowledge is required, only a high-school level understanding of English.Readers who want to master the theory and mathematical foundation of ergodicity are better off reading a more formal manuscript. This book is not a substitute for it, but a complement.You might also be interested in my second Roam book, on management (link).About the authorLuca Dellanna is the author of 7 books. He is a researcher in complexity science and emergent behaviors, and an operational excellence consultant. He spoke at Nudgestock and regularly teaches management workshops and risk management courses.His personal website is Luca-Dellanna.com and his Twitter is @DellAnnaLuca.What you will getBy purchasing this book, you will receive all of the following:PDF version.ePub version (compatible with Apple Books & other eBook readers).mobi version (Kindle)Moreover, you will get added to my mailing list, where I frequently publish essays that do not make it into books.The Roam versionThis book is also available as a Roam Research graph.Roam is a website that shows content in an interconnected way, a bit like Wikipedia. Reading the book this way will allow you to go back and forth content at your pace and following your interests."Ten minutes in, and I'm already questioning whether I'll want to read another non-fiction book *not* published in Roam format. How fascinating and so very valuable. Thank you Luca Dellanna" – Conor M. Ogle (link)Important: reading the Roam version requires a pre-existing Roam subscription, which is not included in this bundle.If you purchase the Roam version, you will receive the eBook in 3 formats (PDF, Kindle, and ePub) and the Roam version (as an editable .json export of the book) and a document suggesting how to import the Roam book and use it and the option to email me to request access to a live, read-only version of the book.Patron's supportThank you very much for your support, it helps me spending more time on my research.I will also add your name as a Patron in the acknowledgment section of the future editions of the book.Some more reviews of Luca's books“Luca’s book was so helpful to my work. Opened my eyes up to some more reasons why change is so hard.” – Chris Murman"A thoughtfully written book in very straightforward language." – A.L. PeeveyYou can find more reviews on the pages of my other books, such as this one.
This could be interesting as an overview to recommend
Read What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory. (Quanta Magazine)
To recognize strange extraterrestrial life and solve biological mysteries on this planet, scientists are searching for an objective definition for life’s basic units.
I’ve been following a bit of David’s work, but obviously there’s some newer material I need to catch up on. I like the general philosophical thrust of their direction here. I can see some useful abstractions to higher math here, maybe an analogy to a “calculus of biology” which doesn’t look at single points, but rates of change of that point(s).
Read a tweet (Twitter)
Watched The Unitive Web from YouTube

This explains our proposal for a new generation of the Web, which we call The Unitive Web. Currently, there is a growing movement from the independence of the web, towards dominant companies. These companies offer organized information, but this comes at a price. We lose our independence more and more. The Unitive Web is a proposal to have both organized information and independence. It offers one generic approach closely compatible with the current web, which makes it possible to create a global open virtual space of information that is responsive and reliable. It offers open customization of user interaction, open bottom-up schema mapping, integration of (AI) algorithms, and facilitates in the protection of privacy. Kickstarter project will be launched if/when there is some interest first.

I only got about halfway through this watching at 1.5x. I’m purposely not embedding the video.

Some of the basic ideas about complexity theory are intriguing here, but it feels more like they’re trying to ground their ideas in solid science when they likely don’t have the proper grounding. I can’t help but thinking about Claude Shannon’s article The Bandwagon and seeing the same things that happened with information theory now taking place with complexity theory.

They’re also proposing a huge amount of infrastructure that is tenuous at best. I’m more than happy to await a minimal example before considering this further.

It almost kills me that they can’t be bothered to create a Kickstarter without “further interest.”

Read Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ by Timothy MortonTimothy Morton (High Country News)
A new way of understanding climate change and other phenomena.

We are obliged to do something about them, because we can think them. ❧

Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:56AM

It’s very difficult to talk about something you cannot see or touch, yet we are obliged to do so, since global warming affects us all. ❧

It’s also difficult to interact with those things when we’re missing the words and vocabulary to talk about them intelligently.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 09:00AM

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World. ❧

want to read these
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:10AM

Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy. ❧

A short, and very cogent argument here.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:07AM

Hat tip: Ethan Marcotte #

Read The hoof and the horse. by Ethan Marcotte (ethanmarcotte.com)
On objects and slices; on design systems and scale.

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own. ❧

Hyperobject is an interesting neologism and concept
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:47AM

Liked a tweet by Melanie Mitchell (Twitter)
Listened to The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019 by Michael Garfield from Complexity by the Santa Fe Institute

OCTOBER 9TH, 2019 | 55:37

A few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, upsetting centuries of certainty about the history of life, he wrote a now-famous letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, British botanist and advocate of evolutionary theory. "But if (and oh what a big if),” Darwin’s letter reads, “we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”

That was 1871. Nearly 150 years hence, humankind has worked out the details of the evolutionary process to exquisite depth and resolution, but abiogenesis - the origins of life - remains one of the greatest mysteries of our world. Fierce theoretical debates rage on between those who think life got its start in deep sea hydrothermal vents and those who think it started in “some warm little pond” – not to mention more heterodox hypotheses. The consequences are enormous – shaping plans for interplanetary exploration, changing our approach to medicine, and maybe foremost, settling the existential question of what life is in the first place.

This week’s episode was recorded live at the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Festival in June 2019. The panel features evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, President of SFI; biochemist Sarah Maurer, Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University; and SFI Professor Chris Kempes, who works on biological scaling laws. In this discussion, we present a spectrum of perspectives on the origins of life debate, and speak to the importance of presenting this unsettled science as itself an evolutionary object...

Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.

David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.
Sarah Maurer's Website.
Chris Kempes's Website.
InterPlanetary Festival's Website.
Complexity Explorer's Origins of Life Online Course.

Some interesting philosophical discussion on the origin of life and related research. I definitely fall more into David Krakauer’s camp of thought.

We definitely need a better definition of life. I’ve got a version brewing based on work in the area of big history, but it still needs some refining.

Listened to David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science by Michael Garfield and David Krakauer from Complexity | Santa Fe Institute

For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.

So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.

At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.

This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.

David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.