Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

By altering the ingredients of the idea menu they are exposed to, we might, in turn, minimize the dangerous inputs to the processes of belief and network updating.

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

It seems that, from the perspective of mathematical science, there exist two natural domains. The first is the physical domain of particles, fields, and universal laws, with an associated search for elegant theories that apply everywhere in the known universe. Here, science has made great strides. The second domain is that of complex phenomena. The

Clausewitz himself proposed that war could best be compared with commerce, since both are social conflicts of human interests and activities.

Of course, gifting a daughter or sister not only signaled the conquering ruler’s superiority, it also had the advantage of turning the conquered into long-term clients, at least as long as the marriage lasted. Trying to avoid client status, four of the societies (Egypt, Hawai’i, Aztec, and Inca) eventually opted for royal incest.

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

Also, in my own research on Tewa Pueblo origins, I’ve found that imagining the community as a garden, with women as corn plants and men as clouds, was central to the emergence of an intercommunity ceremonial system that supported permanent villages and community-level specialization

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

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