Modular, hierarchical, and information-processing:

Right now at SFI, biologists, physicists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists convene for a three-day workshop on Biological #Computation, organized by David Wolpert, @C4COMPUTATION, & @albert_kao.

santafe.edu/news-center/ne…
"A circular definition isn't worthless if the circle is big enough."

- @livcomp of @UNM at today's #biocomp workshop
"#Physics produces order through the minimization of #energy. Adaptive systems produce order through the addition of #information processing."

By why do biological systems compute, whereas classical physical systems apparently don't? @C4COMPUTATION on #function at #biocomp now:
"Correctness is operationally defined from the point of view of the system, maximizing mutual information with the environment."

- @C4COMPUTATION at SFI on how there are no absolute right answers when it comes to collectively constructed ground truths like #wealth distribution:

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More from @sfiscience

Feb 15
"Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond"

Today's SFI Colloquium by @big_data_kane (@Yale), streaming now:


🔍 Follow this thread for highlights... Image
"Part of what we're going to exploit is the multiple definitions behind something [as fundamental as] 'environment' ... in SOME ways, you don't care much about the thing you're looking at; you care about its EFFECT."

- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking now:
ImageImageImageImage
"The environment is an actor and a character in all of our stories. But too often we treat it as something to be regressed away. I joke: 'Find me a piece of DNA that behaves without interaction with its environment.'"
- @big_data_kane (@Yale) speaking now:
ImageImage
Read 11 tweets
Feb 14
On the Shape of Epidemics

Live now: @svscarpino speaking at SFI

"If we just want to make forecasts, learning the mechanisms may not matter."
- @svscarpino (SFI, @RockefellerFdn)
"All the way back to Farr, he's telling us that the curves aren't symmetric. We keep using models that we KNOW are wrong."
- @svscarpino (SFI, @RockefellerFdn)
Read 8 tweets
Sep 16, 2021
🧵 Global catastrophic and existential risks: the weightiest complex phenomena?

"Our job is to think about how humanity can have a happy ending...about how GOOD it can be."

- @anderssandberg of @FHIOxford speaking at SFI today:


#AIEthics #Biosecurity
"The idea that humanity actually *could* go extinct required a lot of ideas to come together. First you needed to know that species go extinct. This wasn't clear until [the discovery of fossil Mastodons]."
- @anderssandberg of @FHIOxford at SFI today:

"It's not just that the end of the world could be caused by a bad political decision. In principle, the *right* political decision or technology could *avert* these risks. In the 19th C, it was a considered merely a matter of natural causes."
- @anderssandberg (@FHIOxford) at SFI
Read 14 tweets
Apr 16, 2021
"It remains to be seen if we'll rise to this challenge. I'm optimistic, but there's so much more we need to do. We're good at developing new technologies...are we as good at the society-scale change we need?"
- SFI/@MIT Prof Jessika Trancik on @voxdotcom:

player.fm/series/vox-con…
@MIT @voxdotcom "If you're purchasing a #CleanEnergy technology, you're creating a market that then drives more #innovation, so everybody can contribute. It DOES also mean that we can't find #SilverBullets. We can't find one really smart person to solve this. We need everyone to contribute."
@MIT @voxdotcom "The way we can get larger projects to improve more quickly is #standardization. We need to understand the parts that are holding projects back, where the inefficiencies come in. I use a broad definition of #technology because these #inefficiencies crop up in different ways."
Read 5 tweets
Apr 16, 2021
"#Economics in #Nouns and #Verbs"

Below, we share key excerpts from SFI External Prof W. Brian Arthur's (@Stanford, @PARCinc) latest, available at arxiv.org/abs/2104.01868, which we recommend for its elucidation of key blind spots in economic thinking & how to address them... Image
"Different means 'see' differently—often they reveal different versions of the same object. #MRI looks at body parts and reveals soft tissue structure; #CT scanning looks at the same body parts and reveals bone structure. There is no 'correct' version of internal body parts."
"#Mathematics is powerful in #economics—and necessary—but I don’t believe that it is suited to describing all that is interesting in an economy. In fact I don’t believe that there is any privileged way to view the economy. There are useful ways and less useful ones."
Read 14 tweets
Mar 31, 2021
"The Evolution of Agency"

Follow this thread for highlights from today's seminar by @WiringTheBrain of @trinitycollege. Watch without login on Facebook (we will post the recording to YouTube within 24 hours):

facebook.com/santafeinstitu…
"The genome doesn't specify the outcome at all; it just encodes the biochemical rules by which development happens."

- @WiringTheBrain on the multi-level interplay of "nature" and "nurture" on #personality ImageImageImageImage
"It's trendy today to deny that #FreeWill is real."

- @WiringTheBrain quotes @SamHarrisOrg & Schopenhauer on the prominence of biological #determinism and neural #reductionism in modern thinking on the nature of choice.

facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
Read 9 tweets

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