Thread by @yaneerbaryam

How Complexity Science can help us understand pandemics and other wicked policy problems

"..let's say you go out to your car and somehow you have amnesia. And your brain is fine, but you don't remember what driving is about..

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staatslabor.ch/en/transcript-…

"The question is: what would you do in order to figure out what to do?..Maybe you would..try to pull on the hood or pull on the doors. Maybe you'd get a door open. But you probably might end up in the backseat just like you might end up in the front seat.

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"The purpose of complexity science, as I understand it, is to figure out what are the control variables in a problem. So if you knew that the steering wheel and the brakes and gas and the gearshift were the things that you need to control..you would know how to drive a car.

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"You would have to..experiment a little bit. You would have to think about it. Maybe do some modeling. But basically you could figure it out. But if you didn't know that those were the things you had to control, it would be very hard to figure out what it meant to drive a car

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".the basic challenge in dealing with complex systems is that there are all of these variables that the system depends on. And if you don't know which one or ones to think about, there then are two choices. Either you pick one, like the average height or the average wealth

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"..and you use that as your variables. Or, you try to map out all of the variables in a system. And there are parametrized problems with 50,000 or 100,000 variables, and therein lies madness, of course, because you can never write down all the variables.

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"So the trick, or fundamental methodology, that I use in complexity science is a methodology called renormalization group, that dates back to 1970 in studying phase transitions like boiling water,.enables you to figure out which variables are actually the important variables.

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".There are two things that people don't think about that are super important..The brakes and the gas, we know that's R. R is greater than one, it goes up exponentially. R is less than one... That's the control variable everyone knows. But the other control variable

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".is travel. Limiting travel is an essential variable. If you don't have travel, you don't have a pandemic. If you do have travel,. travel is a control parameter..And if you can control intercommunity transmission, you have a tremendous ability to control an outbreak.

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"The second is zero. The way to say it mathematically is the discreteness of the number of cases. If you're at zero.. R doesn't matter. Right? Because if you have zero then no matter what R is it's still zero..anything other than zero, it will.increase exponentially..

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"And that's the most important two things that we need to know. And if you know that, then what you end up with is a very clear strategy. And there is only this strategy. We call it the Green Zone Strategy.

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"The Green Zone Strategy says: you limit travel as much as possible, you suppress the outbreak locally, and you open up zones at zero. That way you can rapidly open up zones and rapidly expand, and we have experienced with this disease that it works.

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Also read "five things governments can learn from complexity science in the fight against the current pandemic": staatslabor.ch/en/five-things…

Thanks! @dannybuerkli and the Staatslabor

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