"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)
"All models of interacting contagions can be mapped onto a complex contagion model."
- @svscarpino (SFI, @RockefellerFdn)
speaking at SFI now:
"I have yet to find an infectious disease paper which claims it's a complex contagion..."
"The degree of hierarchy within the city will determine how long the epidemic will persist. This leads to how to prepare for something like this...in some regimes lockdowns help and in others they make things worse."
"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."
"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:
"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
"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:
@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."
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...
"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."
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):