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Jul 6 15 tweets 20 min read
"The Evolution of Strangers and Foreigners"

🧵 Today's SFI Seminar by @DoctorBugs (@Smithsonian)

santafe.edu/events/life-an…

cc @templeton_fdn
First, a loop back to his LAST (2020) SFI Seminar on 3D structure of living systems from biofilms to rainforest canopies:


And his #ComplexityPodcast episode on ideas from that talk and this one:
complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/52-Z7…
"People often think of societies as cooperative, but some societies are NOT very cooperative. I prefer to put the focus on them as groups."

"Societies are just one aspect of belonging. There are groups *within* societies & that's what psychologists mostly focus on."

@DoctorBugs
No matter the organism, #societies are by definition hard to join. Membership is all or nothing: once you're in, you're in.

"In some animals like horses, every member of the #society is unrelated to other members; there are direct fitness benefits of being in these groups."
"Many animals are social but do not have societies."

"You can be a part of a society and not connected to anyone else in the network."
(Re: pairwise interactions)

@doctorbugs
@DoctorBugs 1 - Definitional Features Of A Society

2 - 2013 paper in Human Nature:
researchgate.net/publication/24…

3 - The Human Swarm (@BasicBooks):
basicbooks.com/titles/mark-w-…

@DoctorBugs
"One of the most amazing things is that you can enter a @starbucks and not want to kill everybody. If you're a chimpanzee, you will not tolerate strangers in your group."

Individual interaction societies (#humans, #elephants) vs. anonymous societies (#ants, some flocking birds):
On the biggest battlefield ever measured: #warfare between #ant colonies.

"A society can only grow so long as it has resources and space. This is, obviously, an extreme allowance for strangers."

"As long as membership traits are hard to replicate, they can be pretty foolproof."
On the evolution of #language, #ritual, #covertsignaling, and other hard-to-fake (but not always costly) traits of membership in societies:

"Modern humans can move through #swarms of other humans with little memory challenge. This allows us to not constantly panic."

@DoctorBugs
@DoctorBugs "#Ants can have such efficient little brains because they don't recognize ANYBODY in their society as an individual. Only their caste."

@doctorbugs suggests that the size of vertebrate societies hinges on the cognitive complexity of their members/ability to recognize individuals
On @JaneGoodallInst's observation of "de-chimpanization" (#fission of social groups) as societies become too large for the recognition of individuals — at which point, former members of "us" become "them."

@DoctorBugs on #SocialScaling (& the #collapse thereof, ~ #Balkanization)
@JaneGoodallInst @DoctorBugs "There's this notion of #cosmopolitanism, that societies are just going to appear...it's not going to happen. Even in the EU, societies merge but retain their distinction. Healthy societies do not merge."

@doctorbugs (@smithsonian):
"We don't want to give up societies; but I also think we CAN'T give them up. Within two days, babies are already preferentially looking at individuals that speak their mother's language. (This doesn't necessarily amount to things happening negatively between groups.)"
@DoctorBugs
"The societies of recent millennia usually divide along ancient lines that represent ancient conquests. Those are easy breaking points because people can return to their cherished traditions: flags, languages, dances, and so forth."

@doctorbugs:
"#Immigration is a fairly recent thing, and most people still expect immigrants to assimilate, to learn the language and customs. To start at the bottom. The ways that states 'think' about #citizenship is not the way that people do."

@doctorbugs (@smithsonian):

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More from @sfiscience

Jul 6
🧵 Group project presentations begin today for the 2022 SFI Complex Systems Summer School! We will share bits and pieces over the next two days...

#CSSS #ComplexSystems
First talk this morning by a team including @JenniferKBriggs @gatesdupont @maikemorrison @davidogara_ @simon_rella Ian Harryman & Haoyuan Luo on their contagion model ("Hopefully you'll see this published later" may as well be the official slogan of this summer school)
Our next group considers online #pornography a strangely under-examined domain for quantitative research & wants to bring #digitalhumanities approaches & multilayer network analysis to bear on it. @gulsahakcakir @AnaVybor @thomas_bssnt @prt_thibault @simon_rella

Take their poll:
Read 6 tweets
May 18
"We evolved to be physically active. But most of us avoid physical activity."

The Active Grandparents Hypothesis

Daniel Lieberman, @Harvard

SFI Colloquium, streaming now:
"We evolved from #apes and apes are couch potatoes."

Daniel Lieberman, @Harvard

SFI Colloquium, streaming now:


#evolution #hominin #anthropology #physiology
"Your average hunter-gatherer walks from New York to LA every year."

Daniel Lieberman, @Harvard

SFI Colloquium, streaming now:
Read 24 tweets
May 17
🧵 "Transient dynamics: the key to ecological understanding"

Today's Colloquium by SFI External Professor Alan Hastings (@UCDavis, @theNASciences)

Streaming now on our YouTube channel:
youtube.com/c/SFIScience/

#Ecology #ComplexSystems
@ucdavis @theNASciences "One might say that natural ecological #systems *don't exist anymore*..."

SFI External Prof Alan Hastings @eco_hastings (@UCDavis), criticizes classical approaches to deterministic/equilibrium ecological models, streaming now:


#LoktaVolterra
@ucdavis @theNASciences @eco_hastings "The long-term behavior of the #epidemic is not what you want to focus on. Let's focus instead on dynamics at shorter timescales."

SFI External Prof Alan Hastings @eco_hastings
(@UCDavis), criticizes conventional ecological models, streaming now:
Read 9 tweets
Apr 30
🌍 Our 2022 #Science Board Symposium on "The #Emergent #PoliticalEconomy or #ClimateChange" kicks off with opening remarks from President David Krakauer.

Follow this 🧵 as we provide live coverage of this event all day...
"For those of you who think behavior change can prevent #ClimateChange...behavior WILL change when climate changes. Shutdowns from the pandemic resulted in a reduction of #C02 emissions of about 7.5%."
- SFI/@Harvard Prof Dan Schrag opens our speaker series today
"We *used* to talk about #ClimateChange used to be something that would happen to people in Bangladesh fifty years from now."

Re: #ClimateJustice,
"Children born today are going to deal with climate change they had no role in causing."

- SFI/@Harvard Prof Dan Schrag
Read 56 tweets
Apr 20
"From undirected to directed networks of dynamical agents"

Today's SFI Seminar from @robinus88 (@UCSantaBarbara), streaming now:


(Follow this 🧵 for highlights and select slides)
"[This is] the main question when we talk about power grids...it could be water, it could be gas, it could be opinions transmitted over social media:"

- @robinus88 (@UCSantaBarbara), streaming now:
"We want to keep the right-hand side of this equation as close to zero as possible. What happens if you produce too much, the frequency increases, which we don't want for a variety of reasons."

- @robinus88 (@UCSantaBarbara), streaming now:

#electricity
Read 8 tweets
Apr 18
‘The crux of the problem, in my view, is that understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding."
- SFI's @MelMitchell1 in @QuantaMagazine, cited by @stevenbjohnson in @NYTmag:
nytimes.com/2022/04/15/mag…
‘‘Consider what it means to understand ‘The sports car passed the mail truck b/c it was going slower.’ You need to know what sports cars & mail trucks are, that cars can ‘pass’ one another, and that vehicles exist & interact in the world, driven by humans w/ their own agendas.’’
"Embodied, Situated, and Grounded #Intelligence: Implications for #AI"

Along w/ SFI's @MelanieEMoses & Tyler Millhouse, @MelMitchell1 just organized a four-day workshop at SFI to address the very problems she brings up in @stevenbjohnson's @NYTmag article.

Stay tuned for more! Image
Read 4 tweets

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