🧵 "The Smell of Inhibition. A Code in the Nose?"

ICYMI, this week's SFI Seminar by Fractal Faculty Stuart Firestein (@Columbia) on "what started out ass a very simple-seeming problem [re: #olfaction] and turned out to be very complicated":

"Everything we know about the world comes through these little holes in our head and the skin covering our body, processed through tissue specialized to interpret it."

"The thing to notice about [sight and hearing] is that they're [processing] fairly low-dimensional stimuli."

🧵 "#Possibility Architectures: Exploring Human #Communication with Generative #AI"

Today's SFI Seminar with ExFac Simon DeDeo @LaboratoryMinds (@CarnegieMellon), streaming now:
"A key feature of this is talk is that we make sense of what each other are saying IN PART by what they say, but ALSO by what we expect of them."

"I think what really drives [the popularity of the #multiverse in #scifi] is regret... There's a line in @allatoncemovie where #MichelleYeoh is told she's the worst version of herself."

"I don't think we should resist melting brains. I think we should just bite the bullet."

https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1633828516050669570

"When you measure the spin of an electron, or the position...what happened to all of the other things you could have seen? Everett's idea is that they're all real. They all become real in that measurement."
- SFI Fractal Faculty @seanmcarroll at @guardian
theguardian.com/science/audio/…

"Compositionality in Vector Space Models of Meaning"

Today's SFI Seminar by @marthaflinders, streaming:


Follow this 🧵 for highlights! "Scientists gather here
Santa Fe Institute, oh so near
Inquiring minds seek truth"

#haiku about SFI c/o @marthaflinders & #ChatGPT

...but still, #AI fails at simple tasks:

"Humans are prone to giving machines ambiguous or mistaken instructions, and we want them to do what we mean, not what we say. To solve this problem we must find ways to align AI with human preferences, goals & values."
- @MelMitchell1 at @QuantaMagazine:
quantamagazine.org/what-does-it-m… “All that is needed to assure catastrophe is a highly competent machine combined with humans who have an imperfect ability to specify human preferences completely and correctly.”

- Stuart Russell (@UCBerkeley) as quoted by @MelMitchell1 in her latest @QuantaMagazine article

"Training Machines to Learn the Way Humans Do: an Alternative to #Backpropagation"

Today's SFI Seminar by Sanjukta Krishnagopal
(@UCBerkeley & @UCLA)

Starting now — follow this 🧵 for highlights:
"When we learn something new, we look for relationships with things we know already."

"I don't just forget Calculus because I learned something else."

"We automatically know what a 'cat-dog' would look like, if it were to exist."

"We learn by training on very few examples."

🧵 "#Criticality: A Balance Between #Robustness and #Adaptability"

Today's SFI Seminar by @cgershen @cgg_mx:
Regarding systems at the #EdgeOfChaos
Identifying #PhaseTransition dynamics
Citing @WagnerEvolution on #Robustness
Contrasting it with #Chaos (fragile, hard to predict, etc.)
And then #Criticality, somewhere in the middle...

"Liquid and Solid #Brains: Mapping the #Cognition Space"

Today's SFI Seminar by Ext Prof @ricard_sole, streaming now — follow this 🧵 for highlights:

"Why #brains? Brains are very costly...it seems like they are not a very good idea to bring complex cognition to a #biosphere that just needs simple replicators."

"I also want to explore the problem of #consciousness, which is around all the time..."

@ricard_sole

"Fabricating #Clay: #Machines, #Materials, & #Code"

🧵 Today's SFI Seminar by @leahbuechley (@UNM):
"We build the geometry directly by thinking about the PATH that our 3D printer takes. There's no intermediate slicing software [to render CAD as "2D" layers]."

- @leahbuechley, #3DPrinting clay with a 1.5 mm nozzle

"The 21st Century Question: Emergently Engineering the Future"

Follow this 🧵 today and tomorrow for highlights from our 2022 #AppliedComplexity Network and Board of Trustees Symposium:

santafe.edu/events/annual-…

#Web3 #Cities #Polarization #EmergentEngineering #Decentralization We start with a talk by SFI President David Krakauer:

"Would anyone care to guess why we're so GOOD at building transistors and so CRAP at designing drugs?"

"This thing [points to transistor] lives in a centralized system. This thing [points to cancer drug] lives in US."

"#Emergence, #SelfOrganization, & #Complexity"

🧵 In today's SFI Seminar, Visiting Scholar @cgershen presents the second in his series of talks on core concepts in #ComplexSystems science, streaming now:

"In high school #physics class you are taught that with the initial conditions of a system, you can predict its future states. In #complexity, this is not so...it means #reductionism is not appropriate, #Platonism is not appropriate..."
- @cgershen

Cormac McCarthy spent the last quarter century writing his novels at SFI. In this documentary from December 2017, Cormac in conversation with SFI President David Krakauer, reflects on isolation, mathematics, character, and the nature of the unconscious:
In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (@AAKnopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar @deepsurvivalsm0 recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with SFI:

santafe.edu/news-center/ne…

🚀 We are live! Here is the correct streaming link for all of today's discussions and performances, starting with a panel on complex time with David Krakauer, James Gleick, Ted Chiang, and David Wolpert in a few moments (measured linearly...):

#IPFest

https://twitter.com/sfiscience/status/1579998259094818816

"One of the ideas we had with #InterPlanetary was, 'What would it take to make science hedonistic? And instead of telling people to do it, you'd have to tell people to STOP doing it?"

- SFI President David Krakauer sets the tone for this weekend's celebrations
#IPFest

"Harnessing #SocialCapital to Enhance Collective Welfare" — our final Community Lecture of the season, starting in a few moments (7:30 pm Mountain).

Follow this 🧵 for highlights from the panel, and tune in to the YouTube stream:



#Economics #Inequality

https://twitter.com/sfiscience/status/1582461651202162690

In 2009 @TIME named @NAChristakis of @Yale, one of our panelists tonight, one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. His clever experiments examine the spread of altruism, emotions, & health behaviors in both virtual & real-world settings.

humannaturelab.net/people/nichola…

"Knowledge Representation in Judgment and Decision Making"

Today's SFI Seminar by @sdpbht (@Penn)

Follow this 🧵 for highlights!

Streaming now:


#knowledge #cognition #behavior @sdpbht @Penn How do people evaluate potential decisions — the tradeoffs, the risks?

"How do people make assessments, and how can we *improve* those assessments?"
- @sdpbht

AND: What role does #memory (episodic and semantic) play in all of this?

#psychology #taxonomy

🧵 "Designing #ActiveMatter in Space-time"

Today's SFI Seminar by @SurajShankar92 (@Harvard), streaming now:
"I consider the Organism, or natural Machine, a machine in which each part is a machine."
- #Leibniz

🦠 Energy → Work

"Active matter *employs* control, either internally [e.g., embryogenesis] or externally [e.g., with sheepdogs]."
- @SurajShankar92

"#Imitation vs #Innovation: Large #Language and Image Models as Cultural #Technologies"

Today's Seminar by SFI External Prof @AlisonGopnik (@UCBerkeley)

Streaming now:


Follow our 🧵 for live coverage. "Today you hear people talking about 'AN #AI' or 'THE AI.' Even 15 years ago we would not have heard this; we just heard 'AI.'"
@AlisonGopnik on the history of thought on the #intelligence (or lack thereof) of #simulacra, linked to the convincing foolery of "double-talk artists":

"The key question around the #GreenEnergy transition is technological progress, and which technologies would improve..."
- SFI Prof J. Doyne Farmer (@INETOxford)

Follow this 🧵 for insights from today's seminar, streaming now on our YouTube channel:
"We're tracking the evolution of the global #energy landscape over about 140 years: which source is providing our energy, and how much is it providing us with?"
- SFI Prof J. Doyne Farmer (@INETOxford)

Speaking now:

#Solar #Wind #Nuclear #Oil #Gas #Coal

"The emergence of #government as organized #violence-cum-#robbery"
SFI Seminar by @CoenTeulings (@UniUtrecht)

Video link:


Follow this 🧵 for highlights + slides! "What's the motivation of this paper? We've seen in most of these locations that there was an #emergence of some form of hierarchical #government [correlated with] a monopoly of #violence and increased #inequality [and] most people lost."

- @CoenTeulings (@UniUtrecht)

🧵 "A #biologist's perspective of #process and #pattern in #innovation"
by SFI External Professor @HochTwit

Starting in just a few minutes on our YouTube channel.

Follow this thread for select slides and quotations...
youtube.com/user/santafein… "I'm not going to pretend there's a unified theory of #innovation, and I'm going to explain why."

We begin with a tale of #Minitel: the original, now-extinct French "Web"...and then back further to #ARPANet...and then to theoretical precursors.


@HochTwit

🧵 Tonight's SFI Community Lecture by 2x Miller Scholar @Andrea_Wulf begins in just a few minutes!

Follow this thread for the streaming link and highlights from the talk. (Sorry, but this recording will not be available to view afterward...)

https://twitter.com/sfiscience/status/1554557747345211392

Talk starts now with an intro by SFI Prof @C4_Computation:


Q - Flack: "Some of you might wonder how a talk on Humboldt connects to #ComplexityScience."

A - Humboldt: "Knowledge of the chain of connection....the perception of these relations."