Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West

If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs — whether it’s N95 mask distribution, log-jammed shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, superspreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks. Ultimately, the effects go even deeper: How has COVID changed our understanding of individuality — the self and its relationship to other selves?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

In this special year-end wrap-up episode, we speak with SFI President David Krakauer and former SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about The Complex Alternative, a new SFI Press volume gathering the perspectives of over 60 members of the complex systems research community on COVID-19 — not just the disease but the webbed and embedded systems it revealed.

Complexity Podcast will take a winter hiatus over the holidays and return on Wednesday, January 12th. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware that PhD students are now welcome to apply for our tuitionless (!) Summer 2022 SFI GAINS residential program in Vienna, Austria. Learn more at santafe.edu/gains.

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Related Reading & Listening:

The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Selected contributions from that volume:
David Kinney - Why We Can’t Depoliticize A Pandemic
Simon DeDeo - From Virus To Symptom
On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)
Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of Crisis
Cristopher Moore on the heavy tail of outbreaks
Sidney Redner on exponential growth processes
Anthony Eagan - The COVID-19-Induced Explosion of Boutique Narratives
Carrie Cowan on the future of education
Melanie Mitchell - The Double-Edged Sword of Imperfect Metaphors
Danielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi - Prediction and Policy in a Complex System

Additional Media:
John Kaag - What Thoreau can teach us about the Great Resignation
Kyle Harper - The Fall of the Roman Empire (SFI Talk)
Niall Ferguson’s Networld, Part 1 “Disruption” feat. Geoffrey West
Neal Stephenson, SFI Miller Scholar
The Limits of Human Scale - David Pakman interviews Geoffrey West
Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin - The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
Jonathan Rausch - The Constitution of Knowledge
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19
Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions
Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)
Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)

New Directions in Science Emerge from Disconnection and Discord
by Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei Wu

Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States
by Elisa Heinrich Mora, Jacob J. Jackson, Cate Heine, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Christopher P. Kempes