Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute Concepts

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West · 15 May 2017 · 578pp · 168,350 words

PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2017 by Geoffrey West Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of

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Names: West, Geoffrey B., author. Title: Scale : the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies / Geoffrey West. Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056756 (print) | LCCN 2017008356 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594205583 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101621509 (ebook) Subjects

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UNIFIED THEORY OF SUSTAINABILITY Accelerating Treadmills, Cycles of Innovation, and Finite Time Singularities Afterword Science for the Twenty-first Century • Transdisciplinarity, Complex Systems, and the Santa Fe Institute • Big Data: Paradigm 4.0 or Just 3.1? Postscript and Acknowledgments Notes Index List of Illustrations About the Author 1 THE BIG PICTURE 1

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scientists I receive requests from journalists asking for an interview, usually about some question or problem related to cities, urbanization, the environment, sustainability, complexity, the Santa Fe Institute, or occasionally even about the Higgs particle. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by a journalist from the magazine Popular Mechanics informing me

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had only recently moved to the University of New Mexico (UNM), where he is a Distinguished Regents Professor. He had concomitantly become associated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and it was through SFI that the connection was made. Thus began “a beautiful relationship” with Jim, SFI, and Brian and, by extension, with

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gives me time to finish this book, to see how my children blossom as they approach midlife, possibly even see grandchildren growing up, see the Santa Fe Institute continue to flourish and receive a $100 million endowment, and, the most unlikely of these, see Tottenham Hotspur win the Premier League and even more

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morning and afternoon. This was the hardest work I have ever done in my life (except possibly for string theory and helping to guide the Santa Fe Institute through the market meltdown of 2008). I would return home (almost an hour away) exhausted, eat a huge meal, and be asleep by 8:30

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and natural selection? These were the kinds of general ruminations I was contemplating when I began informal discussions in 2001–2 with colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute whose backgrounds were in the socioeconomic sciences. Fortuitously, Sander van der Leeuw, a well-known anthropologist then at the University of Paris who later moved

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desire to understand an extraordinary fundamental phenomenon of nature for its own sake that the research program on cities and companies was initiated at the Santa Fe Institute. Its origins and early formation were briefly described at the beginning of the previous chapter. This present chapter is devoted to an overview of some

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, and for optimizing social organizations. A lot of this fascinating work has been carried out or stimulated by many of my colleagues associated with the Santa Fe Institute. It’s a Small World: Stanley Milgram and Six Degrees of Separation You are very likely familiar with the notion of “six degrees of separation

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focus on detail relevant to the specific problem in order to optimize design and minimize unintended consequences. Steve Strogatz was an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute when he did his work on small-world networks with Duncan Watts. He has written some excellent popular books on mathematics and nonlinear dynamics and

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, working with the Hungarian physicist Michael Szell, two of the bright young postdocs hired by Carlo Ratti at MIT. Markus later joined us at the Santa Fe Institute in 2013, where we began this particular collaboration. Of the many projects he worked on, a particularly interesting one was with Luis on analyzing how

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polymath Herbert Simon, whom I mentioned earlier. Axtell, who is at George Mason University in Virginia and is also on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, is a leading expert in agent-based modeling, which is a computational technique used for simulating systems composed of huge numbers of components.3 Basically

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wrote an influential best-seller on business, aptly titled Creative Destruction.8 He was much taken by the ideas on complexity being developed at the Santa Fe Institute, so much so that he joined the board of trustees and persuaded McKinsey to fund a professorship in finance which was held by Doyne Farmer

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and whether what we have thus far achieved can survive. 2. TRANSDISCIPLINARITY, COMPLEX SYSTEMS, AND THE SANTA FE INSTITUTE Although such a vision may not be explicitly articulated in such grandiose terms, it does encapsulate what the Santa Fe Institute was founded to address. It’s a remarkable place. Maybe not everybody’s cup of tea

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“transformational” science, he remarked: My colleagues and I have studied approximately 175 research organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, and in many respects the Santa Fe Institute is the ideal type of organization which facilitates creative thinking. And here’s a quote from Wired magazine: Since its founding in 1984, the nonprofit

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marriage, or at least a serious affair, between economics and the physical sciences. . . . This ground-breaking venture is taking place under the auspices of the Santa Fe Institute. How times have changed! These days collaborations between physicists and economists are hardly rare occurrences—witness the huge influx onto Wall Street of physicists and

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he had discovered for optimizing how research should be carried out? If so, how could we exploit it to ensure the future success of the Santa Fe Institute? These were questions that I naturally asked myself when I assumed the leadership of SFI. I learned that Perutz, while maintaining his own research program

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and wonderful scientist Jim Brown. In chapter 3, I related the story of how this fortuitous encounter and my subsequent long-term engagement with the Santa Fe Institute came into being and how it led to an extraordinary collaborative relationship that changed my life, and I believe his, too. I also recounted the

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. This is very likely because both were trained in theoretical physics, so we spoke the same language. Luis, who is now a colleague at the Santa Fe Institute, played a central role in the development of the work on cities, a story that is recounted in some detail in chapter 7. Van, who

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me with the enthusiastic moral and intellectual support and encouragement needed to complete such a book, especially at times when my own enthusiasm waned. The Santa Fe Institute provided exactly the right ambience and cultural mix of colleagues needed for developing most of the ideas that are articulated in the preceding chapters. A

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, 261, 278, 279, 358, 360–61 San Jose, California, 357, 359, 361, 366, 367, 463n Santa Fe pollution, 275 water system, 360–61, 362–63 Santa Fe Institute (SFI), 105–6, 187, 300–301 “cities group,” 249–51, 270, 296 philosophy of, 433–34 transdisciplinarity, complex systems, and, 431–39 São Paulo, 114

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Business”): timetrax23/CC BY 2.0; (Lehman Brothers): Courtesy of Yuriko Nakao/Reuters/Alamy; (TWA): Ted Quackenbush/Wikimedia Commons Graph art by Jeffrey L. Ward Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National

The Nature of Technology

by W. Brian Arthur · 6 Aug 2009 · 297pp · 77,362 words

what technology is and how it evolves. It grew out of two sets of lectures I gave: the 1998 Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures at the Santa Fe Institute on “Digitization and the Economy”; and the Cairnes Lectures in 2000 at the National University of Ireland, Galway, on “High Technology and the Economy.” It

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and I am enthralled by the magic of technology. And I confess a fondness for aircraft. And for old-fashioned radio electronics. W. Brian Arthur Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico; and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, PARC, Palo Alto, California. 1 QUESTIONS I have many attitudes to technology. I use it and take it for

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. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has grown, rather haphazardly, over several years. It was initially supported by Ernesto Illy, grew into the Stanislaw Ulam Lectures at the Santa Fe Institute in 1998 and the Cairnes Lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2000, and in 2001 began to take shape as a book

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. I thank my home institutions, the Santa Fe Institute and the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC, for providing refuge during the research and writing, and my colleagues at both places, in particular, Geoffrey West and Markus Fromherz. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria hosted me

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riveting machines, 29 rivets, 33 robotics, 9 rocket technology, 113, 175 roller bearings, 28 Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 57 Rosati, Robert, 94 Rosenberg, Nathan, 14, 101 Santa Fe Institute, Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures, 4 satellites, 41, 206 Savery, Thomas, 176 Scholes, Myron, 154 Schumpeter, Joseph, 6, 19–20, 90, 107, 180, 185, 199, 200

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thinker in technology, the economy, and complexity science. He has been Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford, and Citibank Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is currently in residence at PARC (formerly Xerox Parc). Arthur is the recipient of the Schumpeter Prize in Economics and the inaugural Lagrange Prize

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan · 1 Feb 2019 · 309pp · 81,975 words

in the next decade. And by 2027 the average tenure will shrink to just twelve years. This fits with broader research recently completed by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In its analysis of more than 25,000 companies, it found that the half-life of all firms was roughly 10.5

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Ohno, Tom Peters, Niels Pflaeging, Daniel Pink, Adam Pisoni, Eric Ries, Brian Robertson, Ricardo Semler, Peter Senge, Simon Sinek, Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb, Ben Thompson, Geoffrey West, Meg Wheatley, Keith Yamashita, Jean-Francois Zobrist, and the few I forgot. Especially them, because their work has stuck with me but their names have

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, Antoine de, 212 salary, 164, 165, 168 see also compensation Salary.com, 170 Salesforce, 119 S&P 500, 29–30, 60 Santa Fe, USS, 67 Santa Fe Institute, 29 scaling change, 234–39 scenario planning, 90 Schaar, Tom, 259 Scientific Management, 22–24, 26, 48 Scott, Kim, 120 scribes, 122–23 Securities and

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

by Duncan J. Watts · 1 Feb 2003 · 379pp · 113,656 words

at Columbia University—Peter Bearman, Mike Crowe, Chris Scholz, and David Stark—as well as Murray Gell-Mann, Ellen Goldberg, and Erica Jen at the Santa Fe Institute and Andrew Lo at MIT for giving me the freedom and support to pursue my selfish interests, even sometimes at questionable benefit to their own

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. The National Science Foundation (under grant 0094162), Intel Corporation, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Columbia Earth Institute have provided critical financial support to my teaching and research, as well as to a series of seminal workshops in

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mentor, an invaluable collaborator, and a good friend. And the other is Harrison White, who first brought me to Columbia, first connected me with the Santa Fe Institute, and ultimately brought me into sociology. Without these two, as they say, none of this would have been possible. And finally, my parents. It is

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, turned out to be something we never even thought to look for. One weekend in April 1999, I was sitting in my office at the Santa Fe Institute, where I was completing a postdoctoral fellowship, when I received a friendly e-mail message from László Barabási, a physicist at the University of Notre

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of their data. He generously agreed. In the meantime, Mark had been doing some homework on his own. In the mid-1990s, Paul Ginsparg and Geoffrey West, two physicists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, had started a minor revolution in scientific publishing by creating an on-line, electronic repository for prepublication research

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large, and it’s in the thousands). Mark not only had to use the giant, new Intel cluster that was just being installed at the Santa Fe Institute to do the calculations, but also had to improve on some standard network algorithms in order not to tie up even that machine for the

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could at least point us in the right direction. Erica Jen, a Chinese American, who until recently had been vice president for research at the Santa Fe Institute and who had hired both Mark and me, had attended Beijing University during the years of the Cultural Revolution, long before her arrival at Santa

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” contact. All three of us had belonged at some point to the same, small, tight-knit community that comprised the live-in researchers of the Santa Fe Institute. From our perspective, it didn’t matter where she had lived or what she had been doing twenty years earlier, only that when we knew

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. More recently, it has also been used to think about the spread of disease. In late 1998, not long after I had arrived at the Santa Fe Institute, I had started talking with Mark about the disease-spreading work that I had done with Steve the year before. Based on a simple SIR

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other—that we will explore in the next chapter. CHAPTER NINE Innovation, Adaptation, and Recovery IN JANUARY 1999, WHEN I WAS A POSTDOC AT THE SANTA FE Institute, I was giving a talk to representatives from the institute’s business network, a group of companies that support the institute financially. Also present was

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jumped ship to Cornell. “That’s my adviser,” I said, and there it rested again, until over two years later, at the Santa Fe Institute. One day my office mate, Geoffrey West, a distinguished physicist and expatriate Brit, mentioned that he was inviting “one of your fellow countrymen” from MIT to recruit him for a

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spin systems and phase transitions is given in Palmer, R. Broken ergodicity. In Stein, D. L. (ed.), Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. I, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989), pp. 275–300. Stein, D. L. Disordered systems: Mostly spin systems. In Stein, D

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. L. (ed.), Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. I, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989), pp. 301–354. If one actually wants to do work in this field, a

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lessons, global challenges. Science, 284, 278–282 (1999). Palmer, R. Broken ergodicity. In Stein, D. L. (ed.), Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. I, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989), pp. 275–300. Pastor-Satorras, R., and Vespignani, A. Epidemic spreading in scale-free

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and Francis, London, 1992). Stein, D. L. Disordered systems: Mostly spin systems. In Stein, D. L. (ed.), Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. I, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989), pp. 301–354. Strogatz, S. H. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos with Applications to Physics

Complexity: A Guided Tour

by Melanie Mitchell · 31 Mar 2009 · 524pp · 120,182 words

unity of knowledge and a recognition of shared responsibility that will stand in sharp contrast to the present growing polarization of intellectual cultures.” Thus the Santa Fe Institute was created as a center for the study of complex systems. In 1984 I had not yet heard the term complex systems, though these kinds

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way to get a job there. Persistence, and being in the right place at the right time, eventually won me an invitation to visit the Santa Fe Institute for an entire summer. The summer stretched into a year, and that stretched into additional years. I eventually became one of the institute’s resident

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curious about the sciences of complexity? Would you like to come on such a guided tour? Let’s begin. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM GRATEFUL TO THE SANTA FE INSTITUTE (SFI) for inviting me to direct the Complex Systems Summer School and to give the Ulam Memorial Lectures, both of which spurred me to write

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a universally accepted definition of complexity that can help answer these kinds of questions. In 2004 I organized a panel discussion on complexity at the Santa Fe Institute’s annual Complex Systems Summer School. It was a special year: 2004 marked the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the institute. The panel consisted

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even broke out between members of the faculty over their respective definitions. The students were a bit shocked and frustrated. If the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute—the most famous institution in the world devoted to research on complex systems—could not agree on what was meant by complexity, then how can

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world’s first Ph.D. in computer science. He was quickly hired as a professor in that same department. John Holland. (Photograph copyright © by the Santa Fe Institute. Reprinted by permission.) Holland got hooked on Darwinian evolution when he read Ronald Fisher’s famous book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Like Fisher

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universal computer. Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science” I first heard about Cook’s result in 1998 when he spoke at a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute. My own reaction, like that of many of my colleagues, was “Very cool! Very ingenious! But not of much practical or scientific significance.” Like the

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working on this idea was always in the back of my mind. A few years later, with thesis finished and a research job at the Santa Fe Institute, I finally had the time to delve into it. A young undergraduate student named Peter Hraber was hanging around the institute at that time, looking

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figure 11.4 for us to figure out what was going on. Luckily for us, Jim Crutchfield, a physicist from Berkeley, happened to visit the Santa Fe Institute and became interested in our effort. It turned out that Jim and his colleagues had earlier developed exactly the right conceptual tools to help us

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turn out to be nine and sixty ways of constructing power laws, and every single one of them is right.” When I was at the Santa Fe Institute, it seemed that there was a lecture every other day on a new hypothesized mechanism that resulted in power law distributions. Some are similar to

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with this problem but not simplify it so much that the biology would get lost in the process. Left to right: Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, and James Brown. (Photograph copyright © by Santa Fe Institute. Reprinted with permission.) FIGURE 17.3. Illustration of bronchi, branching structures in the lungs. (Illustration by Patrick Lynch, licensed under Creative

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Commons [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/].) Enter Geoffrey West, who fit the bill perfectly. West, a theoretical physicist then working at Los

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he himself had been mulling over the biological scaling problem as well, without knowing very much about biology. Brown and Enquist encountered West at the Santa Fe Institute in the mid-1990s, and the three began to meet weekly at the institute to forge a collaboration. I remember seeing them there once a

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Enquist later described the group’s math results as “pyrotechnics.”) I knew only vaguely what they were up to. But later, when I first heard Geoffrey West give a lecture on their theory, I was awed by its elegance and scope. It seemed to me that this work was at the apex

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. His work was original and influential; it earned him many academic accolades, including a MacArthur “genius” award, as well as a faculty position at the Santa Fe Institute. At SFI seminars, Kauffman would sometimes chime in from the audience with, “I know I’m just a simple country doctor, but … ” and would spend

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Horgan published an article in Scientific American, arguably the world’s leading popular science magazine, attacking the field of complex systems in general and the Santa Fe Institute in particular. His article was advertised on the magazine’s cover under the label “Is Complexity a Sham?” (figure 19.1). The article contained two

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use randomness”: The role of randomness in complex adaptive systems is also explored in Millonas, M. M., The importance of being noisy. Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, Summer, 1994. “Eventually, the ants will have established a detailed map”: Ziff, E. and Rosenfield, I., Evolving evolution. The New York Review of Books, 53

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effects of intermittent silence. The American Journal of Psychology, 70, 1957, pp. 311–314. Millonas, M. M. The importance of being noisy. Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, Summer, 1994. Minsky, M. The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1987. Mitchell, M. Computation in cellular automata: A selected review. In T. Gramss et al

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, Tony, 43 Rubner, Max, 258, 260, 266, 268 rule 110 cellular automaton, 153–157 rule 30 cellular automaton, 154–156 rules, cellular automata, 147–149 Santa Fe Institute, x, xi, 94, 156, 160, 164, 254, 264, 282, 291 Complex Systems Summer School, 94, 300 Savage, Leonard, 297 scale-free distribution, 240–245 versus

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer

by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words

. Subsequently, I’ve also benefited from visiting appointments at Nuffield College, Oxford, which generously hosted me for a two-month sabbatical in 2007, and the Santa Fe Institute—my intellectual home away from home—where I spent a few weeks per summer in 2008 and 2009. Without these critical breaks from my usual

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, it’s unlikely I would have been able to complete such a long writing project, and I’m grateful to Peter Hedstrom at Nuffield and Geoffrey West and Chris Wood at SFI for their support in arranging these visits. Finally, I’m grateful to a number of people who have helped me

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 28 Jan 2020 · 501pp · 114,888 words

writ large. Two-thirds of all growth takes place in urban environments because population density leads to the cross-pollination of ideas. This is why Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that doubling the size of a city produces a 15 percent increase in income, wealth, and innovation (as measured by the number of

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60 percent more productive than rural ones. Shenzhen’s GDP, meanwhile, is three times larger than the rest of China. Density also drives innovation. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that every time the population of a city doubles, its rate of innovation, as measured in number of patents, increases by 15 percent. In

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-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time. Force #5: Communications Abundance as author Matt Ridley: Matt Ridley, Rational Optimist (HarperCollins, 2010), p. 1. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West: West wrote a great piece on all this work for Medium. Find it here: https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/scaling-the-surprising-mathematics

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, “Urban Productivity in the Developing World,” National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017. See: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23279.pdf. London and Paris: Ibid. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West: Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2010. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words

book Triumph of the City.23 The big buildings we associate with urbanity are merely the support system that facilitates all of those exchanges. As Geoffrey West, a physicist who studies how cities grow, explains, “Cities are the result of clustering of interactions of social networks.”24 And they are repositories of

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we all live and work. Perhaps we should hold our options open a bit longer and resist the urge to standardize too much. In 2010, Geoffrey West, the physicist who studies cities, remarked at a gathering of urban scholars in New York that if we don’t have a science of cities

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“hard” scientists—physicists and mathematicians—at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute proclaimed the launch of a new science of cities from their desert retreat. That December, a cover story for the New York Times Magazine breathlessly reported on empirical studies of urban growth conducted by Geoffrey West and his colleague Luis Bettencourt. (Ominously, perhaps, the

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from one of West’s and Bettencourt’s own colleagues, Carnegie Mellon University statistician Cosma Shalizi, who is himself listed as “external professor” on the Santa Fe Institute website. Shalizi tried to replicate West’s and Bettencourt’s analysis, and what he discovered was disconcerting for those who had bought into West’s

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman · 19 Feb 2019 · 339pp · 94,769 words

AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl. AN ONGOING DYNAMICAL EMERGENT SYSTEM From the initial meeting in Washington, Connecticut, to the present, I arranged a number of

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LLOYD Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. I met Seth Lloyd in the late 1980s, when new ways of thinking were everywhere: the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

by Michael J. Mauboussin · 6 Nov 2012 · 256pp · 60,620 words

field, read and critique sections of the book. My thanks to Steven Crist, Scott Page, Tom Seeley, Stephen Stigler, Steve Strogatz, and David Weinberger. The Santa Fe Institute has been a tremendous source of learning and inspiration for me. SFI takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the common themes that arise in complex

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the scientists, staff, and network members to share so much with me. Particular thanks go to Doug Erwin, Shannon Larsen, John Miller, Scott Page, and Geoffrey West. Reading a draft of a manuscript and providing feedback to the author is difficult and time-consuming. I was fortunate to have a stellar collection

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and Dodd Investing. In 2009, he received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence by an Adjunct Faculty Member. Mauboussin is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, the founding institution of complexity science and a global leader in multidisciplinary research. Mauboussin received an AB in government from Georgetown University. He lives in