Corona and complex systems, with Michael Garfield

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, it's good to see you again, my friend, and we welcome to the show Michael Garfield, podcaster extraordinaire. Not to geek out too much on microphone stuff while we're talking, but he is a podcaster extraordinaire and works at an interesting center, right? You work for a center that studies complex systems.

Michael Right, the Santa Fe Institute, where I do science communication. I work on the social media. And the podcast, I started their Complexity podcast, as well as hosting my own Future Fossils podcast. But I mean, this is just the focal point through which I get to focus my work as a dot connector for people and someone who can... I like to think of it like in electrical engineering terms, like somebody who can... Step down a really heady, impotence-matching, to use a Jeffrey West term.

Chris I like that he thinks he will understand an engineering analogy, Scott. I think you've just paid us a compliment.

Michael Well, I'm just going to throw out analogies and hope that... We'll desperately grab at some of them.

Chris It's kind of the question I've always been embarrassed to ask you, Michael, to just say a bit about the Santa Fe Institute. It's kind of one of those rarefied institutions. In the intellectual sphere that you're supposed to know of, and it reveals how little you know about the world to ask what it is, and so I've never asked you. But can I just be honest and vulnerable now and ask you to tell me a bit about the Institute?

Michael Sure. It's a place where I'm very lucky to be on the staff. It's important to distinguish that from being on the research faculty. This is a world hub, the place where complex systems science as it is currently practiced was largely pioneered. It's out here in the high deserts of New Mexico. It was founded in 1984. And so the main thing about complex systems research is that it's about understanding the world in terms of how we can't understand everything by pulling it apart and reducing it to its elementary components. There are things that you... I think of it as the postmodern turn applied to scientific discovery. Actually, in the early days of SFI, there was still kind of a bender. Don Quixote-type tilting at the windmill of a general unified theory of everything, one equation that could explain the cosmos.

But as complexity science has matured, the emphasis has shifted in our humbling and our understanding that there are, for example, Things that we can only learn about a system by simulating it in a computer that can't be reduced to an equation. You have to run the simulation and then modify the variables of that simulation and run it again. For anyone familiar with forecasting or scenario planning, that's related to this understanding that strategy is contextual. And that the functional relationships between things depend on the constraints of an environment that's organized at multiple different levels of order and operating on multiple different time scales.

Scott Yeah, you say something in this piece you wrote in Medium about how we will fight diseases of our networks by realizing we are networks. You have this great paragraph that I just want to read in total because I think I love it. You say we're in a world where what the poet John Keats calls called negative capability is king. The skill of not congealing on an answer prematurely, the capacity to hedge one's mental bets and keep one's models open, fluid, and provisional. This looks a lot like having a diverse gut microbiome that can handle a wide variety of foods or how a virus like SARS-CoV-2 is less a fixed point in the genotypic space. Thank you. It's why investors call for a diverse portfolio of assets and high beta strategies are suited for a moment of extraordinary volatility. It's why food webs that don't depend entirely on one key species fare much better through catastrophe. It's why sometimes stalemates lead to better answers than a fast agreement. I thought that was so incredibly well written. And then you get into sort of, it seems like you're arguing kind of that...

It seems that the coronavirus exposes the simple kind of systems that are very fragile and not resilient and highlights other ones that are more resilient. And so you're thinking that, hey, we're only going to deal with a pandemic when we realize that part of this is I'm not congealing on an answer prematurely.

Michael Yeah, yeah. And thank you for the kind of words about that. Yeah, I think, you know, and Chris, you and I have spoken about this at some length before this call, that one of the things that I think has been revealed through this is, you know, if you think of the flows of materials and energy through an ecosystem or through an economy, which I think are kind of like loosely synonymous for our purposes. That former SFI president and now distinguished professor Jeffrey West, whose book Scale has gotten a lot of traction over the last few years, describing the scaling laws that govern the growth and evolution of cities and organisms and corporations and so on. He talks about one of the fundamental things that we can say about physical systems of any kind is that they're lazy. There's a principle of least effort or least action. What that means in practice is that if it rains on a mountain, So, contrary to our sort of You know, folk truism here, the straight line, you know, the straight line is not the quickest path between two points, at least when it comes to real physical systems, not like idealized Euclidean geometries, but actual real world systems where there's friction.

Because the friction is what makes the river bend. So all of these snaking pathways that we see in the growth of trees or cardiovascular systems, so on, are a way of harnessing turbulence and vertical processes to reduce friction and to optimize for the flow rate. And so what this means with respect to coronavirus is that these systems all look the same, like that branching, you know, there's that sort of mind-blowing moment where you realize that, you know, your nervous system looks like the webs of plasma connecting galaxies. What's going on there is that the shape of a lightning bolt is a map of all of the possible paths of least effort that the electron takes to get from one place to another. We're like electrons in that current. Now, what we've done in our systems over the last few years, decades, is optimize them for efficiency. So we're looking at one time scale. And on that one time scale, we've taken a lot of things that are

This is about us realizing that, I guess, to try and close this complicated analogy, it's like if you had your aorta and your major arteries of your body, and then they just went directly into capillaries with no branching vein structure. Yeah, exactly.

Chris You know, sports clubs... All of that has kind of been hollowed away by the forces of efficiency and optimization and scale. Right. And kind of, you know, co-opted by the macro level. And then suddenly when, you know, that fine-tuned environment in which the macro can deliver all of that stuff to the individual level, when that environment is disrupted... Suddenly we realized that, okay, this is fit for no purpose now. And that kind of community layer That we would look to to kind of mediate those big global forces. It's just non-existent.

Scott It's interesting, Michael. I do this long-form interview podcast with Give and Take where I actually first met Chris as a guest. And I had a guy on, I don't know, it was a while back in 2018, whose name is Brian Vandemark. And he wrote this massive history of Vietnam called The Road to Disaster. The guy knew McNamara. He has decades of his own archival research. It's an amazing historian. He teaches at the Naval Academy. But part of his thesis in the book, he spends like the first 150 pages looking at what social science has told us about decision making. And basically, his lens historically is like looking at these cataclysmic decisions that Kennedy and Johnson, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations made. Through the prism of research in cognitive science and psychology and organizational theory to explain... Why the quote-unquote best and the brightest got trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent. And he's talking about why change is so hard and why they were so blind to their errors. And one of the things that's so interesting, because he teaches midshipment at the Naval Academy, because he's thinking, look, some of these people I'm teaching are going to be making the big defense decisions someday. And he talks so much about the need emotionally to be able to stop and not double down.

On what's not working. This is why I hear you saying about complexity and systems that are complex and encourage not doubling down just by the nature of the way the gravitational pull works. It gets a lot of different lenses. Vietnam was the strange thing where we didn't lose many battles, we just lost the war because we couldn't think outside of the boxes we were in and just totally decimated thousands of lives for nothing.

Chris Yeah, Vietnam, yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to add on that. I mean, there's definitely, and I imagine this must be something that you think about a lot as you, you know, in your, you know, part of your kind of formal role of, so how can I... How can I help to connect and articulate the complexity thinking that is happening inside SFI and connect it to a wider world and the challenges that people are dealing with? And it seems to me that this is kind of the... The crux of it that when we study systems and how they behave, we see that the organic models are the best models and mechanistic models are always very poor substitutes. Yet so much of how we just seem to even run our own lives is much more mechanistic. I don't know if this is just the last few hundred years of Every tool that we've developed for ourselves, we tend to think in straight lines. We depend upon the clarity of a straight line to understand whose permission do I need to seek if I want to make a decision? What is the right next step to take? To get from where I am now to some kind of decision that I or the auditor above me will evaluate as the right decision or a good decision, we are a prisoner to these straight lines, these tools and processes and trainings. Thank you very much.

That complexity into straight lines that I guess we can grasp and we can work with. And I think there is this kind of question, and I suppose there are, you know, we live in this, there's so many wondrous experiments underway of demonstrating that there are ways of kind of Thank you very much.

Michael Yeah, I mean, there's another way of framing this, which I find really helpful to everything you just said. It's about the level of resolution or granularity at which we're trying to address the problem. To go back to the idea of fractal branching networks for a moment, there's a famous story that Jeff West tells in that book Scale about the coastline of Britain and how if you use a different measuring stick, use measuring sticks of two different lengths, then you're going to get two different answers because, and this is the whole idea of what fractals are, is that If your measuring stick is a meter long, then your answer of how long is the coastline of any given surface is going to be significantly smaller than if your measuring stick is a centimeter long. But that smaller measuring stick... That means you're taking 100 times more measurements also.

The SFI postdoc David Kinney has looked at this in terms of why we have different fields of science in the first place. It's because they all seem to apply to different scales and we've moved beyond Thinking about physics as the level at which things are actually happening and then everything else is just sort of stacked on that and emergent from that, there's a seminal paper. Moore is different from 1972. This is a Phil Anderson paper where he says that basically a significant change in quantity results in a change in quality. So that there is something genuinely different going on in chemistry than there is in physics and genuinely different in biology than there is in chemistry. And so when you look at it from David Kinney's point of view, his work has been on formal epistemology, which is the branch of philosophy of how we know what we know.

Chris It's easy. Just ask Scott.

Michael He'll tell you. Points which we talk about in the Complexity Podcast episode 19 are about how the cost of using a one centimeter ruler means that the cost is too great for questions that only require a meter ruler, right? And so there's an economy involved in this, which is like... How closely do you have to examine the thing in order to answer the question? You know, good enough in horseshoes and hand grenades and government work, right? Because you're looking at things at the national level rather than at the neighborhood level. But when the problem exists at the neighborhood level, and this is to your point, Scott, about Vietnam, the reason that the military tactics that we brought into Vietnam didn't work is because of guerrilla warfare. It's because of context. It's because we were applying a global strategy to a situation that required a very context-specific approach.

It meant fighting in this particular landscape, and we ignored that to our peril. And something like that is going on everywhere we see a crisis right now, whereas the tools that we are applying to these so-called wicked problems are tools that were invented to address problems at a different level of granularity. And so the tension that you're speaking to, Chris, is a tension between, again, like the short and long-term investments required. You know, like if we're trying to make the most expedient decision now, the most expedient decision now might be to rely entirely on the convenience store down the street for my food. But over the long term, we know that sooner or later there is an infrequent event in which the global food chain, the supply chains are disrupted. And if I don't want to starve to death, then I should be thinking about not only shopping for this week, but building into the system

When you're engaging with the actual complexity of your situation, as this pandemic has forced us to do, Then it's clear that our equations or our models of this system were insufficiently simple, that the ruler was too long, and that we need to look at things a little bit more granularly, which in this case actually means looking at... It's kind of an awkward... It's like an inversion. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture. And see all of the things, all of the dimensions, all the variables that actually need to go into this rather than trying to trim everything down and make the equation as short as possible. So there's, yeah, there's like a, there's an economy involved in the way that we model things. And SFI President David Krakauer and I spoke to this recently on episode 34 of Complexity Podcast talking about... I love how you have like an archive in your head of...

Chris Yeah, well, I mean, it's, you know... Scott, it's all, like, if I just think back to our episodes, it's all a blur to me.

Michael But in this latest episode that we just put out, we talk about the way that this means that mathematical models of the world are not values neutral because they encode our blind spots. And in those blind spots live beings that suffer by being rendered invisible. You know, economic externalities, marginalized populations. You know, there's a way that the, you know, to put this down on the street level, there are ways that the epidemiological models that we've been using to fight COVID-19 are racist. Because they're not handling the structural inequalities that exist at the neighborhood level. And they're assuming that we can talk about the transmissibility of this disease. Chris Moore at SFI has written some really great pieces on this. They're not talking about the differences in the network structure between, say, downtown Manhattan and the Navajo Reservation, or the way that people of different socioeconomic circumstances are incapable of social distancing because essential employees and so on have to go to work. To draw from U.S. news last week, There's this kind of...

Chris Thank you very much. You know, simplifying away to some basic principle because, you know, I guess the virtue of the average is it gives you kind of one number upon which you then make a decision, one decision. And you say, OK, based on this, there is this policy. Everyone do that. Everyone stay at home. I mean, think about it. It's kind of the worst decision to say, OK, everybody stay at home. Everything just shuts down because it's basically conceding that we know nothing. We have no granular information. And if we have it, we have no capacity to act on it. And so we're just going to have to pretend that we know nothing. And if we knew nothing, then the thing to do is just everybody stop.

Scott And I suppose the ideal... Sorry, go ahead. Sweden dealt with this really differently, right? I mean, it's not as though they didn't say all the same stuff that everybody was saying, but they kind of said, be careful, maintain distance, do these things, but they didn't shut everything down, right? And they kind of were working on a kind of herd immunity model, which I mean, I don't know if that was wise or not, but that is interesting. That that's a very different... And also, the levels of social trust in Sweden, like all of Scandinavia, are way higher than they are in the UK or the United States, right? So I wonder how that impacts things. So can you look at like the lower social trust countries, like Brazil is like 17%, right, where the quotient is. The Scandinavian countries tend to be like in the high 60s, almost 70. The UK and the United States tend to be like in the 30s.

So I wonder how much with the lower social trust you have, the harder it is to make things function. They've done studies in Italy, which certainly has a reputation for government corruption, and yet there are individual townships that are way more efficient and run in healthier ways than as healthy as anything in the UK or the United States. A lot of the people attribute it to high social trust. And so I wonder how you deal with a pandemic when there's just no social trust. And especially in the United States, it's a whole complete partisan pandemic experience. I had a guy on Give and Take Research Psychologist. He said that blue versus red pandemic, it is like that, this research psychologist showed, until red state people get the virus or know someone gets the virus. And then their perspective totally changes. But until then, you have this sort of, you know, the blue state kind of folks tend to trust the government and think that we're doing the right response and saving lives.

And red state folks tend to think we're demolishing the society by ruining the economy. And it's just interesting that the social trust factors and things like that just seem to really work against any kind of complex, nuanced, organic framework that, like, Michael, you're talking about.

Michael Well, yeah, I mean, that speaks to some of the social science that's been coming out of SFI. Mirta Golasik, in particular, who was on episode nine of Complexity. There you go, Chris.

Chris I'm keeping score. I'm giving you points every time you do that. You're at five. That's pretty good, man.

Michael It's only 34 episodes so far. It's easy. With Future Fossils podcast, there's 145, and sometimes I lose my place. But Mirta Golasik Her work is really interesting. She came out of Croatia as Croatia was falling apart. She grew up in a nation that was in the process of falling to pieces. And so she became really interested in why that kind of thing happens and how the kind of... This is the basis of what they call politically motivated cognition. We're going to vote Hillary until the day before the election. And then they decided that the social cost of making a decision based on what they thought the best strategy for the country would be. This is a huge piece of why we are suffering such rampant polarization and disinformation right now. Because, I mean, aside from the fact that it's, you know, confirmation bias and it's just economically expedient in the short term to believe the facts that already suit your established worldview, that's, you know, really this sort of politically motivated bias is confirmation bias, but it's at the social level. Where it's easier for you to fall in with the herd than it is for you to stick your neck out and point out the emperor has no clothes, right? And so, yeah, again, it's tricky. And one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is, to your point about, you said... They don't believe it. They think it's a conspiracy or whatever until one of their friends gets sick. And that's the point at which the global scale sort of involves into or erupts into the local scale again.

There is episode 29 of Complexity where David Krakauer and I talk about how to think about disruptions to an adaptive landscape of strategies that are created by this, like stock market crashes and so on. Mass extinctions are great examples where Suddenly, the global impinges on the local, or the cosmic impinges on the terrestrial. You think about the meteor at the end of the Cretaceous period, and it's like, oh, suddenly your strategy has to account for the very, very small, but nonetheless non-zero likelihood that a celestial event is going to disrupt the entire food web that you're a part of. And that you're not going to be able to lean on, again, this extremely efficient but highly specialized strategy of being a pollinator that visits only one particular species of plant or being this enormous dinosaur that relies on this very delicate balance of food web relationships. And so in those moments of disruption, It pays to be a generalist. It pays to keep your options open, again, to the piece of the article that I wrote that you quoted earlier, Scott.

And the cost of being a generalist means that you don't get to scale in the same way, but that you're more resilient to those kinds of disturbances. So, I don't know, there's a lot that I unpacked there and just sort of threw out on the floor. But yeah, I'll leave it there.

Chris You fit right at home.

Scott Oh, I can't hear you, Scott. Sorry, I had my mic muted. I had my mic muted. I was on Zoom protocols, you know, where you mute your mic. John, I was thinking when you were saying that about the kind of groupthink, you know, Jonathan hates work and the righteous mind, sort of moral psychologist. He talks about how morality binds, but it blinds, right? So you have these moral kind of cultures that are necessary for human evolution, right? It helps you early on. Tribalism really helps us. It allows us to bind together, to form social collectives, and to have better food resources, defense, things like that. But it also blinds. And so it often, by necessity... And again, that's... I take him there as being descriptive, not prescriptive. He doesn't think it's a bad thing in the blinds necessarily, because when you choose X, you have to kind of

not choose Y, right? I mean, there's a sense in which this is not... But you do have to be open to the fact that you're going to have blind spots, right? And I think that's kind of the key thing.

Michael Totally. Good science is predicated on the notion that you're... Thank you for having me. There are all of these metabolic or economic factors governing the decisions that we make in terms of what to include or exclude from our models. You're never going to arrive at a final answer. You're always going to find a bigger context or a finer grain at which to examine things.

Chris Although so interesting about that, because I feel like it's, you know, this is a good moment when how the lay citizen, let's say, looks at the expert, looks at the scientist is really kind of coming into the foreground as, you know, OK, we relied upon experts in science to say. We all have to completely stop what we were doing and adopt a completely different routine and pattern for our daily lives. And now there is this kind of stumbling process of figuring out, okay, how do we, and every community society is struggling with this, how do we kind of balance sort of what the epidemiologists, what the health science is saying with Thank you very much. I don't believe that I'm holding this model provisionally. I don't think that anyone else in society believes that that's what scientists believe. And whether we're projecting that on the science or the science is also holding that, I think that there is this sense that science has a form of truth, which is a form of keeper of the special knowledge, the special fire.

And when they speak, then we all need to be silent to it. And then what happens is kind of a question of social trust, as Scott said. Like if we kind of like, yeah, you know, like Canadians, right? In our constitution, peace, order, good government. We're kind of predisposed to listen to the authorities and say, okay, I guess that's what we must do. And so there's a kind of, we'll obey that because they're right. But there's a very, there's little nuance, I guess is what I'm trying to say, I feel. In how the public relates to the science. I think that there's a kind of incapacity to take that confession of provisionality that the scientist is offering and actually work with it in some way and say, right, okay, you've got, you know, and that science is really important and it's saving lives right now. There are also these value questions. Now we need to make some sober trade-offs about, you know, How much is a human life worth? Economic system upon which if we shut it all down, then there are all sorts of welfare and health costs of not having that model. Look at all of the systemic injustice and the way that all of these consequences are distributed highly unevenly. There's all this stuff to talk about. But I think we, so we need in this moment to be able to have really mature conversations kind of like around the campfire where we all have an important voice to bring. I just don't think that we've kind of grown up to be able to sort of find one another to actually have that conversation. And so what we're left with, my hypothesis, is you get like these kind of clumsy absolutes, right?

Either, okay, let's just do what the scientists tell us, and we'll just listen. Or the scientists have been totally politicized, so they're just another political actor. And let's just have the usual political argument that we've been having. And it feels like what we actually need is somewhere in the middle where, yeah, the science is really important, but there are now these other value conversations that we need to have. And that's not what they're specialized at. We've got other technologies for kind of emerging those other things. Is anything I'm saying making sense?

Scott Yeah, they're part of the conversation. The scientists are part of the conversation. And I think that's the problem. I think what we're seeing in the U.S. is that it almost did seem to get politicized. We were talking about this with Harry Pierce, who we ran on the show recently. It is an awkward thing because it just seems like the government says, we're going to listen to the scientists and we're going to tell them what to do. But then again, you do risk then politicizing the scientists when you don't have them as part of a deliberative democratic dialogue and they just kind of... Because then what happens when people are just pissed off? I just see that in America, people are so pissed off when the models seem to be off or something like that. And people just freak out and get so angry because, well, I thought you were the experts. Well, no, that's not how this thing... This is not... There's messiness here, right?

Chris Just to add a bit of mess to this... So I just saw the tweet a couple of days ago. So Doug Ford, who's the premier of Ontario, has, you know, as part of the reopening, so they kind of reopen places of worship and stuff like that. And when media interrogate, so, you know, why we made this policy decision, he says, well, you know, we consulted with the experts. And then the follow up question was. Which experts? Who are the experts? And the government didn't want to reveal who the experts were. And I think that's quite dangerous. If the experts who are being invoked to set public policy are hidden from the public... Whether that was kind of a good faith thing or not, I think that then again, it politicizes the experts because then you're just you're using the power of that label to shut some people up and do what you think you need to do.

And I just think that we I just don't think that we know. I don't know if I've ever seen it. Where the scientist and the citizen sit around a table as in some way equals and contribute together to the, okay, so what do we do with the perspective that we both bring to this? Have I seen that? I don't know if I've seen that.

Michael It's a wicked problem and there's so much in there because one of the problems, again, has to do with what I was talking about, the segregation of social groups that happens without any kind of ill intent because it just takes time to explain what economists call a common prior. You know, a mutually understood sort of basic, an axiom upon which you can have the conversation that you need to have. And it just takes time to try and relate your experience, your worldview, your history, your understanding to someone else. There are plenty of examples where we don't have the luxury of that time. Episode seven of Complexity Podcast, Columbia economist and SFI external professor Rajiv Sethi, who just co-authored this fabulous book, This is a subconscious thing that all of us do all the time. You sit down on the chair without testing to see if it will hold your weight because you've created a mental model of chairs that chairs support you.

And so you just assume that they will and that's a stereotype and that's okay because most chairs do not come to harm when you make that assumption. But it makes a big difference if you run into someone in a dark alley and you're making an assumption based on your exposure to stereotypes because even if you don't think you're racist, the fact is All of us have been shown to... The work on implicit bias makes it clear that we exhibit an unconscious racial stereotype simply by being exposed to them. And this is done because you don't have time to... I mean, everybody, you know, a lot of implicit racists will say, well, hey, I've got that, you know, I've got that one black friend on my block. You know, he's cool. He's all right. And it's because it's the one guy that you've taken the time to get to know or that, you know, your life circumstances have brought you into association with them in that way that you've had the luxury. This is a serious problem with trust in terms of not just racial relations, but all relationships that occur over the internet. This is why hate speech is such a big problem on social media.

We're not living next door to these people. We're not engaged with them in a high bandwidth, long duration, get to know each other, eating together kind of way. And so we're basing our judgments of one another on these these snap stereotyped, you know, you're looking at somebody's profile picture at like 50 pixels across and deciding whether or not they're an idiot, you know, or the last thing they said with no knowledge of their life experience and where that statement is coming from. And to loop this back to a more personal territory, Future Fossils podcast, I just talked with the producers, Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown, of an extraordinary and very disturbing and surreal documentary called We Believe in Dinosaurs. This is episode 144. And they're talking about the underlying issue, like you were just mentioning, Chris, of trust in scientific experts in America specifically, although this is admittedly a worldwide problem, but it's especially acute in the United States, that there is this There's a theme park called the Ark Encounter in Kentucky that's a young earth creationist theme park. Let's go.

Chris Let's all go.

Scott That's run by Ken Ham.

Michael Right, right. Ken Ham, famous Australian-American... I'm just... You know that.

Scott Oh, yeah. He debated Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Michael Yeah, yeah. And had his ass handed to him, I must say. But it was... And they bring that debate up in the Future Fossils episode that I'm talking about because they say that the moderator of that debate asked them both... Would you change your mind about the theory of evolution were you presented sufficient evidence to the contrary? And Bill Nye said, of course I would. And Ken Ham said, no, I would not. And the difference is that there's something in the mind of a fundamentalist, and I don't mean that in terms of just a specific religious belief. Fundamentalism comes in all kinds of... It's kind of content independent. It comes in all flavors. You can be a science fundamentalist, scientism. And fundamentalism is the inability to hold open that boundary. I mean, to hold open that question, because it's easier to congeal on an answer. Again, it's premature, but maybe you'll never get challenged in a meaningful way in the course of your life. So the thing with Young Earth Creationism that Monica brought up in that conversation is that they're obsessed with having all of the answers, that it's a huge relief. To have all of the answers, because it's hard work to keep the question open.

And that's frankly why I think historically science emerged out of the privileged class of people, people like Isaac Newton that had the time and the luxury to spend investigating these things, that had the time to think about these things. The faster we crank the treadmill of society, the more polarized we're going to get because the less time we are affording people to consider things, to think about things, to ask these questions.

Chris This is interesting. I'm going to have to go in a few minutes. You guys go all night. But I feel like this conversation has sparked so many, I guess, contemplations in my mind about this social experiment. Well, you've all been part of it now. Thank you very much. But also the kind of the need for it, which I feel like you've just articulated, Michael. And I'm kind of left, I suppose... So we live in so many such different worlds. Some of the things, if I review in my head the last hour, we've talked about blind spots, we've talked about different levels of granularity that we engage with the world. We talked about the epistemic communities that we're a part of. And also how time poor we are to even develop an awareness of that, let alone then kind of do the next step to kind of explore like, oh, okay, if I've got these blind spots, if I'm only seeing a piece, what are the other pieces and what might they be? And I feel like on the one hand, the need for it and the opportunity for it is so obvious. And on the other hand, the reasons it will fail are so clear.

I don't know. I guess that then becomes the question or one of my big questions around what should we expect in terms of how we interbe, how we kind of interoperate one with the other. And it seems like, well, you know, talk about social scientists. This is what's going to keep us social scientists employed forever. Because, you know, pick your slice of reality. I'm a political scientist. You know, the last few months I've been thinking so much. I've been on the front lines of working so much of just sort of watching. You know, the political relationships between China and other countries just sort of dissolve, right? You know, paying attention to what my friends in China are saying, what they're consuming in media about, you know, what is going on in the US, what is going on in their own countries, and just the walls of understanding and perspective that are just being strengthened and strengthened and strengthened through exactly what's happening right now.

And, you know, I kind of, I sort of wonder, almost like, what should the objective be? You know, in terms of how humanity coexists. I mean, you know, in the naivete of youth, kind of thought of democracy as sort of the project to stitch it all together, right? We're all going to kind of come to a similar way of looking at ourselves, looking at the world we live in, looking at this is a sensible way of kind of, you know, mediating questions and conflicts. And we're all going to get there eventually, right? And so we'll kind of interbe that way. And it feels like in the totality of the complexity of the present and how we're all making sense of it, it's another dimension of reality that we don't live in at the moment. But I don't know. Now I'm just rambling. I wonder where we go from here.

I think, Scott, Michael, you're both in the United States, and I suppose the first step is just as a political project in the United States. It seems like that's a pretty big... We all want to be like Mike.

Michael We sure did a good job pushing that.

Chris I grew up with that. It's so convoluted now. I actually don't know where to look, even just globally. What are we aspiring toward?

Michael Well, I mean, I would say Denmark, but they just demolished Christiana, right? So like, I mean, that's a really good, I mean, and to me, that's the thing is like, you know, as an American, I'm thinking about this in terms of, you know, how do we, what kind of radical reform of policing is required? You know, for me, this has always been the question about oversight and at what level is oversight performed? Because obviously, you know, You know, if you're if you're a cop and you're going to intervene on a domestic dispute, you need to have some sort of it would help immensely if you had some understanding of the family that you're getting involved in, you know, and so police that are handling, you know, you know, a massive jurisdiction. Thank you so much for having me. If someone's having a hard time on an illicit substance, probably the worst thing you can do is call the police or call an ambulance, unless it's absolutely required, because that could mean enormous costs incurred to that individual. In some cases, horrible, horrible malpractice outcomes, as well as legal entanglements for both them and for the event itself.

You know, it can it can literally kill the party. And so, you know, when you think about policing, it's this question of to bring it back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this call. Like, are there enough levels at which oversight and modular decision making are being built into the system? Or are we just like slapping one blanket policy down on all of these specific cases? And in most cases, the guy just needs a glass of water and maybe a back rub. You know, he does not need to be put in an ambulance or a police car, you know?

Chris I came to the exact same place as I was listening to you. As I kind of think back five minutes ago to the question I was struggling with, I was trying to make this leap from the individual to the world. And I actually think that if one is looking for kind of what's the answer, what does one start with? I think it is the kind of restoration of this middle layer. Where at least that becomes a kind of social milieu where we can, you know, empty our pockets of this stuff and kind of put it on the table together and sort of talk around it. And as I think about it, you know, it's not just that, you know, the neighborhood associations are gone. I mean, you know, our mediascape, social media, it is kind of the mass and the individual. There are so few public spaces that are just kind of for the public to encounter one another and figure, kind of navigate one another. That's a sort of rich complexity of the us. And if we had that, then I think we would have more of a sense of a place to bring these doubts and these questions.

And it does occur to me as I think about in that framework of are we missing a middle layer, that that would also be where the scientist and the layperson would find one another. You've got a big bureaucracy saying, okay, this is what it has to be. And me, the individual, okay, I guess I'm stuck at home. And they're kind of missing that kind of middle layer where we sit down together and talk about the implications of that, the consequences of that. Maybe the reality that we are such a sparse community that we probably can suffer to be more relaxed about our distancing earlier, or we are such a compressed community. We've got so many vulnerable people, but despite you doing that, we can't. That level of granularity, to some extent, maybe the best way to navigate it is simply to embody it.

Michael There's one more analogy I'd like to throw into this.

Chris Yeah, you've got room for one more podcast.

Michael Just one more, that's it. I haven't talked about this on a podcast yet, to my knowledge, but I think about this in terms of, you know, as a musician, I think about this in terms of there are kind of three different contexts. You know, you can call them complicated, complex, and chaotic. You know, that's sort of the formal way of talking about these. But it's like at one scale, you have a symphony orchestra where every musician is looking at the conductor, you know, which might be like the president or the pope or the, you know, the... The Attorney General or whatever. And everyone's reading off the same sheet music. And that's fine when the environment is changing slowly enough that the sheet music is not going to change. And you can orchestrate. That's the economy of scale, where everyone can efficiently collaborate in a large body in that way. But if the spatio-temporal scale of the musical collaboration shrinks, And things pick up. You have a jazz ensemble at that middle layer where you're only paying attention to the four other people in your band. And you're reading each other's cues. And you're able to improvise together that way. And maybe you're working off a set of chord changes, like a standard. You have the basic structure, but you're able to move and you're able to flock. Thank you so much.

And that's even in that strategy doesn't plug into a symphony orchestra in the same way. And so it's about like, again, it's about how fast are things changing? You know, if you're trying to play the music of this moment and you're trying to play along with it in a way that is consonant, meaning that, you know, there's a low there's a low energy investment in, you know, you're not it's low friction, right? You're not you're not playing the wrong notes. Then if you're just in the midst of a completely turbulent mass of stuff, you can throw the dice, but you're not going to be able to cohere. You're not going to be able to row together with other people doing that. And then, you know, likewise, I feel like the fluidity of that mesoscopic middle layer that you're referencing a moment ago, Chris, the jazz ensemble, I think that that's kind of where we are in a lot of ways now.

But again, there are scales at which Each of us is playing in a symphony, is playing in a jazz ensemble, and is just doing an air guitar solo in your bedroom at any given time. And it's important that you know where you are with respect to each of those if you don't want to be bumped out of your club, as it were.

Scott Well, friends, we've said it all.

Chris I think it's all or nothing for the three of us. It's all or nothing today, right? It's all or nothing today.

Scott Well, Michael, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This is episode, what, 33, Chris?

Chris Is it? I have no idea. I don't know. I don't know. Numbers are your responsibility, man.

Scott Yeah, no. One of my podcasts is like... Thanks a lot. Thanks so much.