📚 Quinn's Highlights

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The Map is not the Territory Summary: Humans often confuse maps with territories, despite evidence from various disciplines. We wrongly assume that what we measure is what matters, but our values may not have quantifiable metrics. Biometric data can oversimplify complex discussions on health. This conundrum becomes more significant when considering governance on a larger scale. How do we count and operate a nation state wisely? Can social science inform smarter political economies? We must escape the false clarity of information systems that lack collective wisdom. Transcript: Speaker 3 There are maps and there are territories and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know What we should measure and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn't even always have a metric and even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can include the other factors that determine health or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions Of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively. What should we count to wisely operate a nation state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape this seductive but false clarity of systems that reign information but do not enhance collective wisdom?

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Layers of Information Continually Accumulate *Within* Objects Over Time Summary: Information can be shared between objects as evidence of a common history, indicating that objects are deeply rooted in time. As the biosphere has evolved, it has increased the layers of information processing and abstraction, resulting in the generation of objects that are deeper in time. Consequently, some features of these objects appear less physical and more abstract. Each individual accumulates information over time, making parts of them brand new and parts billions of years old. Transcript: Speaker 1 And so information we talked about has a sort of interesting property that seems very abstract. And it seems to be that information can move between objects, like we're speaking the same language, but when you can share information between objects like you and I speaking, what That is is evidence of a common history. These things that we call information and abstractions, I think, are just evidence that these objects are actually deep in time. So things look more abstract, the deeper and timely are. And it's one of the reasons I think that as the biosphere has evolved over time, it's increased the layers of information processing and abstraction that it's built. But really what it is is you're generating these objects that are deeper and deeper in time. And so some of their features look less and less physical because they're not physical now, they're physical in the structure that's extended in time. Speaker 2 You have a lovely line in one of your papers where you say that each of us are our own age, but in many ways, we're thousands and thousands of years old because we have accumulated all that Information instead of genes to be who we are today. Speaker 1 That's right. So parts of you are brand new. And parts of us are all brand new from this conversation because we've exchanged information and generated new structures. Parts of us are billions of years old.

Big Ideas — Time

Simplifying Complexity

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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