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The people with the most accurate models of others tend to have diverse social networks
Summary:
To correct for this handicap, we need to listen to the oppressed in the population.
This includes laborers, students, and others who are usually not given a political voice. By expanding our social networks to include more diverse perspectives, policymakers can make better decisions based on a deeper understanding of societal trends and people's desires.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But it sounds like this gives us a really clear pointer on how to correct for this handicap. And that we really ought to be like, perhaps when it comes time to make decisions on behalf of everyone, we should really be listening to whomever the oppressed are in that population. We should be really paying attention, for example, to laborers and students and people that are ordinarily not historically, not given a lot of political voice. And what you're saying, yeah, it's in other words, what we need to do is broader our social networks include in our social networks, those people who are typically not there. So if the policymakers who are making these important decisions should know as many different people as possible. And we show in related studies that people who have most diverse social circles are also best able to predict societal trends and to understand how the overall population lives and What people want.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Why Bigger Animals Live Longer: The Relationship between Size, Energy, and Longevity
Summary:
The larger an animal is, the more efficient it becomes in terms of energy consumption.
This is because the self-similar fractal structure of larger animals allows them to save energy. Bigger animals require less energy proportionally to run their bodies due to the massive amount of tissue per gram or per cell.
As a result, bigger animals experience less wear and tear and live longer than smaller animals.
The reason for less wear and tear is that bigger animals use less energy and create less damage, reducing entropy.
This principle can also be observed in machines, where those subjected to less stress and driven at lower revs per minute tend to last longer.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So that's why we don't need to double our metabolism when we double our weight. It's that fractal like self similarity that allows us to get these essentially efficient savings in the amount of energy we need. So it's better to be bigger, isn't it? Because you don't need as much energy proportionally to run yourself. Correct.
Speaker 1
So you need massive tissue per gram of tissue or per cell. You need less energy, the bigger you are. And by the way, this has huge consequences throughout all aspects of biology and life. And maybe one just to tie it back to the beginning of this discussion where we started out by talking about aging and mortality. This means that the bigger you are, the less hard your cell is working. The bigger you are, there's less wear and tear the longer you live systematically. So this is the origin of why bigger things live longer than smaller things.
Speaker 2
And why is there less wear and tear if you're bigger?
Speaker 1
You're using less energy and creating less entropy. That is you're creating less damage the bigger you are because simply you're using much less energy if you have an engine, an automobile and you insist on racing it at 10,000 revs per Minute every time you drive it, I can assure you that car will not live as long as a car that's driven by a little old lady or a little old man like me who keeps the revs at about two or three Thousand revs per minute. So you know, cars and machines last much longer, the less stress you put on them.
Scaling 2 — You and I Are Fractals
Simplifying Complexity
Ambiguity in Communication is Both a Feature and a Bug
Summary:
In 1984, Eisenberg proposed that ambiguity in communication is important and influential.
This idea suggests that being too clear can limit interpretation and hinder coalition-building. Ambiguity can be used to evade accountability, but it is also a general principle of communication.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
It's Eisenberg in 1984 in communication monographs or something. It's this great rambling paper and this idea has been massively influential to me, but he's basically arguing that it would seem like the point of communication should be clarity, To be as clear as possible. For me to say, I mean this and you do know exactly what I mean and that's the goal and ambiguity is therefore a bad thing. He argues that actually no ambiguity is a really important thing and other people have expanded on this. Now the way I think about this is like a blend of Eisenberg and then other people who've come a bit later, but that in a lot of ways if you're trying to get let's say a coalition, you don't Want to say this is exactly what our goal is and this is what we're trying to do. You want to use vague terms so that a bunch of people can sort of map whatever they think that the goal is onto and say that's consistent. It also leads to a reduction in accountability because after you do something and someone says, you said you were going to do this and you say, nah-ah listen to what I said, it's consistent With what I did because what I said was ambiguous. So it's pernicious in a way too. It's used nefariously in a lot of ways by let's say politicians and other kinds of leaders to avoid accountability, but it's also just a general principle of communication I think.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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