COMPLEXITY

In the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast I was recently listening to an episode where the host, Michael Garfield, mentioned as an aside that imposter syndrome was something virtually everyone at the Institute deals with, all the time.

Given the intellectual firepower of those involved, that's both disheartening (it's something you never get over) and encouraging (even they have to deal with it).

Tracked it down: Episode 55, James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design, March 11, 2021.

You just spoke to something that seems to come up a lot in the context of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research, which is how it creates a chronic endemic imposter syndrome. That's a thing that I remember the SFI research undergraduates were [having a] very lively discussion about the fact. And they were like, "Oh, the senior faculty were coming in and [saying] no, no, all of us deal with that all the time". You can only be an expert in so many things and you're living in this big complex world.

https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/55/transcript

Audio: https://chtbl.com/track/G41498/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/812a... (quote comes after 54:30)

The podcast itself is excellent and strongly recommended.

Me? I've been faking imposter syndrome for over a quarter century.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply one side as mentally ill. I'll walk it back a bit: If there's an illness, both poles have responsibility. And maybe only ill in the sense that they will break the whole together. Due to historic districting and balance of power in the USA at least, the illness on the right seems to be "winning" in the political arena there. But it'd be a comparable powderkeg if the far left got their people in without laying a foundation for consensus-building. The conservative right doesn't have as much culture of consensus-building in its DNA imho, so it's hard to look to them for any hope of resolution to the crisis of social distance.

Bah, sorry, this is like a "drinks in bar" level of uff-the-cuff conversation on my part. Your reply was wonderful though :)

> Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Fwiw, there's a really rad Santa Fe Institute podcast that addresses that very thing, which I'm listening to right now. tl;dr - we're all terribly biased but mostly just about people we DON'T have connection to, while we're FANTASTICALLY great integrators and estimators of even small nuances in the social fabrics that we're directly in conversation with. https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9-U7UI7GsP

> debating what "life" is as a general concept outside of biology is not a profound issue

I'm not sure this is true. I think I disagree with much of your neat frame-setting here. For example, some of my favourite recent podcasts from complexity science involve clever folks like Sara Imari Walker discussing "life" as what emerges from a dense information well.[1] These questions are not just simple inventories.

But yes, I do agree that this may be just "a language issue". But there are other streams of thought that are actively promoting language into a more respectable realm of complexity science, where "just a language issue" actually downplays what may be going on in that "resolving" process of language itself[2] (h/t Nicole Creanza, whose research in birdsong & human cultural evolution is profiled)

tl;dr - I would argue that these questions are "profound" all the way down, if we start looking at it in the right way.

[1]: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/40-ImRdTdBt

[2]: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/22-yTXhvGCS

> The big question isn't how simple molecules (building blocks) come about. [...] but there is nothing in between the primordial chemical soup and the simplest life forms.

There's a view that the early evolution of "life" involved metabolic cycles that were not yet bounded in cells, but perhaps in increasingly constrained geological boundaries. So for example, early precursors to the Krebs Cycle may have started within oceans, or perhaps some arrangement of pools and geysers or other geological features. So in essence, early life was bounded not in membranes, but within the flows of rock and air and heat of the atmosphere itself.

For more citable references to this stuff, this podcast episode from the Santa Fe Institute touches on it: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/40

Sara Imari Walker has some REALLY interesting things to say about life and information: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/40

> if you want to understand the laws of gravitation, then you go and study black holes because you have a very intense gravitational field there. And you can understand and probe gravity very well there.

> If you want to understand the laws of information and how information operates in the physical world, then you should go and study a living thing. Because that's where information actually is at its most dense or most intense.