EMBRACING COMPLEXITY The Santa Fe Institute

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FI’s story begins well before 1984 though. After the Second World War, a number of key personnel associated with the Los Alamos National Labs and the Manhattan Project found themselves still living in New Mexico. One such man was George Cowan, who would also serve as a science advisor to Reagan, found Los Alamos National Bank, and support Santa Fe’s budding opera company. In the 1950s, Cowan was invited to give a talk about social physics at the Aspen Institute, but came away feeling as though no one understood what he was trying to say. “It was his two-culture epiphany,” explains Krakauer. “He found it was incredibly difficult to present the value of ideas that span the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. George asked himself what he could do to address that challenge.” Later in the Reagan Whitehouse, Cowan advised on thorny problems like the environment, which encompasses disciplines ranging from ecology and economics to sociology and technology. Eventually, Cowan aggregated a group of individuals to address these kinds of multi-faceted issues, and the Santa Fe Institute was formed.

Dr. Krakauer likes to divide the history of SFI into five epochs.

The first epoch is the founders – accomplished Nobel laureates with tremendous reputations who made SFI possible because they had proven their value to the world in very traditional ways. The next epoch is what Krakauer calls the mavericks: “They came in and suggested to the world a new way of thinking. It got amazing interest; tons of books were written about SFI and several businesses became interested.” The next generation, whom Krakauer terms the mavens, were professors in universities across the world who felt the mavericks had ideas that could transform their own fields. It generated a new wave of interest in SFI, extending its faculty across the globe.

By Emmaly Wiederholt

Big data and the internet ushered in SFI’s fourth era: the age of empiricism. “Open data and journals made it possible for theoretical ideas to be tested in real-world empirical situations,” Krakauer describes. Now SFI is in what Krakauer considers its fifth phase, where the ongoing rigor and empiricism is reconnected to the revolutionary ideas of the mavericks. “As you mature and become more successful, you become more complacent and conservative. SFI has grown and matured, but we have to reinject risk and radicalism into data and empiricism,” he observes.

Dr. David Krakauer likens the founding story of the Santa Fe Institute to a mythic epic. As president, he’s naturally predisposed to thinking about the research and education center up Hyde Park Road as such, though as he gets talking, it becomes clear SFI’s story is the stuff of legend. Founded in 1984, the private non-profit takes pride in its cross-discipline and rigorous approach to attempting to solve the world’s most complex issues.

Of the many examples of SFI’s efficacy, one important foundational project was working on networks of infectious diseases. “When AIDS was considered to be a real crisis, SFI researchers worked on the mathematics of the epidemic, taking tools and ideas that had been developed in math and physics and applying them to public health,” Krakauer explains. The project ended up being hugely successful: “There isn’t a health agency in the world that doesn’t now employ the extensive use of mathematical models.”

EMBRACING COMPLEXITY

The Santa Fe Institute

But how does SFI actually work? Broad areas of research start with a free-for-all meeting with all the practitioners and scholars involved. Out of that, subgroups are distilled, and out of those form working groups, which typically consist of 10 members in each group. The groups meet at SFI over the course of many months or even years, generating papers, organizing meetings, and sometimes even spinning off companies and products.

“We consider success a complex system in itself, and we define it on many scales,” Krakauer observes. “If the participants at the first big meeting find it qualitatively illuminating, that’s a first measure of success. The second measure is the desire to engage in sustained collaboration. The third measure is: do the collaborations produce something we can measure? This can include literature in publications, companies developing programs, etc. Each community that participates has different levels of success metrics. I guess the biggest measure of success is the transformation of a landscape, whether it’s educational, cultural or in business.”

Another of SFI’s success stories involved financial markets.

Instead of using abstract economical frameworks, SFI researchers started writing computer models of individual behavior in markets. “A little bit like Sim City, but rigorously informed by what we know about human decision-making,” describes Krakauer. The inquiry led to a number of spinoff companies, of which perhaps the best known is Prediction Company, which took the insights from computational models and applied them to investment strategies and to predicting events like financial meltdowns.

SFI has no tenure, departments or disciplines. “The problems we’re facing in the world require an unprecedented level of intellectual diversity. We need groups that span the entire

academy and beyond. We bring together whatever team it takes to have a crack at solving a particular problem,” Krakauer says.

For example, last year SFI began a collaboration with the company Red Bull. This July, a meeting will be held at SFI’s campus on the limits of human performance in both the mental and physical dimensions. “If you look at the history of Olympic events, there’s been a consistent increase in performance over time. Conversely, if you look at chess players, they’re getting better too. Where’s the limit?” Krakauer poses. Red Bull and SFI are bringing together athletes, neuroscientists, anthropologists, etc. to start unraveling this question.

SFI does not call itself a think tank; it’s not beholden to any one way of working. It prefers a bottom-up philosophy. In fact, Krakauer receives many letters of research proposals from individuals, businesses and agencies alike. Once an area of research is proposed and rigorously considered, SFI’s worldwide community is probed for interest through a series of advisory groups.

“SFI is radically non-political,” Krakauer maintains. “Our agenda is reason. We don’t avoid problems because they’re complex. People have a lot to learn from each other, and you can’t really de-couple economics from health or the environment, for example.” It’s this embrace of complexity that has set SFI apart from its inception, and will hopefully guide it for many years to come.

To learn more, visit SantaFe.edu.

ABOVE: David Krakauer PHOTO BY Minesh Bacrania