On: Exponentials, Economics, and Ecology
Transmission Series Ep. 6
Episode: 32
Date: May 12, 2020
Evolutionary biologist.
Review of 5 Transmission Essays.
- Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West on understanding cities to respond to pandemics
- Eric Maskin on mechanism design for the market
- Pamela Yeh and Ian MacGregor-Fors on studying wildlife in empty cities
- Sidney Redner on exponential growth processes
- David Wolpert on SARS-CoV-2 and Landauer’s bound
Key Takeaways
- Complex systems.
- Compress and accelerate what was already there.
- Higher variation in outcomes (exponential differences).
- Harder to predict outcomes.
- Harder to intervene.
- Increased uncertainty.
Key Concepts
David Wolpert on SARS-CoV-2 and Landauer’s bound
- There are energetic limits to computation.
- Logical manipulation of information generates heat (Landauer Principle).
- Heat is dissipated into the environment.
- Puts a limit on how computation: “stuff” gets (too) hot.
- The corona virus circumvents limitation by “outsourcing” computation.
- Hijacks the machinery of the host to do all the work of copying the virus.
- Extended phenotype: most of the virus is not the virus…
- The host contributes most of the machinery needed for replication.
- Other (outsourcing) examples:
- A spider and its web.
- Technological “hyper-objects”:
- iPhone is small, server backbone supporting it is huge.
- Many “costs” are out of sight.
- Hidden costs, externalities.
- Unclear where to draw boundaries around individuals or individual objects.
- Depends on observed scale in terms of time and space.
- Something to do with causality and control.
- Where does the center of causality extend to, the point of no control.
Sidney Redner on exponential growth processes
- Exponential growth.
- Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.
- Variation in initial conditions leads to substantial differences in outcomes.
- Tiny measurement errors or differences are amplified massively.
- Amplifies uncertainty.
- Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.
- Exposure to more complex, exponential systems = more volatility = more variation in outcomes = more uncertainty = more difficult to deal with.
- Difficult to control or influence.
Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West on understanding cities to respond to pandemics
- History of humanity has largely been rural.
- Shaped our institutions and intuitions.
- Now, majority lives in cities.
- Speeds everything up.
- General theme: compression and acceleration.
- Cities are machines that drive scaling laws for many socioeconomic quantities.
- Wages, wealth, disease transmission.
- Makes it difficult to predict or find points of intervention.
- Difficult to integrate across the many dimensions of these networks.
Eric Maskin on mechanism design for the market
- What to do when market efficiency is compromised.
- Game theory.
- Agents consider strategic options associated with different pay-offs.
- Solution is the strategy with the highest pay-off.
- Investigate accessibility and stability of solutions.
- Mechanism design.
- Turns game theory on its head.
- Appropriate strategy when certain information is missing.
- Starts with the solution, then looks for strategies and pay-offs needed to get there.
- Design a system (voting, auction) to achieve the desired solution.
- Example – dividing a cake among 2 people:
- How to avoid tragedy of the commons?
- One person cuts, the other person chooses.
- General principle: outsourcing the utility function to others.
- Align the individual incentive with the global social welfare function.
- Provide an incentive to both buyer and seller to do the right thing.
- Over time, regulatory coordination may emerge.
- Top-down control can emerge in self-organizing systems.
- Aligning incentives for various agents within the system.
- Constraining the landscape of possible outcomes.
- See Complexity — David Krakauer, Part 3 on the role of internal regulatory constraints.
- Top-down control can emerge in self-organizing systems.
- Game theory.
Pamela Yeh and Ian MacGregor-Fors on studying wildlife in empty cities
- How long does it take for species to adapt?
- Corona virus changes the environment for many species.
- How do species adapt when humans are no longer around.
- See Complexity — David Krakauer, Part 3 on the role of external regulatory constraints.