I do like it when researchers try to connect the deep ideas within their work to broader more general systems, but caution is warranted to the optimism. This a

I do like it when researchers try to connect the deep ideas within their work to broader more general systems, but caution is warranted to the optimism. This article is the kind of formal analogy that inspired/drove much of the marketing appeal of the Santa Fe Institute back in the 1980s. It's honestly always pretty fun, but the devil is usual in the details here (as is usual in making anything "work", such as self-organized criticality [1] which if you enjoyed this article you will also probably enjoy!). As just one example to make this point more concrete (LOL), the article mentions uncritically that "more complex ecosystems are more stable", but over half a century ago in 1973 Robert May wrote a book called "Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems" [2] explaining (very accessibly!) how this is untrue for the easiest ideas of "complex" and "stable". In more human terms, some ideas of "complex" & "stable" can lead you astray, as has been appearing in the relatively nice HN commentary on this article here. Perhaps less shallowly, things go off the rails fast once you have both multiple metrics (meaning no "objective Objective") and competing & intelligent agents (meaning the system itself has a kind of intrinsic complexity, often swept under the rug by a simplistic thinking that "people are all the same"). I think this whole topic folds itself into "Humanity Complete" (after NP-complete.. a kind of infectious cluster of Wicked Problems [3]) like trust/delegation do [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality [2] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691088617/stability-and-complexity-in-model-ecosystems https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691088617/st... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem