Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

When it comes to social change, two questions immediately present themselves: What kind of change do we want to see happen? And, how do we bring it about? These questions are distinct but related; there's not much point in spending all of our time wanting change that won't possibly happen, or working for change that wouldn't actually be good. Addressing such issues lies at the intersection of philosophy, political science, and social dynamics. Sahar Heydari Fard looks at all of these issues through the lens of complex systems theory, to better understand how the world works and how it might be improved. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/18/269-sahar-heydari-fard-on-complexity-justice-and-social-dynamics/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Sahar Heydari Fard received a Masters in applied economics and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati. She is currently an assistant professor in philosophy at the Ohio State University. Her research lies at the intersection of social and behavioral sciences, social and political philosophy, and ethics, using tools from complex systems theory. Web site Ohio State web page PhilPeople profile Google Scholar publications

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Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the great things about having a podcast is that I am not a university. In particular, I do not have departments. I do not have to worry about hiring people. I can just talk to people about ideas, whatever the ideas might be, as long as I think that they're interesting. So as a result of that, I don't need to worry about which department somebody fits in. You know that I'm back now, as a real professor at Johns Hopkins. When I was at Caltech, I was a research professor, which was great for doing research, but you're sort of less integrated into the wider university life than I am now. So not only am I a professor now, but I am both a professor in philosophy and physics, and I have attachments to other parts of the university, et cetera. So I'm thinking a lot about these issues of how people fit in. And it's so frustrating, so annoying that some people might be brilliant scholars, but don't fit easily into any one department. Here at Mindscape,

we don't need to worry about that. And today's guest is a wonderful example. Sahar Haydari Fard is a philosopher. She is in the philosophy department at Ohio State University. No doubt about that. Her work touches, as you'll hear in the episode, on ideas put forward by people like Kaelin O'Connor and Elizabeth Anderson, who are also both philosophers who were previous guests, But it also touches on ideas that are similar to what Herb Gintes talked about. And Herb was also difficult to fit into a category, but if anything, he'd be called an economist. And a lot of what Sahar thinks about is political science, justice, you know, political kinds of philosophy. You'll hear names like Hobbs and Hume come up in our conversation.

People like John Rawls and others have thought a lot about what is a just society. So the specific angle that Sahar brings to this is, guess what? Complexity theory, even more so than people like Kalin O'Connor or Elizabeth Anderson. She's not only thinking about society and its dynamics, but she's explicitly doing so from the lens of complex systems research. Clearly, if anything is going to be complex in the world, all of society is going to be pretty complex, right? And there's a question you're perfectly willing to ask. willing to wonder about if you're a complexity theory skeptic, which is do these techniques that go under the rubric of complex systems research have any specific applicability to the individual fields, right? If society is complex, if the economy is complex, if the internet is complex, but also if an organism is complex, if an individual cell is complex, are there really features that are common to these that are worth thinking about versus just thinking about each individual thing in its own right. And I think that the answer that comes out of, the conversation you're about to listen to,

is that there is something gained by thinking about society as a complex system that we can learn about from thinking about complex systems in general. So we'll think about phase transitions, we'll think about game theory, we'll think about networks, and that not only, helps you analyze the structure of society, which maybe is a perfectly obvious thing if you think this thing might work. The interesting thing is it helps you philosophize about what a good society would be like. Thinking about society as a complex system, as, you know, So Harrell will try to make the case for it, and I think that she's convinced me anyway, makes you think about what society should shoot for in a different way. It's maybe in retrospect not surprising, the better you understand.

something, the more likely you are to have good ideas about how to optimize that thing. So whatever your personal values are, thinking about society accurately might suggest ways to achieve those personal values in the organization of society. And the specific fact that society is a complex system will, as you will see, I don't want to give it away, but as you will see, we'll make certain suggestions about that. So, so glad that I'm not a university and I don't need to worry about fitting people into departments. I can just talk to people because they're interesting. With that, let's go.

Sahar Hadari Fard, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you for having, Misha. So, you know, I have to start with a conversation that we had just a little while ago. We were at a workshop together. And I asked you if, as a philosopher who is thinking about society and political questions, do you ever collaborate with political scientists? And roughly speaking, you said yes, and in those collaborations, your job is to run the model, run the computer model of what they're thinking about. And it made me laugh because as a physicist who talks to philosophers, you know, I often let people know, you know, talking to philosophers is super useful, but you don't go to them to calculate a Feynman diagram.

So just to give us a teaser or an overview, how do you end up being the philosopher that people go to to run their computer simulations? Well, that's a lovely question. Thank you for starting with it. So the short answer is that perhaps because of the things that you have mentioned in your conversation with Kaling O'Connor in another episode of this podcast about just so stories. So the idea is that we have some assumptions about how society works based on those assumptions. we come up with some system for how things can be prevented from going very wrong or can be maintained in a stable functioning level. And then based on those assumptions, we also make a lot of prescriptions for what shouldn't be done or how can we make things more optimal or more effective.

And then it follows some normative claims about what is just, what is moral, what is fair, blah, blah. But those assumptions sometimes are faulty assumptions or assumptions that might come from our intuitions about our interactions at the local level in a very small scale. But it might not hold when you are relying on those assumptions at like a population level. Or when the population has like five times the size that philosophers who have been theorizing this could possibly imagine, right? And the modeling part comes in to test out that ideas, that if we start with those assumptions of how these interactions work and then expand the size, would those intuitions still be a reliable guide for us to know what we should do or how we should like make things the way that we wanted them or who should be the person who we prioritize their wantings or their needs in what way. That's actually a great answer because it's very—

That's a great answer. Because it parallels very nicely what happens between philosophy and physics, because physicists, as I very often say, just love to get the right answer. And they're very happy to get the right answer for the wrong reasons if it gives them the right answer. But then the problem with that is that when you extrapolate beyond the regime in which you know you get the right answer, your faulty reasoning comes to bite you a little bit. And in some sense, to oversimplify, you're saying same thing is true in political theory.

No, absolutely. But also, like when you started before, like, elaborate what the connection you're referring to between philosophy and physics, I was thinking about other kind of connections that have put physics in a place that does the modeling for philosophy, right? like not thinking about the Aristotelian way of like motion works or like the way that

we moved from analytic descriptions of the world to more like statistics friendly because you figure that like well there are details that you can just dismiss and is just like not helpful and you can talk about averages and they're not only better but also in some sense give you a better understanding of this like ontological structure of what you're talking about. Yeah. And then I think complexity is another big step that you're making that, oh, okay, so it is true that the analytic solutions might not give us everything. It is also true that like sometimes statistics or those averaging models are the best way

to cope up things. But sometimes you have this kind of like organized complexity in the middle that like, you cannot just like all the way jump in and say like, oh, I talk. about the average and then I've gathered everything that I wanted. And I think that's exactly what I do for philosophers or social scientists like political scientists to distinguish these and distinguish the tools that they're using to talk about each of. Well, that's also a great answer, I got to say, because physicists are a little bit nervous about complexity for exactly the reasons that you mentioned. They like

things where you can average things out. The classic example being getting fluid mechanics from a bunch of atoms, right? And then you just get still a very simple explanation at the end of the day, fluid mechanics. But complex systems are different. So we talked about this a lot on the podcast, but let's pretend we haven't. What is your personal way of thinking about what complexity is and why it's interesting? Why do you have to start with the hardest questions? They're all going to be hard. They're never going to get easy as we go. Well, the way that I'm thinking about complexity is a kind of phenomenon that has some sort of stability at the aggregate level. But that stability is not dependent on the homogenous components who have like the same kind of direction incentive property, however you're thinking about it.

So in the social world is like if you're thinking individuals as rational actors with like diverse incentives, if you don't want to think of them as rational actors, just think of them. as actors who are acting for diverse like reasons and diverse needs and diverse situations. But like at the same time, you see that like some kind of stability is emerging from this kind of many actor condition that some of them are more influential, some of them are less, but it requires coordination among so many different levels at so different individuals, at so many different levels to get that kind of stability. And with that, that you cannot have any explanation whatsoever.

You cannot just assume that like, this is just a unit, like the public opinion or political opinion. It just like occurs and happens to oscillate. I don't know why. You know, and you see that it oscillates like over time, sometimes in response to external stimuli,

but sometimes endogenously, sometimes because people are like reorienting their, political views or connections or who they're talking to, who they're trusting. And you see that kind of oscillation of time. And if you want to explain that kind of thing, it seems like, again, going back to individuals and their incentives is too much information. People do things for all sorts of reasons. You cannot take a survey of like everyone, why they're doing what they're doing.

But thinking of them as their average of the public opinion is too little information and give lost a lot. So the way that I'm thinking about complexity is first a phenomenon in which you have many actors that coordination among them is necessary to generate some level of stability. But you don't have any central organizer that is doing the work for you. You have something that people call emergence, the emergence of the stability that also constrains the behavior. Well, I'm going to become a broken record, but that was a great answer because It's very different. You're highlighting a different aspect of complexity than we've talked about before, this stability over time, right?

It reminds me of Erwin Schrodinger's little book. So you know Schrodinger, the physicist, wrote this little book called What is Life? And he has a line in there that answers the question, where he says life is something that keeps on moving long effort should have stopped. And no one pays attention to that line in the book where he actually answers the question in the title. but it is fascinating to me. And as a physicist, I'm trying to figure out where these come from. You have the luxury of saying, okay, I'm going to look at society. They're there.

And you want to sort of use the tools of complexity, I guess, to think about how that stability happens. And presumably, how it might change. They're not perfectly stable, like our current democracy, for example. That's true. And that's a very, very important point to think about that. like one way of thinking about stability is like that kind of average kind of mentality that is just like it's stable. I don't know.

Like, just let me explain what's going on. And like the kind of phenomenon that I'm seeking to explain in the world is the kind of phenomena that is stable. So I start from that assumption of a stability and then I can bring in some functional definitions or some other assumptions that like make the individuals perhaps a function of that stability at the social level or their property is a function of that. And then explain a lot of things, but then you want to incorporate change. And what happens is that the only way to conceptualize that is that we should burn everything to the ground and start from scratch to be

able to have change, right? The avenues for gradual change or even rapid change that is not revolutionary in a sense that it doesn't make us completely unstable, but help us to go from one equilibrium or relatively more stable state to the other another, or just have a stable situation that drifts over time or oscillates or have some other kind of dynamic behavior. But it's not like set in metaphysical stone that this is it and I prioritize this metaphysically and explain everything else based on this stability. And you see that in social theory, in political science, this a lot happens a lot because like when you recognize that there is some higher level of stability and you don't need to figure out how individuals interacted to generate this, then when you're trying to use that to theorize how change happens, you end up saying things that people don't want to do, like live through a revolution or make it possible. or love afterwards in a way that I did.

Right, right, right. Okay, good. So that brings in another aspect of your work, which is that you do want to make the world a better place or at least theorize about how to make the world a better place, right? So I just hope the world becomes a better place, but my work is not going to help it along. So that is an important distinction.

But it's nice because what you just said is, you know, the theory of change aspect of it is important. It reminds us of, you know, punctuated equilibrium in biology where population is doing pretty well, but then a mutation comes along that makes them do even better, and suddenly there's a pretty rapid change. That's the kind of thing, I'm going to suggest, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that complexity theory is geared up to talk about in maybe ways that other theories are not. Absolutely. But I think on top of that, the complexity theory can help us think about how

punctuated equilibrium happens. Sometimes, given that, there are so many other interrelated things that, like, would keep that equilibrium very, very stable. So sometimes, like, this comes up in discussions about economics. People talk about, like, norm change in the same sense of punctuated equilibrium. So you have, like, the practice of footbinding. It started because a king in, I don't know, somewhere, like, very much liked one of his. is dancers biting her foot in a certain way. And then that, like, became a way for other women to make themselves desirable for either the king or the people who are close to the king.

And then it became like a form of, like, status to have, like, a wife or a partner or whatever who or a concubine, who has that property. And then incentivized women to do that more and more often to be able to, like, marry up with a lot of like income inequality or like wealth gap or whatever feudal systems deal with. It became like some method for people to marry their kid up, right? So you have like a stable situation that like a parent is stuck because if they do this, well, they're hurting their child. The child cannot walk anymore. It's very painful. It's very like I don't know whether you've seen pictures of it. It's like horrendous. But if they don't do that to their child, their child doesn't have the possible, their daughter doesn't have the possibility to marry.

And in an environment in which there's no other way for these women to support themselves other than marrying, well, you have harmed that child. So, like, everyone has incentive to keep things in place. But, like, centuries passes, and it's now a practice that everyone does. So you don't even do this to marry up or down, but it's just like a sense. stable feature of the culture. Locked in. Yeah. And then people all realizing that this is a problematic thing, like we shouldn't do this, but no one has the incentive to deviate from it. But what happened is that like a group of people who are wealthier get together and sign a pledge that they

not going to let their child marry to a person who has done this to their foot or would not do that to their own children. And then it kind of had a trickle effect. overnight or if not overnight or a very short period of time that practice kind of stopped that only stopped by it was like a negative view of those who do do that but like this is a situation in which the equilibrium is kind of separate or decomposable from many other things it like exists kind of in isolation even though it feeds into the marriage market and income inequality and so on so but there are so many other kind of equilibrium states that their stability is not just because people repeat them or they don't have incentive to change, but because they're so interrelated to other social norms and like social practices or laws or whatever, that like even if you change them overnight, other social practices reproduce or recreate this kind of phenomena all over again. I'm coding this from Elizabeth Anderson, who has this example of school segregation. that like in some measures, at least in some parts of the country,

school segregation is worse than what it was in 1960s. Not because the law, like, is generating it, but because the law or like the practice of doing that was interrelated to so many other things like taxing for houses, how funding for schools come about, where people live, like many, many other things that have been, you take the law out of the equation or make it even illegal to do that and impose a cost on people who want to segregate schools.

Other factors recreate and reintroduce the very same phenomena all over again, right? So that kind of punctuated equilibrium is not going to help us completely understand how you can get out of the situation, right? Like at the end, it is a punctuated equilibrium. But like when you take account of those interaction, it seems like you are, if you think of like a landscape of the choices people make, it's like creating a path in that, a new path in that landscape that allow people to come and use that path to get to another point. Elizabeth Anderson, of course, another former Minescape guest.

I do appreciate you name-checking all the former guests. No, that's very interesting because, so just to back up, you use the word landscape. That's a word that is used sometimes by evolutionary biologists, although I know that others worry about it. They always worry, people worry. And the whole issue there is that for the biological case, for natural selection, it's not teleological, right? It's just the mutations are random. and if you are separated by a barrier from, or a valley, I suppose, the biologist would say, from an even better equilibrium, it might be very difficult to get there.

I think what you're pointing at is that we humans are supposed to be better than that. We can see that there's a better state there, but there's still a collective action problem, right? Like maybe it would be better if we all went there, but if one of us goes there, it's still bad, what can we do about that? lovely question so i think the collective action problem is serious i i agree that it relies at least in its traditional form it relies on very restrictive assumptions uh in terms of self-interest rationality like perfect information and so forth but um even when you drop those things uh you see that in biological systems who don't have any of that you see similar kind of phenomena um and at the

time, you see that groups do have problems to act collectively. So if you just think that, oh, we're not all rational or we have other altruistic motives, still there should be some mechanism to explain why we fail to do things that even collectively we realize that they're beneficial. So we know that like this alternative is good for us, but like you have trouble getting there. And sometimes that comes with lack of assurance. I'm not sure that if I go, everyone else will follow, and this is costly for me. For instance, like, if I don't do, I don't bind my child's food,

and everyone else keeps doing what they're doing, and the age passes, well, my child has to pay the price for this. So if I want to be self-interested, I'm better off doing something that I actually don't want to do, namely finding my foot. But the way that we do it in ways that doesn't require, like you mentioned, that we are better than biological organisms, I think it's partly true.

But at the same time, the complexity of the problem that we are trying to solve is very high. So it has many variables, and these variables are highly interdependent, right? So regardless of how smart we are, it is possible that we're going to get it wrong. And it's possible that we try to do something and not everyone in the society will follow generates like counter movements or backlash or so many other layers of complication that can nest things up. But when you're looking at the history of movements or changes that happen and kind of rapidly, not overnight necessarily, but like reasonably fast in like a decade or so, you see that like public opinion, people's practices, or many things relevant to that change,

is that you generate counterpublics. Okay. You generate an environment in which deviating from what's the standard or the equilibrium or the norm is less costly for individuals. Ah. And those counterpublics, you can experiment and see whether this alternative way of people, living has any plausibility and does it work or not. And then if it works, well, people around you might be motivated to follow and copy. And if you have some other means to destabilize the equilibrium in the rest of society,

then if this is working, it will bring a lot of people in. I'm saying a lot of abstract things. I'm happy to break it down, but I just wanted to give a general picture. of what I'm thinking. Now that's great because are we thinking here of the existence of subcultures within a diverse society or sort of giving us ways to experiment? I know that, you know, in a federal system for a government, that's supposed to be what states are supposed to do, right?

Individual states experiment. They're the laboratories of democracy. It sometimes works. It sometimes doesn't. But, you know, we're all philosophers here. We're thinking about what is conceivable in principle. So is that basically what you have in mind? Do you have examples?

Kind of, but in a more informal way, right? And a more fluid way because when you create states, you're also creating very outcome-oriented ways. Or like you're changing people's incentive when they are participating. that kind of collective thinking. But sometimes these things, these kind of change when it comes at the cultural level or like we want to change practices that are ingrained in everyday people's lives, well, you might need their input.

Fair enough. So you cannot just like ask them to vote and tell you whether it works or not. So you've gone this far, we've gone this far without actually. saying the words game theory. But it sounds like they're behind some things that you're saying. We mentioned Kailin O'Connor, and she definitely uses game theory. Herb Gintes was also in the podcast, and he does it. So when we're talking about these equilibria, these interactions, is it useful to?

And do we use game theory to model them? Absolutely. Because the thing here is that we are talking about a lot of interactions and the way that people need to cooperate with each other in order to achieve certain goals or have some outcome. And game theory is a very helpful way to formalize and simplify those interactions in a way that we can see at least how these dynamics can work by gamifying them in a sense. So like you're thinking that like, well, when you're talking about, let's say, discrimination

or group-based disadvantages, what we're talking about is that like we're observing that like in a consistent way people are getting the short end of the stick in their social interactions or there's some like accumulation of disadowing or clustering of disadvantage or clustering of some social problems that otherwise these things don't have similar-ish mechanisms to be clustered around the same group of people. And when you want to think about how is it even possible to be ending up in this kind of situation, game theory is a very useful way of thinking about the basics. Do you want me to say more about what kind of game base is this?

I do, I do. I think that, you know, everyone has heard the phrase game theory. Some people know what the prisoner's dilemma is, but some people might even know what Nash Equilibria are and things like that. But yeah, to make a little bit more specific example would be great. So a game like a prisoner's dilemma is composed of some main components. one is the players who are interacting and for better or worse we often talk about two players I think it's a it's a problem it's a limitation yeah yeah but like it does the job done for

at least a big class of problems that it's helpful to maintain it so they have two players coming to a table and they have strategies that they can choose or they can, they have choices, let's say, or how they want to interact with the other person or the other person. And there are some outcomes that come out of those decisions, but each of them might not know what is the decision that the other person is going to make, right? So the classic example is to prisoners who are in jail, but the police doesn't know whether they actually have committed something or not. So they're playing a trick on them. Like if you come, to each of them, if you come and tell me what you guys have done, I'll let you go.

But the other person will stay here and pay the price by going to jail for a longer time. So they're giving both of these actors an incentive to be mean or tell on the other person to gain some personal benefit, right? So each of them have the choice to defect or to tell on the other person and gain the advantage of being free and not worrying about the crime they've committed or to both cooperate. So if they both stay quiet, the police doesn't have actually any evidence. But maybe because they just want to keep them in jail because they don't have any suspect, they will get a very, very short time and they can be released. So what this game is trying to show is that it is possible for us to stay in or be in a situation that the structure of the world or the world has structured our choices such that,

that there's a tension between what is good for us if we could cooperate with each other, comparing to what is good for us if we knew what is the decision that the other person is going to make. And what's the effect of thus not knowing what the other person is going. So each of them have the incentive to defect because even though they won't benefit from being completely clean and the police not knowing what they've done, but they're preventing themselves from paying the cost for the other person. So going to jail for 10 years instead of going to jail for six months. So both of them got a defect, even though they both had the option to stay in jail only for a month, right?

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So they're collectively best off if they both cooperate, but individually they're both better off if they defect, so sadly they're going to end up defecting in the world is a terrible, terrible place. Yes. And when you're like going back to the conversation about the collective action problem, a collective action problem is a similar dynamic but within people, right? All of them have this worry that like they might like do something that commits them to this strategy or this choice. But if other people don't follow suit, they're going to be the people who are going to pay the price for it. And the price is going to be high.

And this price can be high enough that will incentivize almost everyone or enough people to not follow suit. So those who are worried about collective action problem say like it's practically impossible for this group of people to achieve any collective good. Yeah. The physicist in me wants to think of this like statistical mechanics, right? And imagine a huge number of people constantly bumping into each other with their strategies at some temperature, which means that their strategies can change over time and things like that. And maybe there are different equilibria depending on the strength of the coupling and the temperature and stuff like that. There must be people doing exactly that, no?

Yes, yes. So I don't consider myself a physicist, but the undergrad physicist Sahar, the undergrad level physicist Sahar is thinking about this dynamic as a very similar. picture that you describe, but with this caveat that you're not talking about an ideal gas. So individuals are not doing what they think they should do independent of their social connections or interaction with the other. So instead of an ideal gas, you have a bunch of molecules who are kind of tied to one another, but not perfectly. So everyone has some significant interaction with the one on the right or the left.

So when you add this kind of interdependence, the collective action problem changes its structure because then there are ways for people to solve their collective action problem because they have some repeated interaction, because they have some more information about each other, or because through these interactions, they can come up with some strategies,

that they think of as the norm. It's the salient option now. So going back to O'Connor's episode, she talks about, like, dividing a pie or you start with, like, the pint of ice cream and, like, the mom who is deciding, like, giving the children this rule that if you both claim the same amount or claim less than what is available, you can get, what you claim equal or less. But if you claim more than what is available,

if it was my mom, I'll throw away the ice cream altogether. So you both know that you shouldn't do that. So when you are giving that kind of option, people have the choice of both claiming half of the ice cream pinned or claiming less than what's available to be cautious. Or if they have some information about what the other side kind of claim, claim more, but not high enough that there is no way for the other person to get anything. And then they talk about some equilibrium solutions that like either dividing in half or

one dividing, taking much less one, taking much more, will become the evolutionary stable outcome of social interactions that are kind of repeated over time. Some of them might be with the same people. sometimes you don't have to even make that assumption, but just keep that interaction going. So it's not a one-shot prisoner's dilemma. It's a prisoner's dilemma that happens over time. But the game that I described is not actually a prisoner's dilemma.

It's a coordination game. But it's like similar enough in the idea. But all I wanted to say is that the difference between what prediction, the collective action problem is giving us which is very sad that like,

oh, you guys cannot do anything together done and the conclusion that will look at the world, we can do things. So like you're missing. It's like similar to the comparison you made

or similar to comparison I made based on your example of thinking of an ideal gas in which individuals are kind of acting in isolation comparing to an environment interaction is dominant or the interaction is the one that is doing things. Good. And you can kind of see where philosophical implications come in here a little bit.

But again, as usual, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like we can find ourselves in situation where bad things happen even if nobody is to blame. That's so true. Yeah. And maybe that changes our philosophical view on how to either think about or even deal with bad situations. That's absolutely true. For instance, O'Connor and Bruner and a lot of other people use this kind of evolutionary game theoretic mechanism to explain how in the same way that we expect fair divisions to become dominant strategy of a population that's trying to divide their resources and go about their days. You can see that unfair divisions become the dominant strategy. Why? Because you can

have some structural components. And it's like Axelrod too, right? The Robert Axelrod, a famous book on Evolutionary of Cooperation. The idea is that if you have some added layer of information about what your opponent's going to do, well, you can base your strategy on that added information. And that can be sometimes group-based membership that, like, I treat everyone. in my group fairly, but everyone outside of my group unfairly or like I want to be greedy to them.

And then you see that like other kind of symmetry breakage can like make us end up with an unstable or not a stable outcome that is not actually fair or not equal at least in terms of the outcome it generates. But we do have, unlike the prisoner's dilemma, where a crucial. feature is that the two prisoners can't talk to each other, right? That's true. And so one of the things that's interesting about the differences between the physical system or the evolutionary genetics and humans is that we can anticipate and imagine other possible

futures. But another one is we can talk to each other. I mean, how much is that part of the models when you're making these models, that that people can try to persuade each other to act in a certain way that helps the collective good. That's a very good point. I think like whenever you, like let's assume that in all these conditions, people actually can talk to each other, but they don't have any way to hold each other accountable if the other person lied, right?

So even if you can talk to each other, talking is not going to do anything because I can come and tell you that like, give me a watch or give me or like something like relatively expensive and I promise that I'll bring it back to you tomorrow, right? But like, I can just lie. And in the absence of any other mechanism that help you think that whether or not I'm going to actually stick to my promise, it's the same as no communication. It might give you some information about the other person. But if that information is not giving you a way to hold that person accountable. Well, that doesn't mean anything. So yes, you can add as much communication as you want, but like it's still at its space the same kind of dynamic, right? But we do interact

more than once. Doesn't that add some complication there? But like I think what does a lot of work is what network theorists actually help us to see that like sometimes if I'm a complete rando and I'm asking for your watch, the dynamic is very different comparing to a situation that you and I both know Kaelin O'Connor and we both respect her. And I'm worried that if I don't bring back your watch, well, that's going to affect my relationship with Kaling too. And you know that I care about this relationship. And that is enough for you to have some reinforcement mechanism that will hold me accountable, right? And that repeated interaction also is a similar dynamic

that if I don't bring your watch back to you tomorrow, then next time I'm asking you for something, well, you're just not going to give it to me. And if that's the case, this worry about the future is a way that you can use to hold me accountable and make me do what I promise. So communication becomes relevant again. But what you are adding by saying that people can communicate

is not anything other than just repeated interaction or being embedded in a network is doing the work. So that's why people don't talk about communication as much and try to offload the... I guess so. I don't know. I worry, I wonder whether we're not being fair to people or maybe we're being too fair to them, thinking of them as too rationally self-interested,

whereas people might take pride in being honest or being trustworthy or something like that, right? But you should know that. Yeah. If I don't know to take pride. And that won't come without some other layers of information or some other layers of getting this information. That best person not going to lie regardless of. Fair enough. Okay.

So let's be like super philosophical here. There's different ways that philosophers have thought about justice. So we've done a wonderful job laying the groundwork of some complexity theory, game theory, network theory, even though we didn't quite use that, but that was involved in you're saying that we're not an ideal gas, right? Yeah, yeah. There's certain connections that exist and certain ones that don't. How is that different than, you know, I'm not? I don't know, Hobbes and Rousseau and Locke or even, you know, John Rawls or whatever, the traditional theorists of political justice.

Well, I think it's similar in many regards, but it's different in important ways, too. So similar in a sense that, for instance, Hobbs and Rousseau and others want to think about what keeps us a coherent functioning society, right? And even though maybe a lot of us are altruistic people, but like we have enough people who are not altruistic and might be self-interested that can like ruin it for everyone else, right? And they're thinking about what are the conditions that we can put in place that we don't have to depend on everyone being altruistic for the society to work, right? And someone like Hobbs want to say that we have to have a Leviathan. And what is that Leviathan doing is it's making sure that whoever wants to deviate has reason to be scared of doing it, right? That like if I say, I promise to you that I'll bring back your watch and I don't, there's a Leviathan and all like powerful thing.

Distinct. Yeah, and hold me accountable. Put me to jail or make me pay the fine or whatever. And if that's the case, and you know that the Leviathan exists, and I know that the Leviathan is, then I don't have an incentive to not bring back your watch, right? Yep. So it doesn't matter whether I'm an honest person or not. I'm an altruistic person or not. Like, even if I am a very self-interested, selfish, self-centered person, still a society would work if you have that kind of powerful.

whole entity that people can depend on to make sure that deviating from what they agreed on has a cost, right? But at the same time, what someone like Hobbs is missing is that, well, that's not all we need first, second, that is too high of a price to pay to make sure that someone brings back my watch, to give like all the power to like, one. one entity who like walks around and make sure that everyone like sticks to their promise. And people like Hume or others talk about culture or other social practices that help us hold each other accountable or like cooperate or do things that we need to do together

to benefit from the fruits of that cooperation. And evolutionary game theory is a way to talk about that kind of cultural practices. And it's interesting to me because it goes back to the persistence and stability question that you first brought up when thinking about complex systems. And so I am asking myself questions about how non-equilibrium steady state systems require low entropy energy, right? They require free energy and then they dissipate and make the world a more random place. And in some sense, there's a parallel here. I mean, it sounds vaguely like it. I don't know.

is there some equivalent of free energy that we need here? Is there some resource that these stable structures require? Yeah. So, like, think about a society in which everyone actually follows the rules and, like, they don't even need some higher level things, like, or a Leviathan or whatever. It's a very stable society. Everyone follows the norm. But pandemic happens.

I don't know. Something happens that like disturbs the structure of dynamics that they were relying on very, like, religiously to keep things together. And they don't have any alternative already existing there, right? Well, this society is not going to last. You need that kind of diversity and variation and this kind of like energy that moves around that like keeps their. stable and on their foot. And like if something happens, like those countercultures we talked about, sometimes they generate change, but a lot of time they help us remain stable.

Some like norms or practices are irrational to have in many situations. I had this example that I haven't ever thought about this, so it might not bear with me. that like I had a I had a partner who was like a hoarder like many years ago and it was very annoying to me how much of a hoarder this person is and like for many reasons like he would never be able to find something he needs because he has so much stuff and a lot it was expensive to move them around it was expensive to like keep onto them there was not much utility but like then pandemic happened. You cannot go out and like buy whatever we need on demand.

And like that hoarding. The revenge of the hoarder. Yeah. Well, it's all good. Like we had like balls of rubber bands that we used to like make masks. Like I never thought like having that many rubber bands would be even useful. And we could just even give it to others who didn't have rubber bands to make. So basically you're making an argument for diversions.

for diversity in some sense. It's not just a moral good to be diverse in the cause of being fair to people, but you're saying if you want to be the best society and find the right solutions, sometimes you might do something that might seem to you to be suboptimal. You know, you need to have a mixed strategy in game theory terms. But at the same time, if you have just a close society, that close society is often have a lot of conformity pressure. So a close society over time makes everyone look the same

because of the social pressures of dunes. But an open society that has an influx of people who are coming from different parts of the world, different cultures or whatever, is like a way to keep this kind of stability. Like sometimes that is just like the influx of information or different ways of living, some other times is just like having actual people

who are coming to generate that kind of diversity. So you don't get that kind of diversity over a long time, at least in a way that game theoretically we can think about societies and maintain your diversity, unless you are very intentional about keeping things separate. Yeah. It actually reminds me of the footbinding example in the sense that you can have a strategy or a norm or a customer or whatever that was optimal under some conditions.

The conditions go away, but you're left with the strategy. And if you don't have this influx of other people, maybe you forget how to justify. You forget the reasons why you were doing it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I really like that analogy. Yeah. And so it leads to, I mean, are there, let me ask it this way, is I can see this in the terms of the game theory, network theory, complexity picture, this interest in diversity and sort of constantly probing our weaknesses and et cetera. Is that new and different in this discussions of society and how to set them up?

Is that an insight that we got from thinking in these ways? Well, I think by these ways you mean like focusing on complexity. Yeah. Okay, so the way that I think complexity distinguishes or thinking from the standpoint of complexity distinguishes itself from other viewpoints is that if you again go back, like you can tell how much of a fan of Kayleen O'Connor. That's fine. Constantly go back to her.

But the evolutionary ways of talking about. social norms is like at the end of the day trying to find some stable outcome, right? Okay. So it's a stability-based kind of explanation that gives you some insight of like how that can be possible or how if the complexity approach is helping us to not take that stability to be our end goal. and think about how change can happen. Not only can happen, but it happens all the time. Right.

And our ability to explain things is not dependent on finding some fixed features of the world, right? So I don't have to offload the robustness of the causal connections I find in the world onto unchanging things. And if I can do that, I can show that how I can perhaps guide the changes that are already happening to a direction that are in a better help us to get to a better outcome without assuming that I know what is this better outcome, right? Yeah. And it reminds me once again of Elizabeth Anderson, who was the one who convinced me for the first time in my life that ideal theory was not the best. way to think about political justice rather than... That's true. So to me, as a physicist, maybe, it always made sense.

Just think about the perfect society and work to try to get in that direction. And she points out, number one, you don't know what the perfect society is. And number two, conditions are changing. But it's much easier just to try to improve a little bit. So asking about the local derivative is a more sensible thing than asking about the final goal. Absolutely. And if you want to improve things and you start with this assumption that the The problem that we're solving is too complex for any of us or for most of us or even for,

I don't know, an institution that it's irresponsible for gathering information. To have like a bird-eye view of this landscape to tell us what is the better outcome or what is the better equilibrium. We want to know how possibly we can make improvements. And the way to think about that is to think about first how knowledge is. produced, how these practices come to existence, how are they generating outcomes that are soft optimal in ways that the evolutionary models help us to understand, but also how we can minimize the error in finding the alternatives. So let's go back to the landscape kind of metaphor,

that you see that in scientific communities too, right? They're different ways. of exploring this unknown and very rugged epistemic landscape and it has a lot of local optima that makes you think that oops we found the best possible solution and that i don't know we have phlogiston or whatever just explain very good um but you want people to explore um alternatives and find whether there is a better way to go about solving this question or not and people model this as like a let's say a group of scientists who have like different kind of strategies

some of them want to find what is or like follow what is the consensus and just stick with it some of them want to find what's the consensus and do the opposite because like they

feel like it and some of them don't care about anyone else and just like focus on their own work and they want to be a good scientist that like proves everything from the basic axioms to the conclusion that they want to drive. And like they show that like when you have this kind of dynamic and like let people kind of follow or learn from each other, exploring this epistemic landscape is not something that

you can plan and tell people that like, look, this strategy is bad, the strategy is good. even though intuitively doing something that the scientific community says, well, we have consensus over this and do the opposite is not a promising way. But like they show that like having people who do that help us to maximize their ability to reach out and like find what is the better equilibriums or what are the better answers or better outcomes. and the structure of who is talking to who is another important way to think about it. So those models don't think about that. I have some other work. I'm trying to make sense of when you compare chapter-based movements, for instance, to hierarchical movement.

Chapter-based movements try to figure out how they solve a problem locally in their own, like, I don't know, neighborhood or city or state or whatever. but they have ways to communicate with other chapters and ask them, how will you do it? What did you do that work? How can I like not waste important resources to reinvent the wheels, right? And if they try something and it doesn't work, they can tell others. But at the same time, they take into account that like something that works for me in Columbus, Ohio, might not work in Baltimore. or might not work in Arizona or whatever.

And then they are changing the structure of their communication or their collective action as a way to minimize their chance of making mistakes and maximize their chance of finding solutions that work for them, not assuming that the solution even works for everyone or there is like a way for everyone to do. So it's a way of incorporating that situated knowledge. knowing that we don't know what is the alternative necessarily that we can get to. We know that along the way we might figure out that we were wrong all along. Some people make this argument in terms of like the feminist resistance to like some conceptions of a family, a not clear family.

And then this like change in people's attitude when same sex, marriage, became legalized and like the tension between these two ways of thinking about what is the right way of solving the problems that people were facing and realizing that well we might have been wrong in fact like it's too costly to ask people to not live in knock your families given everything else maybe in an alternative world it would have worked but like it's like there's a better outcome that we can seek. And it can improve the lives of many who we care about. And otherwise, they would be in trouble or, like, not benefit from those outcomes.

But this example of science or of academia more broadly reminds us that diversity can be hard to achieve, right? If you have a certain academic subfield that has a different approaches to the problem, and people think, well, a certain approach is 80% likely to be. right, but you're only hiring people in that subfield once every 10 years. You're going to hire one of those consensus people 100% at the time, and you're not going to give 20%. You don't have room, right? So you need to make some extra special effort to nurture the diversity in that sense. That is absolutely true. And when you, again, look at scientific communities, you see that like when there is like a critical mass who is kind of negating the dominant or the main.

way of thinking about things. They often start generating their own journals. They're creating like departments that's like more likely to hire. So hire like people who have this kind of tendency because that's the only way that you can protect these like more minority groups. And I'm not saying minority to say like being minority here is always right or being minority here. Like I'm just saying like it's good to preserve the diversity here.

and the pressure for conformity is real and you want ways to allow this minority to persist just in case the majority was wrong. So you have some people who have explored the alternative and you can borrow from them. But like they create their own enclaves that helps them to survive or even be successful in their own smaller community. but it also protects them from the pressure that they are feeling from the mainstream. And in social movements or like social change literature, you see a lot of that kind of dynamic that people generate groups to like protect them from the cost of deviation. But at the same time, amplifies their voice. So they have a chance to be heard by the rest.

I love this example of Rosa Park that like if you're thinking that she is just a tired person who didn't want to change her seat because she is sick of the racist rules and practices in her town while you're missing, like that's partly true but you're missing a lot of important information about what actually helps to make an action like hers to be a milestone or like a significant driver of like something like a civil rights movement, right?

That like she is a local organizer of NACP. Her husband is a youth organizer for the same organization. She has been thinking about like doing this for like a long time. They have tried like other people who wanted to not change their same. and see what happens. And she had like an army of other organizers and activists who, when that happened, reassured her that like the costs is not something that she's the only one who bears it. It's not like she will lose her job and not going to have any support whatsoever.

And she's alone in bearing the consequences. But also they amplified her voice, right? They were primed to help out to support. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like she's not the first person who has ever decided to change, like not change her see or not follow the racist laws or practices in her hometown. The difference is that the connections that she has and the counter community that protects her from just like doing something that makes her go to jail and lose her job. as it would be the case for everyone else.

And the same, I think, goes for the scientifics. Yeah, but the Rosa Parks example is a good one because this was the last thing I wanted to talk about. So we've segued perfectly to the end of the podcast here because you write a lot about social movements and their importance. And here's a perfect example of one, right? And, you know, someone who hadn't thought about this very carefully might just say, why do we need a social movement? We have a democracy. Everyone's going to vote.

They're going to get what they want. but these collective behavior kind of issues really do matter. So even if we live in a perfect democracy, which we don't, but that's a whole other podcast. But even if we did, this kind of coordination, game theory, network theory kind of thing becomes really important to making the society you live in closer to its own ideals. That is true because when you're thinking about like a democratic society, one of the distinctive features is that, that like people have roughly equal say in how things go. So it's a self-governing society, right? But like it's, it might be the case in an ideal gas situation.

Yeah. That like each molecule has like the same effect on like the temperature, roughly speaking. But like we don't live in an ideal gas situation. And we have so many other mechanisms to first make collective action possible, but also generate power, generate influence, generate mechanisms that can advantage some people and disadvantage others, right? But the very same kind of mechanisms

can be used to amplify change, right? It's like you are increasing the number of connections between people. So something that would happen to someone and no one else would hear about because that person is very disconnected or like have the poor resources or whatever. When you're talking about social movements,

you are in a just like heightened level that like everyone is like more or less like prime to think about this problem first, but second they might like have extra connections that make them hear about this kind of news. So when a shooting happens or like a killing happens to a member of a population or by a member of a group, everyone else going to know about it in a way that it wouldn't happen before.

So the networks can help us explain how change is way more likely and stability is, the basin of attraction is kind of like shrunk because people are more connected, because people are more primed even to think about the lack of connections that they had to a problem or the lack of connections that would prevent them from hearing about some phenomena. So if I wanted to start my own social movement, would insights from complexity theory and evolutionary game theory help me build a more effective social movement or is it more

describing things after the fact? Lovely question. I think my conclusion or what I've learned from social. our complexity theory is not a recipe for starting a social movement. It's a recipe for knowing that when change is going to happen, I have an influence way beyond what I thought I have because I'm not just myself. I'm also an extended network of people who know me or they might take what I say with more confidence or accepted with more confidence than they would at someone else.

And if I am at the state that like a movement, like a wave is approaching me, it's not like I can just disconnect if I am feeding into it. I can amplify it by a lot. Or I can be a wait for it to dampen it down. So my conclusion from complexity theory is that first, Sahar, start rethinking what you think you as an individual can do and stop thinking of yourself as a molecule in an ideal gas. And that like the addition of your action with a bunch of others will generate change because I can have cascading effects. Anyone can have cascading effect with the right connection. But also, if you want to start change, mind your connections.

Go find others who are like-minded, support them, be supported by them. And know that without that, not much going to come out of you. Well, so you just gave me a little epiphany here. So I very much appreciate this because, of course, physicists love to talk about phase transitions, right? which is highly analogous, if not exactly the same, as social transitions of various sorts. But, you know, to stand up for my physicist friends, we don't only think about ideal gases. Sometimes we think about a lattice or a solid, which are kind of very primitive network kind of models, right? And something you notice when you have a lattice that has a physical system on it that's going to do a phase transition,

is that far away from the phase transition, correlations between what's going to be. on at nearby lattice points might be either only infinite range or only short range. It's exactly at the critical point, at the phase transition, that you have both short range correlation and long range correlation. And you just explained why that's important to a social movement. So I think that's great. So whether you planned it or not, you have very much helped me launch my social movement when I decided to do that. So Hariri Farid, thank you. Thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight. From the writers of parenthood and life as we know it comes, it's not like that. A new family drama about starting over and second chances. Scott Foley stars as Malcolm, a recently widowed pastor and dad of three. And Aaron Hayes is Lori, newly divorced with two teens.

Their families used to do everything together. Now they're navigating single parenthood, and maybe something more. Watch, it's not like that. All episodes streaming May 15th on Prime Video.