Sam Arbesman
Venture Partner, Lux Capital. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistauthorinvestoracademic@arbesman ↗LinkedIn ↗arbesman.net ↗
Sam Arbesman is a complexity scientist and Venture Partner at Lux Capital. He is the author of books including The Half-Life of Facts and Overcomplicated, and serves as an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University.
3shows
3appearances
33statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Sam Arbesman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Arbesman: Large computing systems evolve like biological organisms, not engineered machines
“At the same time, though, these systems, they're not always Fully engineered. They're almost grown. And when they're evolved, and then like, then you often get the kind of all the terminology from evolution of kind of like evolved feature or repurposing some o…”
Arbesman: Human advances will require AI partnerships due to cognitive limits
“And so we're going to need these kind of machine partners in order to continue making advances, and so rather than viewing it as humans are being displaced, it's really essentially that humans are only through this partnership are humans going to be able to co…”
Arbesman: Humans will feel vicarious pride in AI-generated creations
“We are going to increasingly need to have a certain amount of nachos for our technologies, where these technologies might be doing things, might be doing activities that they might be making creations that are not our own, but we were the ones who ultimately p…”
Arbesman: Computer malware encoded in DNA successfully compromised a sequencing machine
“We've actually seen in the news recently this that malware was encoded in DNA and then it compromised and took over a machine involved in analyzing the sequences which is pretty wild stuff.”
Arbesman: VCs can succeed in deep tech by avoiding naive cross-domain analogies
“Yes, I do think so. As long as we're really just not stepping too naively from one domain to another, and we recognize essentially both the promise and perils of analogizing from one complex system to another. So as long as we do this with open eyes, I think w…”
Arbesman: Relying on Google over memory ensures more up-to-date knowledge
“When people talk about how the internet and Google is ruining our brains or our memories I am actually much more positively inclined towards those technologies simply because it, if we don't necessarily have as good memories anymore, It means that we now actua…”
Arbesman: Algorithmically generated art elicits similar emotional responses to human art
“I imagine if you don't tell someone where it comes from, you probably can get a similar kind of response, especially if it's almost indistinguishable.”
Arbesman: Iterative hacks on large systems accumulate into impenetrable complexity
“When you have, when you're confronted with a large system, some large technological system, like a piece of software or whatever oftentimes the only way to change it is through those kind of kludges or hacks, because it's this kind of iterative tinkering at th…”
Arbesman: Complex software requires biological thinking over high-level physics equations
“In this biological mindset is the idea that, that the details really matter. It's wonderful if you can write an equation that explains 60% of what's going on, but it turns out the remaining 40% Is really, really important when you're trying to make sure someth…”
Arbesman: Combining disparate ideas creates a defensible moat for startups
“So I think if a startup can bring together disparate ideas and carve out a niche and unique way of thinking and provide something of value to the world, that's something that is both differentiable and also a defensible moat because it's hard to jump across di…”
Arbesman: Combining specialists, T-shaped people, and generalists builds optimal organizations
“Bring all those different people together, specialists, teachers, individuals, people who are a little bit more general minded into an organization is going to make it the best version possible.”
Arbesman: Computational tools are necessary to navigate increasingly complex systems
“As the world around us is becoming more and more complex, it's becoming more difficult to fully understand either the technologies that we ourselves have built, or the systems that we're trying to understand in science, like a biological system, for example. A…”
Arbesman: Machines will increasingly join human teams in creative collaboration
“But ultimately, I think creativity, it's always been, to a certain degree, a collaborative act, and now we're going to increasingly count machines as part Of our collaborative teams now.”
Arbesman: Frontier tech is too broad to be treated as a single category
“While there might be certain similarities, I think frontier tech overall, and it's really this, it's very broad and diffuse space, and so in many ways I'm almost hesitant to group it all under kind of that umbrella term. And because the knowledge you need to d…”
Arbesman: People fail to update 'mesofacts' that change over decades
“So miso facts were sort of facts that bits of information that change neither too slowly nor too rapidly. They're sort of at the middle or miso scale. The idea is that there's bits of knowledge that change very, very rarely, like how many constants there are o…”
Arbesman: Science is a querying method where all knowledge is a draft
“Science is, it's a body of knowledge, but even more important than that, science is really a means of querying the world, and I think recognizing that everything we know is constantly in draft form is really, like, that's the way we should be thinking about th…”
Arbesman: Science and art are beautiful outputs constrained by reality and medium
“Science is almost like beautiful output constrained by reality, and art is also beautiful output constrained by reality of the media that you're using in some very different sort of ways.”
Arbesman: Physical books hedge against technological disruption better than ebooks
“Physical books are a great hedge against like technological change. And I know if like my physical book, if I like 20 years from now it will still be kind of backwards compatible with the human eye. But and like an ebook, not entirely clear”
Arbesman: Paywalls and jargon boundaries cause scientists to reinvent existing models
“In science sometimes you have things that are out of date, but also because knowledge might be either locked behind journal paywalls, or these articles are not necessarily as interconnected as they could be people sometimes end up reinventing certain ideas. So…”
Arbesman: Modern technology has grown too complex even for its creators
“Increasingly technologies are becoming so complicated that not only just does the every everyday person not fully understand them, but increasingly even the experts who work on them with a daily basis, or even the people who built them don't necessarily fully …”
Arbesman: Embedding computation into physical objects drastically accelerates systemic complexity
“It's probably been accelerated significantly due to the fact that we now have computation embedded within everything else. There's only so many Levels of kind of like levels of hierarchy of complexity you can have if you don't have the ability to have code wit…”
Arbesman: Fear and reverential awe toward complex technology cut off questioning
“People sometimes when they're confronted with technology, they don't understand or maybe they can't even understand is they often respond with one of two extremes of either fear in the face of the unknown or this reverential, almost like, religious sense of aw…”
Arbesman: Complex technology requires biological thinking rather than physics-style abstractions
“When you build a technological system that mirrors the world in all of its complexity you have to be kind of aware of all the details. You end up making something that's more biological in structure and ends up therefore being more amenable to kind of this bio…”
Arbesman: Leaders should avoid rapid changes in complex, interconnected organizations
“When someone kind of comes into a new organization, there's a tendency to really make a mark and change a lot of different things, and that desire should be tempered with this recognition that when a system might be highly nonlinear, highly interconnected and …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sam's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Venture Partner, Lux Capital | 1 | 17 | — | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
 20VCLEDGER | Venture Partner, Lux Capital | 1 | 12 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Venture Partner, Lux Capital | 1 | 4 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |