Sam Arbesman
Venture Partner, Lux Capital · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
17statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.76/5average certainty → 1.88/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources
1 assertion · 2 opinions · 13 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Sam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Sam Arbesman said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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 …”
Arbesman: Engineers must design ways for users to glimpse underlying system complexity
“From an engineering perspective, we need to build into these technologies as well as something I think people just need to be mindful of looking for is trying to find ways of kind of glimpsing what's happening underneath the hood. Of a technology. And cause I …”
Arbesman: Simulations reveal non-linearities and unexpected behaviors in complex systems
“Another kind of approach that I advocate with these technologies is like having simulations, like the same way that in playing with, like in playing SimCity, you might gain a better sense of the complexity of a city rather than not necessarily the details of t…”
Arbesman: Drafting a book requires writing 1,000 unjudged words per day
“The way I did it was I set myself a goal of kind of just a certain amount of text to create per day at least as the initial step, I said something like, A thousand words a day, and so I just write a thousand words, and it didn't have to be on a single topic it…”
Arbesman: Generative design creates functional objects with a biological appearance
“You also have generative design, where people are using computer programs to design objects that almost have this, like, biological appearance to them but are still functional, and they also are really beautiful in different sorts of ways than we might think o…”
Arbesman: Asimov's Foundation heavily influenced many computational social scientists
“It turns out if you actually, if you ask a lot of social scientists or scientists who are kind of involved in computational social science or quantitative or, like, network science and things like that, a lot of them Read foundation at an early age, and we're …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge | Nov 28, 2016 | 35m |