You seem to be knowledgeable in this area, what would you recommend someone read to get a good picture of things you find interesting in complex systems theory?
I didn’t personally go about it in the most principled way, but: 1. locate the smartest minds in the field or tangential to it (surely you know of Friston and Levin, and you mentioned Krakauer—there’s a handful more. I just had a sticky note of people I collected) 2. locate a few of the seminal papers in the field, the journals (e.g. entropy) 3. based on your tastes, skim podcasts like Santa Fe’s or Sean Carroll’s 4. textbooks (e.g. that theory of cas book you mentioned (chapter 6 on info theory for cas seemed like the most important if i had to pick one), multilayer networks theory, statistical field theory (for neural networks, etc.)) - I personally also save books which seem a bit distanced from alignment (e.g. theoretical ecology/metabolic theory of ecology) just out of curiosity to see how they think/what questions they wind up asking
Of these, I think getting a feel for the repeats in the unsolved problems/vocabulary/concepts that show up in journals is important, and pretty much anything related to “what does it take to unify information and physics, and extend information theory to talk about open-systems, and how do we get there asap” seems good bc of how foundational all that is.
You seem to be knowledgeable in this area, what would you recommend someone read to get a good picture of things you find interesting in complex systems theory?
I didn’t personally go about it in the most principled way, but:
1. locate the smartest minds in the field or tangential to it (surely you know of Friston and Levin, and you mentioned Krakauer—there’s a handful more. I just had a sticky note of people I collected)
2. locate a few of the seminal papers in the field, the journals (e.g. entropy)
3. based on your tastes, skim podcasts like Santa Fe’s or Sean Carroll’s
4. textbooks (e.g. that theory of cas book you mentioned (chapter 6 on info theory for cas seemed like the most important if i had to pick one), multilayer networks theory, statistical field theory (for neural networks, etc.)) - I personally also save books which seem a bit distanced from alignment (e.g. theoretical ecology/metabolic theory of ecology) just out of curiosity to see how they think/what questions they wind up asking
Of these, I think getting a feel for the repeats in the unsolved problems/vocabulary/concepts that show up in journals is important, and pretty much anything related to “what does it take to unify information and physics, and extend information theory to talk about open-systems, and how do we get there asap” seems good bc of how foundational all that is.