Eddie Lee

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of industrial mutation--if I may use that biological term--that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

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#Schumpeter on #creative #destruction. Note the mention of #globalization and ref to #biology:

"The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process...

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This is nuts

A fun read about group selection on culture, not genes 🧪

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🍁A call for PhD positions in complex systems relevant to ecology

#Ecosystems, #ecology, and #forests as an example are marvelous examples of #complex systems. In collaboration with our colleagues at BOKU, we are also interested in applicants who want to study these topics! Applications due soon!

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Highlighting this Simons postdoc fellowship again. Looking for junior postdocs who might team up with Brian Enquist and me.

Keywords include nonlinear dynamics, reaction diffusion, population dynamics, metabolic scaling.

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“the progress of culture consists only in the ever-increasing permeation of all of life by artistic purposes.”

- Klimt

…Though I shall not even attempt to answer it in that form, a few further remarks about the possible absence of crises in the development of a social science may illuminate some part of what is at issue.’

…This raised for me the perennial, but perhaps not very important question about whether or not the social sciences are really sciences at all…

Professor Spengler expressed great interest in my concept of "crises" in the development of a science or of a scientific specialty, but added that he had had difficulty discovering more than one such episode in the development of economics…

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

This is a great Simons foundation #postdoc opportunity for theorists with incipient interest. If you’re interested in working in quantitative laws of life in ecosystems, please message me.

Due date Dec. 4.

Note the 3 years w/in PhD condition.

#ecology #physics #maths

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One of the most fascinating points from the Q&A:

Polarization isn't just about what we believe. It's about what we choose to make into a political issue.

Some issues divide, others unite. The Senate is voting on more polarizing issues and, predictably, getting more divided outcomes.

Synthesis of innovation and obsolescence Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolut...

In fact, the very definition of innovation is debated and it's easy to argue that we do not really have a great definition of it---same for obsolescence.

This and more we discuss in "Synthesis of innovation and obsolescence" arxiv.org/abs/2505.05182

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It's important to recognize the #interdisciplinary nature of the problem; for example, the deep discussion in #evolutionary #biology #evobio all the way to the way that those forces are controlled or harnessed within firms, not just competition on the market.

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Synthesis of innovation and obsolescence Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolut...

The well-deserved #NobelPrize in #Economics this year reminds us how important (and really how little is known) about the dual forces of #innovation and #obsolescence as we discuss in our #arXiv #preprint.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.05182

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...Most of the time we never even get around to asking the question in such a form that it can have an answer."

McCulloch: "...what we need first and foremost is not a correct theory, but some theory to start from, whereby we may hope to ask a question so that we'll get an answer, if only to the effect that our notion was entirely erroneous...

"McCulloch and Pitts' important result is that any functioning in this sense which can be defined at all logically, strictly, and unambiguously in a finite number of words can also be realized by such a formal neural network."

These two were responsible for inventing logical circuit diagrams.

"...natural organisms are constructed to make errors as inconspicuous, as harmless, as possible. Artificial automata are designed to make errors as conspicuous, as disastrous, as possible."

which is functionally about a million times larger, has the weight of the order of a pound and is accommodated within the human skull."

Love this one:

"This difference between a millimeter object and a micron object causes the ENIAC to weigh 30 tons and to dissipate 150 kilowatts of energy, while the human central nervous system...

"It is here-and not in its practically ineffective absolute reliability-that the importance of the digital procedure lies."

"here" refers to the feasible noise level. Apparently, analog machines have a lot of noise, while with digital machines you just have to add decimal points.

"The electrical fields, which exist in the controlling space, are about the same for the vacuum tube and for the neuron."

"Thus the vacuum tube, at something like a billion times the expense, outperforms the neuron by a factor of somewhat over 1000."

von Neumann on #digital and #analog vs. #biological #computers (1964). Some notable quotations:

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I wonder if #Dyson was inspired by it for a curious and delightful article that he wrote about the end of the Universe, "Time without end," in 1979 (link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...). He knew about Stapledon's work and even said "Stapledon sphere" may have been more apt for his eponymous one.

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