SNF Agora Institute, Sociology, and Hopkins Population Center Co-Sponsored Seminar

ON-SITE VENUE
Mergenthaler 526, Homewood

REMOTE/ ONLINE AVAILABILITY
Zoom: http://zoom.us/j/6019060976

SPEAKER BIO
James Evans is the Max Palevksy Professor of Sociology, Director of the Knowledge Lab, and Founding Faculty Director of Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago and the Santa Fe Institute. Evans’ research uses large-scale data, machine learning and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know. Thinking and knowing collectives like science, online communities like Wikipedia, and democracies involve complex networks of diverse human and machine intelligences, collaborating and competing to achieve overlapping aims. Evans’ work connects the interaction of these agents with the knowledge they produce and its value for themselves and the system. Much of Evans’ work has investigated modern science and technology to identify collective biases, generate new leads taking these into account, and imagine alternative discovery regimes. He also explores thinking and knowing in other civic domains ranging from political ideology and (mis)information to popular culture. His work has been published in Nature, Science, PNAS, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and many other top social and computer science outlets.

ABSTRACT
The wisdom of crowds hinges on the independence and diversity of their members’ information and approach. Here I explore the wisdom of scientific, technological, business, and online crowds for sustained discovery and invention, and I consider insights these provide for understanding and redesigning democracy as a method for societal search and discovery. I show how science, technology and society operate through a process of collective abduction wherein unexpected conflicts or findings stimulate innovators to forge new insights that make the surprising unsurprising. Drawing on tens of millions of research papers and patents across science and technology, as also interactions between diverse collaborating groups online, I show that surprising designs and discoveries are the best predictor of outsized success and that surprising advances systematically emerge across, rather than within people or teams; most commonly when innovators from one field surprisingly publish or share problem-solving insights to an audience in a distant and diverse other. This relates to other research I summarize that shows how across innovators, teams, and communities, connection and conformity is associated with impeded innovation and reduced generality. Using these principles, I simulate processes of knowledge search to demonstrate the relationship between crowded fields and constrained collective inferences: I illustrate how inverting the traditional approach to artificial intelligence, to avoid rather than mimic human search, enables the design of diversity that systematically violates established field and community boundaries and is associated with marked success of predicted innovation. I conclude with a discussion of prospects and challenges in a connected age for sustainable innovation in science, technology and democracy through the design and preservation of difference.

This seminar is co-sponsored by the SNF Agora Institute, Sociology, and Hopkins Population Center.