Complex Systems Summer School 2014-Panel Questions

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Please post questions you might have for our panel, W. Brian Arthur, Marcus Hamilton, Simon DeDeo, Sid Redner.

1. What is the next big scientific question in the complex systems research?
2. What is the origin and the importance of stochasticity in complex systems?
3. What do you believe, but can not (yet) prove?
4. What mathematical tools do we lack most?
5. What role do models play in the analysis of complex systems (prediction? mechanistic insights? computer experiments?) and what does that depend on?
6. How do we model the creation of novelty?
7. What advice do you have for those who wish to learn about a new subject or tool, but cannot necessarily take classes? How does one embark on a program of self-study?
8. How do researchers advance in interdisciplinary complexity research when it seems that the academic system prioritizes maintaining the status quo?
9. How does people's belief about how economics works change the actual running of economics itself? More specifically, will the advance of complexity economics change the running of economics significantly?
10. Are the characteristics of consciousness consistent with those of an emergent property?
11. How can we upgrade the network science study from topological property of networks to more complex and more realistic dynamics on networks?
12. Can we predict extreme events with early-warning indicators based on time series or spatial data from a system?
13. It is clear that the way we understand Ecology and its processes is completely biased by the early notions of human Economic competition (1700-1800) - and that also applies to the principle of natural selection. In your opinion, is there an alternative way of understanding ecology under a different paradigm?
14. How would you go about inferring mechanisms from observations?
15. In an intertwined world where “ecological value of a resource decreases with rarity “, “economics rarity increases value” and both economic and ecological worlds are bounded by space and cognition, should we be looking for a coarse-grained effective theory of entangledness of systems?
16. Is there a bias in the SFI research agenda towards the application of very elaborated formal methods that are very much dependent of a good data situation? I.e. why are there comparatively few people working on complex (social) systems for which data collection and interpretation is necessarily very normative, data is scarce and often qualitative? Does the significantly high number of phisicists, mathematicians and computer scientists leads to a systemtically bias in this regard?
17. Are large-scale Software systems (such as massively parallel simulations, highly-concurrent telecommunication systems, etc.) considered complex? If not, why not? If yes, how is complexity science informing Software engineering (or vice versa)?
18. Are economic cries an inherent part of economics?
19. What are the future research frontiers towards achieving sustainability in coupled economic-environmental complex systems?
20. There are set of deeply entrenched mechanisms that drive our (self organized) society in such a way that even if it is obvious to many of us that we are heading (faster and faster) towards a "cliff" we can not do much about it. Or we can? 21. Optimization is a controversial concept across fields. From our lectures we saw that it plays important role in methodological framework of many researchers. At the same time we are witnesses that this assumption in economics apart from important contributions to the field can have very detrimental side effects. In psychology the topic sparks lots of controversy as well (even if most of them agree that we are not optimizers). Finally, do our arms and legs have optimal length? What are limitations of the concept?
22. Does (SFI) complex systems research lacks an epistemology and methodology of its methods?
23. Is urban scaling also true for the incidence of common diseases? (e.g. heart disease, stroke, cancer, sudden death).
24. Why the dialectic materialism (and the approach of the dialectics of nature) is not considered in the science of complexity?