Complex Systems Summer School 2015-Panel Questions

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Please post questions you might have for our panel on June 19th. Panel includes Simon DeDeo, Mirta Galesic, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Christa Brelsford, and others to be announced shortly.

1. Are there any universal principles that govern the generation of power-law distributions?
2. Is complex systems science a discipline, toolset, mindset, or something else? How do you define complex systems science?
3. What evidence do we have that understanding complex systems is a task the human mind is capable of? What if we reached the point where it's fundamentally beyond our comprehension?
4. Interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, but perhaps you need to be specialized to be useful to interdisciplinary work. Do you have thoughts on balancing these?
5. Is the idea of a "generative social science" approach embedded in the use of complexity tools and framework for social phenomena? How can we make this idea useful, in particular when dealing with economics, which usually aims to generate predictions?
6. "I believe there is a fourth law of thermodynamics, or some cousin of it, concerning self-constructing nonequilibrium systems, such as biospheres, in the cosmos, but cannot prove it" - Stuart Kauffman, former external professor at SFI. Where do you stand on this statement?
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