Riskgaming

Latest Episodes:

How games, god(s) and chance transformed human decision-making Aug 30, 2024

Show notes

Gaming has enveloped our world. A majority of Americans now gamble at least once every year, and popular video games like Fortnite and Roblox count hundreds of millions of global players. In social science, game theory and its descendants remain the mainstay for objectively analyzing human rationality, even as a gigaton of evidence shows the limits of these mathematical approaches. Meanwhile in foreign affairs, wargaming (including some of our very own Riskgaming scenarios!) are used to explore speculative futures that can change the fate of nations.

All of these subjects and more are fodder in Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, a broad and open inquiry into the nature of games written by neuroscientist Kelly Clancy. Kelly weaves discussions of dopamine, surprise, chance and learning into a history of human behavioral development over the ages, but then she pivots her discussion. For all of gaming’s success across time and around the world, what are its limits and are we properly critiquing these simulacra of reality?

Kelly joins host Danny Crichton to talk about her book and so much more across an extended show that gets at the very heart of Riskgaming. We talk about the history of games, why the theory of probability arrived so late in the development of mathematics, why game theory works mathematically but fails to capture the complexity and dynamism of human behavior, how AI models use gaming techniques like self-play to evolve, and how the world might change given the explosive popularity of interactive gaming in all facets of modern life.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Orthogonal Bet: The Harsh Realities of the Soviet Space Program Aug 28, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Samuel Arbesman speaks with John Strausbaugh, a former editor of New York Press and the author of numerous history books. John’s latest work is the compelling new book “The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned.”

The book is an eye-opening delight, filled with stories about the Potemkin Village-like space program that the Soviets ran. Beneath the achievements that alarmed the United States, the Soviet space program was essentially a shambling disaster. The book reveals many tales that had been hidden from the public for years. In this conversation, Samuel explores how John became interested in this topic, the nature of the Soviet space program and the Cold War’s Space Race, the role of propaganda, how to think about space programs more generally, and much more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The Orthogonal Bet: Understanding Embodied Intelligence Aug 23, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Michael Levin, a biologist and the Vannevar Bush Professor at Tufts University. Michael’s work encompasses how information is processed in biology, the development of organismal structures, the field of Artificial Life, and much more.

Sam wanted to talk to Michael because of his pioneering research in these areas. Biology, as Michael’s work reveals, is far more complex than the mechanistic explanations often taught in school. For instance, the process of morphogenesis—how organisms develop their specific forms—challenges our understanding of computation in biology, and Michael is leading the way in this field. He has deeply explored concepts such as the relationship between hardware and software in biological systems, the process of morphogenesis, the idea of polycomputing, and even the notion of cognition in biology.

From his investigations into the regeneration process in planaria—a type of flatworm—to the creation of xenobots, a form of Artificial Life, Michael stands at the forefront of groundbreaking ideas in understanding how biology functions.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Radical Uncertainty, Rapid Learning and the Success Equation for Catching Up Aug 21, 2024

Show notes

Global inequality has grown over the past two decades, concentrating an enormous amount of wealth and power on an elite number of individuals, cities, regions and nations all while stranding the vast masses to ignominy and penury. Yet, history is replete with examples of people and places that have caught up — and in some cases even surpassed — once foregone winners, begging the question: how should those left behind today work to catch up?

That’s the question that Paul Collier addresses in his new book, “Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places.” Collier is a long-time development economist who has diligently brought the spotlight onto the most impoverished people in the world, calling attention to what he famously dubbed the “bottom billion.” With his new book, he explores why some places that were once terrifically wealthy — think Detroit in America — have fallen behind economically, and what steps are needed to overcome that stagnation.

With host Danny Crichton, Collier talks about the economic reversals of places around the world, why evolutionary economics and contributive justice offer new lenses on the problem, how addressing radical uncertainty through rapid learning suggests a path forward, and why global development institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund remain so recalcitrant in their approaches to aid, particularly in offering agency to those affected by their decisions.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Build the Fruitful Web Aug 16, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Laurel Schwulst. Laurel operates within many roles: designer, artist, educator, and technologist. She explores—among other things—the intersection of the human, the computational, and the wonderful. Sam wanted to talk to Laurel because of this intersection and particularly because of how Laurel thinks about the internet. As part of this, she helps to run HTML Day and its celebrations, promotes what is referred to as “HTML Energy,” and is even thinking deeply about what it would mean to create a PBS of the Internet. In other words, the Internet and the web are delightful and special for Laurel, and she wants more of that energy to exist in the world.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Industrial literacy and the fate of American progress Aug 15, 2024

Show notes

It’s good and bad times in America. Inflation is down and wages are up in real terms, but there’s a rising challenge: how can we provide the housing, transportation, schooling, health care and amenities that Americans expect when prices for these social services have skyrocketed over the past three decades? Even when new technologies are capable of delivering better services, rules and regulations often stymie their dissemination. America was once the most progressive nation in the world — what happened?

Many analysts focus on policies, from zoning and permitting reform to government procurement modernization, that can accelerate the adoption of frontier tech and increase productivity. But Jason Crawford takes a more expansive and longer view of the challenge. As founder and leader of the Roots of Progress Institute and through his on-going publication of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason emphasizes that we have lost something important: our industrial literacy. America’s leaders no longer understand how prosperity was delivered from the Industrial Revolution onwards, and we’ve lost the ability to rebuild and expand wealth in its broadest conception for the next generation.

I talk with Jason about his manifesto and its focus on humanism, and then we walk through some of the major ideas he’s hoping Americans pick up. These range from more progress studies in high schools and colleges as well as a greater understanding about the value that technology delivers for quality of life to the importance of gratitude for our ancestors who delivered this prosperity to us and why technocrats and reactionaries can both be wrong about managing technological change.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Orthogonal Bet: : The Art of Cultivating Curiosity Aug 09, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Eliot Peper. Eliot is a science fiction novelist and all-around delightful thinker. Eliot’s books are thrilling tales of the near future, exploring many delightful areas of the world and the frontiers of science and technology. In Eliot’s most recent novel, Foundry, he takes the reader on a journey through the world of semiconductors, from their geopolitical implications to their profoundly weird manufacturing processes.

Sam wanted to talk to Eliot to explore this profound strangeness of the manufacturing of computer chips, but also use this as a jumping-off point for something broader: how Eliot discovers these interesting topics and those wondrous worlds that are incorporated into his books. They spoke about the importance of curiosity, as well as concrete ways to cultivate this useful kind of curiosity, which was fascinating.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Why engineers are using chaos to make computers more resilient Aug 08, 2024

Show notes

The CrowdStrike meltdown on July 19th shut down the world with one faulty patch — proving once again the interconnected fragility of global IT systems. On Tuesday this week, the company released its Root Cause Analysis as both an explanation and a mea culpa, but the wider question remains: with so much of our lives dependent on silicon and electrons, how can engineers design resilience into their code from the bottoms up? And more importantly, how can we effectively test how resilient our systems actually are?

Kolton Andrus is one of the experts on this subject. For years at Amazon and Netflix, he worked on designing fault-tolerant systems, building upon the nascent ideas of the field of chaos engineering, an approach that iteratively and stochastically challenges systems to test for resilience. Now, as CTO and founder of Gremlin, he’s democratizing access to chaos engineering and reliability testing for everyone.

Kolton joins host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist-in-residence and complexity specialist Sam Arbesman. Together, we talk about why resilience must start at the beginning of product design, how resilience is aligning with security as a core value of developer culture, how computer engineering is maturing as a field, and finally, why we need more technological humility about the interconnections of our global compute infrastructure.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Orthogonal Bet: Building a Fractal Combinatorial Trope Machine Aug 02, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by ⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, he speaks with Hilary Mason, co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door, a startup creating a platform for interactive storytelling experiences within works of fiction. Hilary has also worked in machine learning and data science, having built a machine learning R&D company called Fast Forward Labs, which she sold to Cloudera. She was the chief scientist at Bitly and even a computer science professor.

Samuel wanted to talk to Hilary not only because of her varied experiences but also because she has thought deeply about how to use AI productively—and far from naively—in games and other applications. She believes that artificial intelligence, including the current crop of generative AI, should be incorporated thoughtfully into software, rather than used without careful examination of its strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, Samuel, who often considers non-traditional research organizations, was eager to get Hilary’s thoughts on this space, given her experience building such an organization.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

How many trillions in damage would an invasion of Taiwan cost global GDP? Jul 31, 2024

Show notes

When it comes to the so-called DC foreign policy “blob”, few scenarios have been more sketched out, analyzed and wargamed than a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping’s calls for national rejuvenation coupled with Taiwan’s coalescing autonomous identity apart from the mainland is raising the stakes for both sides and the world writ large.

Given Taiwan’s centrality to global supply chains, I wanted to understand how the world’s economy would transform if a crisis in the Taiwan Strait were to escalate, and few people understand the topic better than Gerard DiPippo. He’s the Senior Geo-Economics Analyst for Bloomberg Economics, and his research centers on the Chinese and Taiwanese economies and their interlinkages with global value chains.

DiPippo and host Danny Crichton walk through different scenarios of what could take place in the Taiwan Strait — from an outright war to a soft embargo — and how we might model the global economic costs of each scenario. We also discuss some of the second-order effects of any conflict in the Strait, from additional sanctions to what goods might substitute for those lost to conflict. Along the way, DiPippo highlights some surprising and counterintuitive findings from his macroeconomic analysis that changes the calculus for all parties involved.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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