A century ago, the section of U.S. federal law governing public health and welfare was relatively small and loosely connected to the rest of the legal system. Today, it is one of the largest and most ...

Whenever an authority has influence over a population — be it a social media platform moderating user comments, a government ...

Figures such as a country’s gross domestic product or a city’s population size represent organizational and individual decisions over time. These statistics are useful for policymaking, but they hide ...

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

03/10/2026 Colloquium "The Great Holocene Transformation: Cultural Macroevolution of Social Scale and Complexity" by Peter Turchin, Complexity Science Hub Vienna 01/07 — 01/09 Working Group ...

Over the past 40 years, the field of microeconomics has gone through a revolution in real-world applications, yet the theoretical models taught in Ph.D. coursework have been slow to catch up. In a new ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...

From Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice to the classic sitcom Friends, all stories share a common purpose: to convey knowledge about how to navigate the world. “Stories are everywhere,” says SFI External ...

In his biography of Elon Musk, historian Walter Isaacson describes a game of Texas Hold ‘Em poker in which Musk went all in — on every hand. “Isaacson uses the anecdote to show that Elon Musk is a ...