Yes, thank you. This was nicely written.
Another place that takes a similar but more applicative view, but is less well known, is College of the Atlantic.
Oh jeez! I'm admittedly an SFI super-fan, but had never heard of CoA! They seem like a neat little feeder institution. I used to camp there as a kid, so the area is very familiar to me.
Thanks so so much! I feel like some kid in my "future sphere of influence" -- whatever that might be -- could very well end up there, so your comment feels impactful.
No problem! I had the same reaction when I found out about College of the Atlantic. I was like, I should quit my job and go study there. Haha. I actually found out about them via Complexity Explorer, the Santa Fe Institute's online MOOC platform, by looking up David Feldman, who teaches a course on Complexity Explorer and is a professor at College of the Atlantic.
https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Dynamical-Systems-Primers-Compl...
College of the Atlantic actually has a lot of neat videos on YouTube, and below is a tour of the campus by the college president.
https://www.santafe.edu/culture/podcast
If you feel like it, pls do listen to this popular podcast by the Santa Fe Institute, and you'll hear them connecting things rather frenetically. Some adherents ground all this in rigorous science, but others participate very effectively as amateurs, guided by pure intuition/creativity that's often complementary and comparably fruitful. Complexity science offers an approach that elevates metaphor to a curious form of information/knowledge. Some amateurs in the community just participate in this "rhyming game" of networks, and leave the hard science to others in the community. That works fine.
Cormac McCarthy (of "The Road" and "No Country For Old Men" fame) has been hanging out with these folks for decades, and participating in their discussions even though he lacks the scientific underpinnings. These's a symbiosis of sorts between the hard and soft "scientists" doing this work. Adam Curtis sounds like he's one of the "soft" researchers. If you can't straddle this fuzzy boundary, it doesn't mean it's not real wisdom they're chewing on -- it's just not the sort everyone can easily stomach/navigate/sift imho, just as some don't have the neurotype to excel in deep programmatic thinking)
Anyhow, thanks for the opportunity to think this through out loud :)