How Networks Learn an Interview with Cesar Hidalgo

Episode 085 – How Networks Learn An Interview with Cesar Hidalgo

Aired on May 10, 2018

[00:00] Commercial about The Ninth International Conference on Complex Systems hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute.

[Intro Music]

[02:30] Haley: Today on the Human Current we have with us Cesar Hidalgo, he’s a physicist, complexity scientist and the director of the Collective Learning Group at MIT. Hi Cesar, thank you for being on the Human Current.

[02:42] Cesar: Hi, it’s my pleasure to be here

[02:44] Cesar: Would you start us off by introducing yourself to our listeners along with telling us about the work you’re currently doing and what makes you passionate?

[02:50] Cesar: Of course, I run the Collective Learning Group at MIT and what we do here is to study how teams, cities and nations learn. We study how they learn to develop new activities for instance; how countries started exporting new products but also we create data democratization and facilitation tools can that can help facilitate learning within organizations.

[03:11] Haley: Some very exciting and much needed work that you’re doing there and in our introduction, we said that you are a complexity scientist so we’d like to talk a little bit about how you became interested into complex systems.

[03:23] Cesar: Well, I remember being an undergrad in Chile and at that time we had to do this huge weekly problem test, I was studying physics and there were problem test on Quantum Mechanics, Electro-dynamics and other tough courses. So, when my friends would spend a huge amount of time in the library, when I would take a break, I would walk around and try to think about how to solve the problems that were being assigned. I would look at books on chaos and fractures I started to become interested in this other physics which I thought it was quite interested, it was quite new, and it was not what I was being taught in the classroom and this was the physics of complex systems; it was the physics of things that were deterministic but yet not predictable or things that would have geometry that would be extremely interesting and complex. Eventually I got from there to the physics of networks which at that time was growing very fast and at that time I was sold, I knew that was the path I needed to follow.

[04:17] Haley: When I looked you up it said that Laszlo Barabasi was your PhD advisor?

[04:21] Cesar: Yes, that’s correct I did my PhD with Laszlo.

[04:23] Haley: That’s got to be an amazing experience to work with him as well?

[04:27] Cesar: Oh yes, it was amazing because he’s actually someone that has been extremely successful in this area; so you not only learn about ideas you learn very well how to interact with editors, with other people, how to identify certain problems, learn how to shape them or communicate them and I think all of those are skills that are vital to survive as a scholar.

[04:49] Haley: Yeah definitely and I think that it’s one thing to talk about network theory another to put it into practice in your own life as well, right?

[04:56] Cesar: Yep.

[04:47] Haley: If you would give us your definition of complexity.

[05:00] Cesar: So, I usually use a couple of definition of complexity; one of them is functional and we can talk about complex systems as those systems that have the ability to adapt and evolve. So, you can think of life forms, you can think of society, you can think of a economies of complex systems. So, think of a car, a car is very complicated but it’s not complex because it doesn’t have the ability to adapt or evolve but a car company does have that ability; so they can change the type of cars that they do over time or the way that they organize, so that’s adapting and evolving. Another definition of complexity which we owe to Warren Weaver is that complex systems are those in which the identity of the parts involve, and the interactions cannot be ignored. Think about gas, a gas is not a complex system because if you swap one of them with oxygen with another atom nobody cares, nothing changes. But think now of a company, a company is a complex system because if you were to change one person for another it does matter the identity of the elements involved and their patterns of interaction it’s important. So, complex systems are systems that are intricate in the sense that they do have a large diversity of parts whose identities matter and cannot be ignored and also, they have this ability to adapt and evolve and when you find these systems that have these properties you can think that you are in the presence of a complex system.

[06:20] Haley: Great thank you for sharing your definition. We definitely see complex systems all around us every day and Angie and I definitely see the importance of them and we like talking about them especially in our human systems and we’re just wondering why do you think complexity thinking is so important?

[06:37] Cesar: Thinking about complexity is important because people have the tendency to jump into micro explanations for macro-phenomenon, so when we start some changes in the world we tend to attribute those to certain individual actors that have perform certain actions and we have a large tendency to go into those explanations but sometimes in reality the world is a little bit different; sometimes the behavior off people is constrained by large system variables so it could be the other way around, it could be that the constraints of the systems could be the ones that are imposing and restricting the behaviors that kind of emerge within the individuals. Sometimes the outcomes that individuals generate are the macro scales from the micro-actions are outcomes that are unintended or even not understood by the individuals that perform them. So, complexity thinking is very open at trying to understand how these different scales affect each other, how micro behaviors can have emerging property than large scales and also how constraints of the macro-scales can shape and even rule what happens on the micro-scale because their force can be larger than that of the individual agency of the agent. So, then it’s

important to think about complexity, to conceal all of these options and not to jump to conclusions that the outcomes that will serve are always a result of the actions of the individuals.

[07:54] Haley: That’s well said and we definitely agree with that. Our mission here at the Human Current is to get the word out about complexity science and explain and share stories of how it is valuable to our lives. We recently spoken to Jean Bolton on a show and she talked about complexity really being our reality and that we are constantly trying to control a machine that doesn’t exist and if we just embrace complexity that we would have a better way of navigating the world and being innovative and creative and working within the systems that we are a part of.

[08:29] Cesar: I completely agree. In reality is like we are always so myopic at understanding what’s going to happen or how our actions affect certain outcomes especially when we’re working in large organizations or with many people that you do need to have some sort of taste and acceptance of that uncertainty. I think complex systems give you not only some practical tools to think about world but also some sort of humbleness because you have to understand that your knowledge and your understanding of how the systems work is always very limited and that humbleness I think gives a different attitude and perspective and gives you some peace.

[09:06] Haley: Yeah absolutely that’s definitely a word that we would use to describe a lot of the guests that we’ve had on the show and it plays out in their work and how they approach problem solving and it’s definitely something that we think you need self-awareness and a humble nature to approach these complex systems and to work within them, so yeah well said. I would love to dive a little bit deeper into this topic of complexity and get your take on entropy because this is something that you talk about in your book which we’ll get to here in a minute. I was hoping you could give your definition of entropy and explain how it shows up in your work?

[09:42] Cesar: Yes, so entropy is a tough one because it’s a word it is used a lot and it has been introduced by multiple communities so there is a lot of confusion around it. The concept of entropy emerge originally in physics in the 1850s and it was in the context of understanding thermodynamics which was the big technological breakthrough of that time, it was in the middle of the industrial revolution when the idea of entropy came about but then that concept was also developed a century layer by Cloud Shannon in the context of information theory. So, I think to get a definition of entropy it’s important to look at both of these communities. In the case of physics what entropy means simply is just the number of different ways in which you can arrange something while keeping an advocate property of that constant. For instance, if you have one hundred dice you have only one way in which you can arrange them so that they all add up to one hundred. That would just be having all of them with their ace looking up, but if you have the same one hundred dice you have billions of ways of arranging them, so there's some, it's not one hundred but three-fifty; so we can say that the state in which the dice adds to one hundred is the state that has way lower entropy than the one in which they add to three-fifty, there is many ways they can add to three-fifty but few ways they can add to one hundred.

Now, imagine you put this dice all on a table and you start kicking the legs of the table and the dices just start jumping up and down and tumbling and rotating, it would be much more likely that after you kick the table a bunch of times the dice would be in a state that is close three-fifty

then to a one hundred, and the average expectation value of rotating those dice randomly is full them to three-fifty and that doesn’t happen because there is something special about that three-fifty number with the one hundred that simply there are many, many, many more ways in which that can be expressed and there are many, many paths that can take you there. So, that is the entropy in physics the simplicity of a state and that’s also why systems had to go towards the state of more entropy because simply those states are very large and there are many paths that go to them. In computer science the story is a little bit different, people use entropy to make sure that the number of yes or no questions that you would need to guess a message but the formula that Shannon use to calculate information entropy is identical to a formula that was used by Gibbs to measure physical entropy. So, these too concepts are the same but the way that we can think about entropy and physics and information really comes from different traditions and sometimes that causes a bit of confusion but at the end of the day there’s a number of different ways in which you can arrange something.

[12:33] Haley: I think it’s a very rich definition of entropy and a little bit more than just disorder, which is kind of how you think of it or how you hear about it. It was talked about in-depth in your book which we have a copy of, Why Information Grows, The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economics and your book is great it’s very insightful, it takes a scientific at global economic complexity. So, we’re hoping that you would share a little bit more about your book with our listeners including why you wrote it and who should be reading it.

[13:05] Cesar: The Why information Grows was a tough book to write because every chapter spoke about something different but nevertheless they all connect. So, the beginning the book talks about the idea of entropy and it tries to connect the idea of entropy with some forms of human production; so let me do a little bit of that connection and then I can enter to the second part of the book so you can get an idea of the ark. If you go back to our analogy of the dice, imagine you walk into a room and you see one hundred dice lying on the floor. If those dice are all facing up with their ace they’re all ones, you for sure will assume that was the action of someone that doesn’t happen by luck okay. So, what that tells us is when we’re sure of ordering that which will serve us things that has low entropy we basically tend to understand that those low entropy states are the results of human action or human agents or some form of intelligence. We also understand that it takes energy to create this low entropy state-in the case of the dice that energy is that of someone bending over and flipping each one of those dice so their all facing with their ace up. So, we usually perform economic activities that actually reviews entropy locally. When we build cars, when we build airplanes, when we build cell phones, when we create building or bridges these are all activities that consume vast amounts of energy, they require vast amount of knowledge and eventually produce products that are locally goods and have very low entropy.

So, the question of economic development that comes from that is the question of well how groups of people which can be small as a startup or large as a company learn how to create these activities, that allow them to create these low entropy products that are ultimately useful. So, from there the book tries to answer that question and the way that we try to answer that question is by asking about the different constraints that would limit the ability of a group of people to accumulate knowledge. The main one that we explore there although there are many others are the factors that affect the size of the networks that people can form and the idea here is that if people are only able to form a small networks they are going to be able to accumulate small amounts of knowledge and they are not going to be able to do things that are too complex

but if people develop the institutions and technologies and mechanisms needed to create large networks where they can cloud it and cultivate a large number of people, those people would be able to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge because they would be able to divide the knowledge and accumulate the knowledge in all of the corners of the network and ultimately they would be able to enter more complex economic activities.

So, the book it starts describing the word in terms of entropy, physics and energy and explaining some of the basic concepts of thermodynamics and (Inaudible, 15:59) dynamics but from there it moves into the social sciences of economic complexity like trying to answer the questions well, why some groups of people have been so much more successful at creating very sophisticated products and developing large networks of people that can produce entropy locally and create sophisticated things while others have failed to do that, so that’s more or less the arc of the book.

[16:23] Haley: And what led you to write this book?

[16:26] Cesar: I think it was a number of things you know on the one hand I wanted to learn how to write a book because I’m a big believer that you only learn by doing, by experience, by practicing. I’ve written a book before that was much shorter and this was a challenge for me to write a full trade book. I had an idea of where I wanted to go which was a little bit different from where I ended up going, so all of the connections with the physics of information and entropy and thermodynamics were things that I developed as I wrote the book but one of the main reason I wrote it was to learn about these topics better, to learn how to construct this difficult story but of course there was another part of me that wanted to do was to tell a story and to tell a story of the evolution of economies that was not base on the idea of economics that comes from traders or merchants, which are the true fathers of economics like Adolph Maize or Josiah Chides, the first people that thought about economics they thought about it in the terms of trading but to think of economics in the terms of production and the knowledge and learning activities that need to happen for us to be able to create the product that eventually are worth trading.

So, I wanted to tell a little bit of that story and that’s what brought me to eventually start thinking more deeply about what are products, why they are so special, why is it so difficult to make them, why some places can make some products but not others and all of those things were the ones that I wanted to explore with the book because I’m pretty convinced that places do some products and not others only because it is convenient to them. A big part of explanation is that some places simply don’t know how to do some things, some groups of people fail to have the knowledge that they need to interest in activities. So, a lot of difference that we see in the world are not created by incentives but actually are the result of the constraint of knowledge diffusion and the limitation of that knowledge diffusion across languages, across geography, across different lines of products and so forth.

[18:21] Haley: It’s great that you asked those questions and really went to the front of the problem or the front of the whole state of economy and ask those deeper questions of why do we even have these products and why do even people start making them and it’s interesting to hear a different side of that story because it really does take you to the frontend of why are we even in the economy in the first place and so you do tell a different side of the story and it’s

fascinating. We’re just wondering also it felt like a very general read but is there a specific audience that you think you wrote the book for or does it matter who picks it up?

[18:56] Cesar: Yes of course there is an audience that you write the book for and there is an audience that find the book and then you learn about the audience after the fact. So, there is an audience that involves executives and business leaders, which I think are interested in the book, I found that the book as had good reception on executives and business leaders that tends to come more from the engineering side. What I’ve learned over the last few years is that economist have a certain way to think about the economy that is quite different from engineers but engineers don’t think that they don’t understand economy either, they do things and they understand economy quite well from the perspective of being able to run a business and make that business productive and innovative and developing it. But the difference is, is that economist tend to see businesses much more from commercial standpoint and engineers tend to see business much more in terms of learning, in terms of capabilities, in terms of their ability to make and how difficult it is to accumulate that ability to make something that other people is willing to pay for. So, within engineer CEOs they all resonated well, I remember I went to Switzerland to present an executive summit for Schindler, which is a company that develops elevators. So, it’s one of the largest elevator companies in the world and for example the CEO of Schindler, Silvio Napoli had read my book and he was super excited because it was an economy that made sense for him as a CEO of a company that was manufacturing elevators, so that’s one of the audiences that we find. Of course, there was another audience that was more academic, that involved black students, people working on complex systems and what not and the last audience that I would say has been substantial is that of development practitioners and public sector workers, which is actually a large sector, so I would say those are the three main audiences that I think I would say reach with my book.

[20:51] Haley: That’s great, it's quite a diverse group too and I’m glad that they are exploring other avenues of looking at economics and especially using a complexity lens to do so. Congratulations on the book and we love it, we’ve just got a copy and we dived into it. We actually got our copy of the book on Amazon is there anywhere else that our listeners can pick it up?

[21:12] Cesar: Well yeah Amazon is a great place because they don’t run out of stock that easy but I do think it should be available in some major book stores still of course the book is already a little bit over two years old but Amazon or major book store should be the place to go.

[21:27] Haley: Great. We do want to dive a little bit deeper into what you were talking about along the lines of economic development because you said that the problem of economic development is in fact the problem of making networks more knowledgeable, so we’re curious how do networks become more knowledgeable?

[21:44] Cesar: Yeah, that’s a great question and one that I don’t think I know the full answer but I do think I have some ideas. So, for countries to be able to enter new economic activities, you need to have groups of people that learn how to do the activities they didn’t know how to do and I think that involves two things. On the one hand people need to have the right structures that allows them to create a large network and that’s something that we talked a little bit about before. So, you need to have trust, you need to have also decent communication technology, transportation technology, you need to have systems that have relatively low transaction cost

and not so bureaucratic and the trust sometimes helps with that because if you have a system in which you have a lot of trust you don’t need to many checks and balances because people are for the most times doing the right things so they don’t need extra insurances and checks and so forth. But on the other hand you need to also have a way to acquire the knowledge that you don’t have, so having the network is not enough, it’s necessary but you need to be able to get those networks to learn. So, there are many channels by which networks can learn and the learning is quite difficult but for instance networks can learn through migration. These are relatively long literature by now that document how migration changes the product countries make the destinations they export or import from and so forth and all of those papers interpret this as some form of evidence of knowledge diffusion. So, when people move from one country to another they bring knowledge on the commercial destination that their origin country is and how to trade there, they bring knowledge also of the things they know how to make and therefore they can bring new knowledge to our community and so forth. The other barriers of course that affects knowledge diffusion is easy for two people to learn when they share language, so you see more knowledge diffusion among neighboring countries when they share a language than when they don’t share a language. There is also knowledge diffusion that is facilitated by relatedness, so it’s simple for you to learn from someone that knows how to do something that is similar to what you know.

Just to use a music analogy, it’s simple for someone to learn how to play the bass if the person teaching them how to play the bass is someone that knows how to play the guitar than someone that knows how to play the piano because they are relatedness between activity also determine the rate at which knowledge flows. So, when you have activities that are very separate there are people from one activity that can learn very slowly from that but when the activities are very related you have a lot of shared language, shared ideas, shared concepts, shared knowledge that you can use to facilitate and speed up the accumulation of the new pieces of knowledge that you would be acquiring. There are many mechanisms that affects knowledge diffusion and there are ones that affects the size of network and I think both of those things are ultimately one that affect the ability of these networks to learn and become more knowledgeable and eventually prosperous.

[24:46] Haley: So, because of a few of the things you mentioned specifically trust in migration and just based on American politics right now, where do you think our human network in the United States is heading?

[24:59] Cesar: That’s a great question because for years of course and I’ve been here fourteen years and I do think a lot about the United States in comparison both to my home country and to dozens of countries that I visit every year and even though the US have some very good institution in the context of professional networks, it is easy to start doing business with our people and to develop these trusting commercial relationships. I think it as a bigger problem than maybe something expressed in the political which is a problem of loneliness and eventually social isolation on the individual level, so that’s where I think the true problem that is affecting the country is. It’s a problem in which a lot of people are isolated, we have evolved in a society in which we have traded these deep emotional relationships for market transactions. I didn’t believe originally that - that might be the outcome of having a late stage without capitalism, but I see it more and more. I encounter regularly the stories of people that are deeply isolated, deeply lonely and they’re sad, they are angry, they can go into substance abuse and that defragmentation that I’m really concerned about. It’s not a loneliness or the trust that you need

to do commercial relationships, it’s a more personal loneliness, the loneliness about intimacy, it’s a loneliness having other people that you can be really honest with, people that when they ask you how you’re doing? You can say bad. That’s something that I see missing increasingly so in the last fifteen years and that’s the one that worries me the most and I think that many of the outcomes that we’re serving like political polarization, gun violence and so forth maybe at the same time expressions of the deeper isolation disease.

[26:52] Haley: Yeah, I would definitely agree with you on that and it’s really sad and also kind of nerve wracking because if you think about it being on such a personal level then it eventually going to trickle into all of our other networks and everything else if we think about our communities, our families, our organizations and that’s a trickle out effect that with the sickness is not going to be healthy for the country as a whole either, sadly.

[27:19] Cesar: Oh, it’s really something that like honestly scares me and make me think that oh well I do very well here professionally and in other things but it make me think, do I want my daughter to be a teenager here because of that and honestly I don’t know. I do see this not just a US problem, in the UK there is a ministry of loneliness right now, in Sweden people also made the point of the actually live in a world where the state takes care of everything, this family doesn’t take care of anything. So, there might be some side effects of the combination of progressive individuality values, lost capitalism that we are starting to see. In general, I’ve always been a supporter of both progressive values and free markets but honestly even though I’m not against them, I’m starting to think they might be our incomplete solutions and that we might need not only individualistic values, we might need like group values, values like the ones from the family, on the teams and of social support and of sacrifice. I’m an atheist but I do believe the ideal sacrifice is genius because there is this idea that sometimes you need to put yourself second and support other people because that’s what important, that’s what your duty is. I think that honestly now especially in the coast we do have a culture in which everything is about loving yourself and being independent and not allowing anything to be said to you that is mean or that is inappropriate or anything and in reality when you have a strong emotional connections with other people things are not mean or inappropriate because you know the context and the rate you’re talking about horrible things and laughing with your friends because you have like that deeper relationship.

I’ve even started to worry that there might be some people that don’t even know that that’s possible because they only live in the world of superficial politeness and they have never had those deeper relationships in which you can be vulnerable and intimate and honest and what you expect from your friends is not to tell you that everything is fine but to tell you that your clothes look like shit and you should wear something different and you accept that and you both laugh at it because you have that strong link. So, I do see this as something in my view is haunting me, I think about it every day.

[29:34] Haley: Yeah, I was giggling at your friends telling you your outfit sucks. Angie and I have a really close relationship where we tell each other everything very openly, we’ll give each other a hard time and we’ll play around, and I think that that is missing a lot out in the world and in this culture for sure. It is sad I think that it is something that is part of the scarcity mindset and that very fear-based culture and if we expanded that I think complexity science also plays a role in this of expanding the mindset to one of abundance that we can all work together and share our knowledge and be a part of the collective whole and that’s what’s really missing. I think that

talking about complexity science and showing this other side of things can make a difference and change that narrative.

[30:23] Cesar: Yeah, I agree but also I think that in some ways sometimes we think too much about the big picture and at the end of the day what I’ve learned is that my happiness, my support, my responsibility is also very much focused on the three, four, five, or maybe even ten people if I would stretch it to the most that I am really in close contact with and I’m responsible for. So, my wife, my daughter, my close friends and collaborators that’s the people that I owe myself to and I think sometimes we’re worrying too much about the systems and too little about those that are right next to us and I think that’s what we need to change instead of always preaching grandiosity we have to just focus on spending comfortable time with people until that uncomfortable time turns into a growing friendship and opportunity and we do things as we did it before the Internet. I think that all of this social media addiction and use and everything is on the one hand partly engineered by this technology but on the other hand also consequence of a socialite related society because I find myself not using my phone in those days in which I have a really rich social experience in the real world.

When I’m going to a party with friends and maybe we’re drinking and talking and things like that and when I have that I don’t even think about using my phone. I see it also as I travel around the world there are other countries in which they still have more of those medium size network with a lot of deep emotional links and people actually spend less time online and they are less addicted to the phone because the person that they have in front of them is actually better than the hundreds of people that they have on their pocket. So, that’s another way of putting it, I do think that few strong links are the ones that we really need to worry about, not so much about the system and if we worry about those strong links eventually I think the system will have a better outcome because we are all going to be taken care by those who we should be caring about.

[32:26] Haley: Yeah, absolutely the days that I don’t have my phone out are the days that I’m having the best social interactions and really living in the moment. It takes a lot of mindfulness to not just reach for your phone in your pocket, any dull moment where you’re sitting in silence it’s just an automatic thing that happens now and that you have to really fight to counteract that and that’s what kind of dangerous about the technology just being so accessible because we have to learn how to manage our time with it.

[32:54] Cesar: At the same time, I’m super so luddite, right, quite the opposite, I develop technology, I create technology. When I’m going to speak at a TED in a couple of weeks, I’m going to be talking about how to use technology to automate many government functions on executive and legitimate branches. So, I do believe in technology as something that could be use for social good but I do think that the moment we are seeing a lot of negative effects of technology not because technology is bad but because we have like this perfect storm between technology that has been engineered to be addictive and society is isolated and therefore it’s more prone to addiction.

[33:32] Haley: Well said, yes definitely agree with that. Speaking of your TED event coming up we also learned that your collective learning group is at the International Conference on Complex Networks, Complement 2018 which is hosted by the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, so we’re just curious what they are going to talk about at this event?

[33:50] Cesar: Well there’s a few of my students there, one of them for instance Sanjay Guruprasad and he is going to be presenting a new paper is it still on the works in which we show that to learn more complex activities you need more social reinforcement okay. This is actually quite interesting because what Sanjay did to identify is he took data from giga for thousands and thousands of users and he was able to trade for each use of the first time that they made and commit in a new programming language. When we take that first commit in that programming language of evidence of a user having learn or starting to java script or starting to learn python we starting to learn CSS or HTML or any of the micro programming language that are express in giga data and what we did is to look at the with the start programming language starts committing programming language as a function of the number of its friends or contacts in giga that have participated in previous projects with him and were already using that language.

When we do simple languages like text or html and so forth basically the response curve is completely flat meaning that if you have one friend or you have all of your friends using that language that can affect the probability that you would have start using it but when you start going to real programming language like java script, python and C and you start putting this programming language in some sort of hierarchy from the ones that are maybe easier to learn or harder to learn and there are some service that people have done to try to assess the complexity. You find that the more complex language the ones that are harder to learn only are being learned by people who already have a lot of social reinforcement that’s kind of like a gather process. So, what this is telling you is that if you want to learn something simple, you don’t need social reinforcement but when you want to learn something complex you need that social reinforcement. So, this idea of complex contingent beside the other contingent to have multiple agents reinforce and transmission event is something that we would be finding here is true and necessary only in the presence of learning complex activities and behaviors but not when these activities are simple so that’s one of the papers that we’re presenting.

We’re presenting other papers on also how countries learn to export to new trade destinations and what the role of relatedness and geographical proximity and so forth on countries learning how to export a specific process specific destinations. We have other papers on labor flows and how those labor flows between company mediate knowledge flows. So, we find for instance that when you have startups that are working in an industry that was not pressing in a region the value of those startups survive increases enormously when the employees of those startups are people that have worked on related industries but none had related occupations. So, we have been looking at these different aspects of learning; learning across regions, learning how to find new destinations and in the case of Sanjay’s paper learning how to program in a more difficult language and finding that learning actually requires more social reinforcement and the activities become more complex.

[37:13] Haley: Is there anywhere that our listeners can find access to these papers?

[37:16] Cesar: Some of them are online in working paper forums, some of them are in transmission, some of them are just in the PowerPoint that we have in our group and that we use in our group meeting, so I do think that the best way would be to simply follow my profile in Google Scholar or go to the Collective Learning Group website or to my personal website because as things become available usually we post them in those places.

[37:40] Haley: Okay, great just in case our listeners would like to find out a little more about the papers that were presented at that event they can hopefully find them through those resources. We also saw that you will be attending the Ninth International Conference on Complex Systems and we are going to be there as well, we are the official podcasters for the event. We’re curious if you would tell what you’re most looking forward to at this event?

[38:07] Cesar: Well what I’m most looking forward of course is the community, it’s a community of people that I’ve known for over a decade or more right now and it’s great that they’re all going to be here in Boston which is now my city. So, that’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m looking for to actually share ideas and share friendship with the community of people that would be here during the summer.

[38:28] Haley: We’re very excited to be a part of the community and to network as well that’s one of the things that we’re most looking forward to. We can’t wait to also share some of the insights from presentations and speakers.

[38:39] Cesar: Oh yes, I actually look forward to having you here. I’m dying to meet you now that we’ve been talking.

[38:44] Haley: We can’t wait either. In wrapping up we were wondering if you have a takeaway for our listeners. Is there anything you have advice wise for how we can act effectively in our uncertain world?

[38:55] Cesar: So, one of the things that I learn to modify a bit I think it’s good advice is that when we manage groups or when we lead groups, we have to be clear about the goals and the main goals that I think you always want to keep in mind is that of learning. So, everybody fails but not everybody learns from their failures and when we have teams that are doing difficult things whether its writing papers or developing software projects or trying to launch a movement or any of those things we’re always going to be keeping some successes and probably harvesting way more failure and sometimes things can get demotivated, sometimes that can generate internal frictions and divisions and what’s important to do from a very early stage is to make sure that the team understands that all of those negative feedback, all of those failures are learning opportunities and we will embrace them as such and that at the end of the day our successes are going to be greater if we really learn from those failures. So, that’s a message that I take to heart and I try to implement it into all of my teams, I always try to make sure that when we fail we try not to just get angry and just say okay what’s the lesson here, what has happened, how are people thinking, maybe this tells us that we were thinking differently than what we expected and there is so much that we learn from that. So, that’s a big takeaway for me; that learning is not just something interesting to study but is actually a goal. You don’t want to be successful you want to be a lifelong learner and that’s true for you but it’s also true for your teams and that’s an explicit decision that you have to make and something also that you have to explicitly nurture.

[40:37] Haley: That’s definitely a practice in looking at that as an opportunity for feedback and not necessarily as any sort of criticism to who you are as a person. That’s great. So, is there anything you think we might have missed in our conversation or there any future projects in the work for you?

[40:54] Cesar: Well, we do have a number of projects that we’re about to release like one thing; we do a lot of tools to integrate, distribute and visualize data. In my group I also in a startup company that was created a few years ago called Datawheel some of the persons you may know we have those server that are complexity, which is the main tool to distribute international play data. We have Data-USA which is the main integration tool for the US public data, now a days we recently release Data-Chile which also integrates data from more than fifteen different public sources for all of Chile. But we’re releasing some new projects for instance we’re releasing soon a tool called Outputs that integrates data from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph that we can use to describe to impact of scholars of universities, of journals, of countries and so forth. We have another tool called Dart that we are releasing soon that allows anybody to transform a data feed to story, it’s a tool that allows people to create visualizations but also statistical analysis, crafts story and so forth. We have new version of Pantheon coming out soon Pantheon is a tool that visualizes the study of cultural production by using a data set of more than fifty thousand biography that is upgraded, it’s now in its second version-the first version had eleven thousand biography this one is going to have nearly fifty thousand. A completely redesigned site, we are updating the servers are going to be complexity also to our newest software pipeline and tack. So, it’s going to be much more improved, much more frequently updated; so those are some of the things that we’re releasing this semester, which I think it would be of interest of the audience and we’re also excited about it as a team.

[42:32] Haley: Great I’m glad that you mentioned Datawheel we’ll definitely include a link to that website in our show notes as well at human-current/episodes. Is there any other way that our listeners can get a hold of you?

[42:45] Cesar: I’m easy to find online, so Google is a place to start. I’m also on twitter, on Facebook, I even check my LinkedIn once every couple of weeks. I do think that I’m easy to find in social media that might be one way of reaching out to me, you basically just have to ping me on Twitter, follow me I can follow you back and then we can talk through internal messaging system.

[43:09] Haley: Great, well thank you so much for being on the Human Current Cesar it’s been a pleasure talking with you and picking your brain.

[43:17] Cesar: Thank you it was my pleasure it was a lot of fun.

[43:19] Haley: Enjoy the rest of your day, bye-bye.

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[44:19] End

*DISCLAIMER: Humans transcribed this content. Please keep in mind, there could be some human error.