Simon DeDeo - Studying society, the science of science, and collisions with the strange
Simon DeDeo's inquiry takes on the most immense topics: astrophysics, history, epistemology, culture. He brings the precision of a physicist, the capability of a data scientist, and the sensibility of a philosopher to thinking about how we live our lives; and his polymathic life might be the example we need to make sense of the world we are walking into, one requiring an evolution to our way of studying and understanding.
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Professor DeDeo is William S. Dietrich II Career Development Chair in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the incomparable Laboratory for Social Minds. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), where, he says, physicists go to change.
His laboratory studies the present and past of the human species to better understand its future. In so doing he attends to dynamics we don’t often take seriously enough: the use of words and signals, the formation of ideas, and the interactions of minds and the world and other minds that create the worlds we live in.
Simon is a student of mathematics and astrophysics, with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Princeton. The orientation of those sensibilities changed during his three years as Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and you might describe his work now as combining data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.
His inquiry, as his life, is a lens on our world that brings into relief how change happens, how our cultures form, and how we understand ourselves.
To listen to Simon is an exhilaration, as intellectually stimulating as it is culturally important, and it is a great honor to welcome him to Origins Podcast.