Paul Smaldino - Social identities, collective intelligence, and an ambling open life

Paul Smaldino is an explorer. That might seem like an odd way to describe a professor of cognitive science, but anyone who has glanced at his biography will recognize that he lives his life in exploration. His scholarship as his life are inspiration for keeping the lines of inquiry wide open and the things we can discover in doing so.

Join the Flourishing Commons community of listening and living - receive the newsletter that enriches these Origins conversations

Paul is Associate Professor of Cognitive and Information Science at the University of California Merced, but thinking of him only in that way would be a gross simplification and would be to miss the singular brilliance of who he is. At UC Merced, he is also faculty in the Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate program and affiliated with the Center for Analytic Political Engagement and the Center for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience. Keeping with the uncategorizable nature of his life, he is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, one of our great bastions of big questions, eccentric minds, multi-disciplinarity.

Perhaps the reason for his expanding across all of these areas of inquiry is that he studies the most immense topics: the evolution of behavior in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures; modeling social behavior; the process of how we do science and make new knowledge.

He has produced some of the most exhilarating scholarship in these growing areas of thought, evidenced by a long list of publications, each of which is as irresistible as the next. He's also the author of the book Modeling social behavior: Mathematical and agent-based models of social dynamics and cultural evolution.

Paul is also hilarious and exhibits a zest for life. To read his papers and his writing across media is a delight, often a source of out loud laughter and always thought-provoking.

So, this is a conversation about how individuals think and work and behave and on how those behaviors make up the societies we live in. But it is also about the literacies and the exploration that are required to think about these subjects that are so imminent to the world we are walking into.