In this talk, Jonah Wilberg argues that complexity science offers a set of tools that - having been designed to understand systems that are dynamic, nonlinear, and prone to radical change - are especially suitable for making sense of our current period of global societal transformation and crisis .
Jonah traces how this scientific tradition has grown into a genuine alternative worldview, one that challenges the reductionist assumption that complex phenomena can be understood by breaking them into parts. Emergence, interconnectedness, and bounded unpredictability are not just scientific concepts here - they are lenses for rethinking how societies change and how change can be steered.
The core of the talk applies three formal modeling frameworks - dynamical systems, agent-based models, and evolutionary game theory - to the specific question of societal transformation. Drawing on thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Donella Meadows, and the Santa Fe Institute tradition, Jonah explores what it would actually mean to model a civilization in transition, and what leverage points might exist for nudging it toward something better.
Jonah is developing a sequence of posts based on this talk, the first of which is available here.
