Episode 25: Simon DeDeo, Associate professor in Social and Decision Sciences

Simon DeDeo is an associate professor in Social and Decision Sciences and the William S. Dietrich II Career Development Chair in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was previously affiliated with Complex Systems and the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University. Prior to that, Simon was an Omidyar Fellow at SFI. Simon has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. At his Laboratory for Social Minds he and his team undertake empirical investigations, and build mathematical theories, of both historical and contemporary phenomena. The data analyzed range from the centuries-long timescales of cultural evolution to the second-by-second emergence of social hierarchy in the non-human animals, from the editors of Wikipedia to the French Revolution to the gas stations of Indiana. They create synthetic, deep-time accounts of major transitions in political order, with the goal of predicting and understanding our species’ future. Website: https://sites.santafe.edu/~simon/