In the Media: The Way We Were

Julia Goldberg of the Santa Fe Reporter interviewed SFI President and The Complex Alternative co-editor David Krakauer about the Santa Fe Institute’s evolving response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to sharing knowledge and ideas, Krakauer wanted to “experiment” with presenting science in “real time,” and share the concomitant and inevitable fallibility that is part of science’s underpinning.

“I was interested in that experiment in part because most science is very retrospective,” Krakauer tells SFR. “You wait a few years until the dust has settled and…you know approximately whether you were right or wrong. This is a different kind of thing. Let’s do it in real time; we’re probably going to be wrong at least half the time; what does that look like in a crisis?”

Krakauer wanted to both share those errors and reflect upon them. “One of the things I was very keen to ask was, ‘OK, this is what you said in April . . . what do you think now? Some people were willing to say, ‘Oops, I really did get it wrong.’ And others, ‘I got it right!’ So everyone is different.”

Read more at: https://www.sfreporter.com/news/theinterface/2022/02/09/the-way-we-were/