Seminar: Why does history surprise us?

The Russian military aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 demonstrated how illusory our confidencein the stability of the global political system was. This confidence stemmed mainly from theshort timescale of our observations and from naive expectations that political structures and social relationsconstitute fixed points in the evolution of history. In reality, however, there is no reason to assumethat the socio-political order known to us is the only possible one. During the lecture, I will presentseveral agent-based models in which changes in socio-political structures exhibit a discontinuouscharacter, especially when the collective dynamics of social groups depend not only on deterministicinteractions between agents but also on social noise arising, for example, from communication disturbancesor the complexity of individual beliefs. These discontinuous transitions result from multistabilityin multi-agent models. The lecture will be illustrated with computer simulations of the systems under consideration.

Janusz A. Hołyst is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, where he founded the Physics in Economy and Social Sciences laboratory. He is one of the pioneers in applying methods of physics to the modeling of economic and social processes. His current research interests include simulations of evolving networks, models of collective opinion and emotion formation, econophysics, statistical physics, and data science and information overload.

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