Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

But it turns out that learning as a phenomenon, which we're starting to understand also now in AI, is a nonlinear phenomenon.

And if you stick with the same thing, you get much better at it.

than being a generalist.

It's not just by unit time again.

There's another non-linearity in this.

And this basically means that, you know, a great scientist, a great lawyer, a great, you know, musician is much better than a generalist person who also plays some music.

Right, right.

And so the ability to specialize and depend on other people creates knowledge and value in these networks in a way that can't exist before, cannot exist in other ways.

So that's the part that's kind of inside the individual, and that's what creates...

the fact that these things stick is that now you've changed people.

And what's interesting, not only you see this, of course, in professions and knowledge and personality types, as you said, it may be that some of this effect may be sorting.

There may be people of different dispositions that prefer different environments, but some of it also seems to be learned that people just in that environment acquire that.

So, you know, early on, we saw that people walk a little faster in cities, for example, that are larger.

So that's interesting.

Well, the explanation is that in some sense you need to fit a certain number.

Time is not compressible, right?

So all these things we were talking about, you're compressing space, but you cannot...

change time so you got what you're going to do is fit more things in it you have to move faster you move faster as well yeah and you have more interactions you have move faster between them and it's the same for everything but in the behaviors available to people where we can't regulate the speed right we have more highways we regulate the speed in some ways but we have subways that go faster you know so a bunch of very curious adaptations but a lot of this is you can see

You know, there's a lot about space and time and then has to do with this ability that people, in biology more generally, but people have to adapt to such circumstances by acquiring different knowledge.

So, yes, two things should be said.

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