Anh Nguyen

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.

In her book Hopeful Pessimism, Van der Lugt argues that, often, political activists act regardless of the outcome of their action. This form of action is informed by a ‘blue hope’ that finds its value in commitment regardless of effect and is based on openness of the future and uncertainty, not evidence and probability. This short essay argues for an alternative explanation of political action: often, activists are acting from despair, and the effects, outcomes and consequences are the central motivating factor despite the near impossibility of success. Acting from despair involves a tragic pursuit of one’s goals that is (almost certainly) doomed to fail to reach one’s goals. An agent that acts from despair is (1) motivated by the outcome they desperately want to bring about and, at the same time, (2) accurately judges the outcome to be extremely unlikely or impossible to achieve for the agent. I argue that acting from despair is not only just as plausible as blue hope for explaining political action but often captures the normative orientation of political activism better than blue hope can.

In the face of a worsening climate crisis that continues to be neglected by governments, the climate movement faces major challenges. Many climate activists see civil disobedience as their moral duty to stop the climate crisis, while some activists and philosophers suggest that civil disobedience must be abandoned, and that violence must be included as a method (Malm 2021, Arridge 2023). This article explores this debate in a new way: How much can climate activism demand? Which forms of action are particularly morally demanding for individuals and groups? And at what point is climate activism morally overdemanding? Drawing on classic debates about moral overdemandingness, I show that civil disobedience, as practiced by climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, can be both psychologically and physically overdemanding (Hooker 2009), integrity-violating and self-alienating (Williams 1973, Railton 1984), as well as unfair (Murphy 2003). However, I also show that moral overdemandingness can also occur within a duty to escalate the climate movement’s methods in a way that includes violence, which, given that most climate activists are pacifists, can corrupt the identity of the climate movement.

This study aims to determine whether political connections and foreign investments influence the level of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure among listed firms. To empirically explore these relationships, we utilized a novel dataset of 111 listed manufacturing firms on the HOSE stock exchange in Vietnam, covering the period from 2015 to 2022. Content analysis was conducted to assess the levels of ESG disclosure, while ordered logit and random effect estimators, along with several robustness checks, were applied to quantify the impacts of political connections and foreign investments. Our findings reveal that foreign connections are positively correlated with higher levels of ESG disclosure, whereas politically connected firms are associated with negative impacts and lower levels of ESG disclosure compared to those with foreign connections. These results address the research questions effectively and contribute to the literature by offering an updated view of current ESG practices in Vietnam, an emerging economy with evolving ESG norms. The findings provide both theoretical and practical contributions to the understanding of ESG disclosure, with important implications for policy-makers and business leaders.

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual-task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions.