The Santa Fe Institute has launched an ambitious project in which leading complexity scientists comment on “foundational” papers. However, many of them are not foundational in the sense that they started a line of research that led to the complexity science of today; some of them are even foundational for lines of research that are rather distinct from complexity science. I […]
The holistic tribes
This blog post is hopefully the beginning of the lecture notes for an upcoming course. Ultimately, I want to rectify the story of the development of ideas around complex systems, which has neither been a steady and well-informed progression nor a succession of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but rather something messy and disconnected: a story of […]
Dissipative delusions
Lately, I’ve been reading books and papers of, and about, Ilya Prigogine, and here’s a little report. [1] I have always been fascinated by cult leaders. The way they create wallless echo chambers—where what they say resonates with the minds of their followers. It feels unbelievable that I would fall for such rhetoric. How could […]
What I was gonna say (Tractatus edition)
This is a post about how AI (if used to the best of our abilities) might rid science of its knowledge memes. Which are prone to become factoids, or overshadow more important results. While adding slides to my keynote talk at the inaugural Cudan conference on cultural data analytics, I wanted to say something about […]
Women pioneers II
One of my most-read blog posts is this one, where I highlighted some trailblazing women scientists—Helen Jennings, Klara von Neumann, Mary Tsingou, Helen Abby, Miriam Kretzschmar, and Fan Chung Graham—in fields related to network science and computational social science. In the eight years since that post, I learned about more, and now is the time […]
Networks of the day
For a few years, I’ve been sharing interesting networks as I come across them. Here is a gallery.
Six tips for interdisciplinary lovers
I think I know a lot about interdisciplinary collaborations, so I’ve been planning to write down some notes for a long time. Tongue in cheek, but also serious. Take time to get to know each other Yes, it will take time. It might feel like you understand each other from the moment you met; that […]
The well-groomed anarchists: Why the world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should know, do, and a few words about our hairstyles. Should it really be an academic discipline? Maybe this is changing, but five or […]
Human black boxes
Just some plain reflections that must have been expressed better by someone else, somewhere else. AIs are often criticized for being black boxes—good at predicting, but bad at explaining. They get it right, but we don’t know why. That AIs are black boxes doesn’t mean that humans are not (which is an opinion I often […]
The twilight of fantastical science
A post arguing that we shouldn’t give bonus points to off-beat and bold theories just because they are off-beat and bold. The allure of deep, hidden connections Probably we all had moments when we were seduced by the idea that there are unknown, hidden, long-ranging connections between seemingly distant parts of reality. The examples range […]
Petter Holme 