In this armchair-philosophy blog post, I’ll argue that we need to talk about emergence with scientific detachment, and one way of doing that would be to emphasize its role in explanation rather than as a phenomenon in itself. The eye of the beholder, after all The wonder of life itself is the wonder of emergence. […]
Analogies at the edge of reason
Making analogies is the engine of human intelligence, but for humanity as a whole, and our collective-intelligence enterprise called science, it is an obstacle. I’ll try to expand on that in this, maybe not sharpest of posts. Hypotheses In science and life alike, we use analogies as shortcuts to form hypotheses. Any other strategy—experimenting, making […]
The quiet revolution: When complex left networks
Soon after networks became all the rage among statistical physicists, the field turned away from the home turf of complex systems science. This blog post argues for considering network science as distinct from complexity science. All is sketchy and subjective (from the viewpoint of a statistical physicist jumping on the complex-networks bandwagon). I can think […]
The poster lovers’ manifesto
The arguments As in-person conferences are returning after the pandemic, here’s a tongue-in-cheek blog post to set the priorities straight. It’s simple: poster presentations are better than oral. Or, more precisely, the only reason not everyone is excited about poster sessions is that they are the Cinderellas of academic conferences: tucked into some small and […]
Complexity science in the name of politics: a travel diary
This is a reading diary of a naïve complexity / computational social scientist’s first encounter with F. A. Hayek + Eastern Bloc tektology & cybernetics. You might have heard about project Cybersyn? In 1970s Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist regime was betting on a systems-theoretical approach to the complex decision-making that’s an inevitable consequence of a […]
The absolutely most fundamental
I recently revisited some social network classics, and this post collects random thoughts about them. In sum, I want to cheer on research on the foundations of social network theory. Not because the house would crumble without stronger foundations but because that’s where the coolest future discoveries will be. These reflections are rough, quick, and […]
The golden age of complexity science books
Here is a list of complexity science books in a popular science style from when the hype was the biggest—from 1987 and a decade further*—and some very brief comments. Several of them are available at archive.org, as linked below. I’m pretty sure I forgot a few. If so, I’ll add them later. * I’m no […]
Temporal networks and the extraordinary fluidity of effortless abstractions
This is a semi-grumpy post about the many ambiguities and reinventions in the field of temporal networks. Cheerful posts are more fun, so do consider browsing away. Also, I’m not always contributing to clarity myself, so maybe I’m not entitled to whine about this. Many types of data consist of discrete interaction events, where we […]
Intro video to the history and ideas of complexity science and networks
I needed a video presenting the historical development of ideas behind the complexity and network science in 20 minutes—an impossible task of course (especially since I couldn’t spend too much time on prepping it). Anyway, someone out there could be interested, so here it is: Some credits not stated in the video: The starling murmuration […]
Good idea! But it’s already been explored by geographers
This post is an attempt to start a Mexican wave among computational social scientists (not only the urban science crowd) for the golden age of structural geography—the 1960s-80s. The main point is not to say geographers should have more credit but that literature from that era is a treasure trove of ideas. Neither is the […]
Petter Holme 