(The title is as clickbait-y and tongue-in-cheek as ever. The cover illustration is by Midjourney, prompted by “I love my baby. My baby loves statistics.” . . which is, of course, a wink to that good old U/F/O track sampling Ken Nordine.) This post discusses the unfortunate and detrimental division of labor between statisticians and […]
Category: Computational social science
Salon des refusés: Foundational papers in complexity science
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 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 […]
The road to nowhere… or explaining human cooperation
Here’s a new instance in a series of silly-dialogue blog posts (find others here, here, and here). Today, the study of the emergence of cooperation is a peculiar cocktail of applied math, behavioral economics, and theoretical population biology. I have found myself on either side of discussions about if this is the correct direction (depending on […]
10 papers of the 10s
Here I will list my ten favorite papers of the 2010s related to my research. It’s not an ordered list, and it will not be too serious, so don’t hate me if your paper is not on the list. Here we go: R Bliege Bird, E Ready, EA Power, The social significance of subtle signals, […]
The mild identity crisis of computational social science
I really like computational social science and love to identify myself as a computational social scientist. Having an identity in that sense is perhaps not so important. Throughout my entire career, I’ve got accustomed to being a [one field] person doing [another field] things, and learned to like it. Still computational social science very much […]
Zachary’s Zachary karate club
If you haven’t heard about Zachary’s karate club, you should probably be careful calling yourself a network scientist in the wrong company. It is a small network data set that is used as an example and benchmark for community detection algorithms. It even has a club! The Zachary Karate Club Club. With a trophy going […]
10 good science books
As a follow-up to my post about ten papers that shaped my science, here are ten favorite books. I limit myself to science-themed books; I get inspired by fiction /other non-fiction too. 🙂 Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, 1978 Many of my fellow computational social scientists have read it (and those who haven’t already, definitely should). […]
Why computational social science? 1960s edition
(This post is a spin-off from this essay by Fredrik Liljeros and me.) The use of computers and numerical techniques (except regression analysis) has always been outside of mainstream social and behavioral science. At the same time, computational social science was not born later than computational physics or chemistry (although it is a bit hard […]
Petter Holme 