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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

50 years of limits to growth

In my closest scientific surrounding, The Limits to Growth is surprisingly unknown, so at its 50th anniversary, this blog post is an intro + my reflections. For short, it’s a fascinating story of what happens when computational social science makes a splash. If we interpret computational social science literally—not just meaning social media data mining—its […]