When we learn things by studying or doing research, we perceive understanding as coming to us in step-like a-ha moments. I will argue that these moments happen more likely when we recognize (or map our observations to) specific patterns of explanation. The snag is, of course, that reality doesn’t always follow human-preferred patterns, so they […]
Category: Philosophy
The embers of collective intelligence in science
In this blog post, I’ll explore reasons to call science a product of collective intelligence. I’ll look for something more than the sum of its parts, something more than a Cartesian or Baconian view of science as an edifice built by the contributions of many individuals. Are there steps of scientific progress taken by several […]
The eureka fallacy of symmetry
This post continues the theme of how quirks of the human psyche limit our advancement of knowledge—quirks that are very much avoidable if you are aware of them, but if you aren’t, they move the goalposts for scoring that Eureka feeling. I’ll entertain the hypothesis that if we are presented with a symmetrical, neatly structured […]
Essay time: AI and science’s happy ending
I’ve been a bit disappointed with the debate about the future use of AI in science. Either it has been short-sighted: “Wow, let’s try this thing we’ve always been doing, but with chatbots instead” or pessimistic without any real arguments. So, in remedy, I wrote an essay, channeling my inner Marvin Minsky. Download! 👏🏻 It! […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 