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 […]
Category: System science
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 […]
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 […]
A better way of thinking about emergence
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
What complexity science is, and why
I also posted this post on arXiv, in a more reader-friendly layout and somewhat shaped-up writing. This is a post/essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It is the result of my nostalgia-driven hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and […]
{complex [systems} theory]
(This is a light-hearted and ill-researched post. When the infinite amount of free time I ordered on Amazon finally arrives, I might dig into it deeply and be serious.) Everyone who tries to read widely about systemsy stuff will inevitably feel puzzled by the large-scale flow of ideas. In particular, there is a—sometimes crystal clear, […]
Petter Holme 