Honest science is spirituality
I see a problem with current science. It’s not the reproducibility crisis, nor the toxic work culture, nor the misaligned incentive. But...
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Pavel Chvykov
Feb 711 min read
Quantum Darwinism, social constructs, and the scientific method
We live in a "consensus reality" – where reproducibility, or redundancy of consistent records, is what makes something "objectively true." B
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 224 min read
Values Darwinism
TL;DR / summary: Can we objectively define "progress"? A Darwinian definition seems plausible. But when referring to cultures,...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jun 11, 20235 min read
Aura as a proprioceptive glitch
At my recent Vipassana retreat, I had a peculiar experience of feeling distinct physical sensations outside of my physical body... O_o
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 9, 20234 min read
Against the Paradox of Tolerance
The Paradox of Tolerance argues that an absolutely tolerant society cannot exist. I don't like that. Here I'm proposing one way around it -
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Pavel Chvykov
Aug 30, 20224 min read
And the word was "God"
I want to explore a word that seems to be very triggering, and thereby somehow very important, in our culture: the word God. Whether you...
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Pavel Chvykov
Mar 26, 20223 min read
Magic, tricks, and high-dimensional configuration spaces
What is a magic trick? Any complex system, such as our world, may be described in terms of its numerous degrees of freedom, each...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 23, 20224 min read
Emotional Microscope
Seeing is believing. Before we could accept the germ theory of disease, we had to invent the microscope to directly see the culprits of...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 13, 20222 min read
Doing “good”
I just did my first substantial donation (informed by Effective Altruism, and my own work on complex social systems). Even though I have...
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Pavel Chvykov
Aug 16, 20214 min read
A gentle apocalypse
Is robots taking over the world bad? Some of the AI-risk scenarios I’ve read almost feel like it’s inevitable — and I’ve been wondering...
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Pavel Chvykov
May 14, 20212 min read
Does butterfly affect?
Can a butterfly really cause a hurricane? Having been working in complexity science, I realize that I have a problem with the...
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Pavel Chvykov
Apr 30, 20213 min read
Mindfulness as debugging
Are mindfulness practices just attempts to reverse-engineer our brain's compression algorithms?
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Pavel Chvykov
Apr 4, 20212 min read
Our compressed perception
One of the most important and amazing feats that our brain learns to do in this complex world is to find compressed representations of...
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Pavel Chvykov
Mar 12, 20213 min read
Is social theory our doom?
Complexity science, and especially the dream to deeply understand social systems and build concrete predictive models (such as Asimov’s...
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Pavel Chvykov
Feb 10, 20213 min read
What is magic?
Don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to discover real magic in this world. Recently, I was trying to formulate this desire more...
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Pavel Chvykov
Feb 4, 20214 min read
Letters about structure of the universe
In this post, I wanted to share a bit of a sense of the more fun aspects of a scientific career: namely having cool conversations and...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 28, 20213 min read
In search of Truth
Is there one true way to understand a tree? Well, of course there is — talk to any scientist! A physicist will tell you that it’s a...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 20, 20212 min read
Is Santa real?
Just wanted to take a break to sprinkle some magic into this blog ;P Well as it happens, I have always believed in Santa. Perhaps thanks...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 15, 20212 min read
Deriving everyday reality from fundamental rules
What makes a good scientific model? As a theoretical physicist I used to think that modeling everything at the level of atoms seems like...
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Pavel Chvykov
Jan 6, 20212 min read
Darwinian designs
What is the difference between the amazing designs of biology, and those built by humans? Well, as we’ve discussed in the last couple...
16 views0 comments
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