I’ve often heard of the dichotomy of making decisions with “mind” vs “heart” – which I understood to be roughly equivalent to conscious...

I see a problem with current science. It’s not the reproducibility crisis, nor the toxic work culture, nor the misaligned incentive. But...

We live in a "consensus reality" – where reproducibility, or redundancy of consistent records, is what makes something "objectively true." B

TL;DR / summary: Can we objectively define "progress"? A Darwinian definition seems plausible. But when referring to cultures,...

The Paradox of Tolerance argues that an absolutely tolerant society cannot exist. I don't like that. Here I propose one possible solution.

“Abiogenesis”: how does non-living matter turn into living matter? Here are my big ideas from 6 years of PhD work on this

What is a magic trick? Any complex system, such as our world, may be described in terms of its numerous degrees of freedom, each...

“I’m a physicist, I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains” –Sheldon, “The Big Bang Theory” While...

I just did my first substantial donation (informed by Effective Altruism, and my own work on complex social systems). Even though I have...

Can a butterfly really cause a hurricane? Having been working in complexity science, I realize that I have a problem with the...

Complexity science, and especially the dream to deeply understand social systems and build concrete predictive models (such as Asimov’s...

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...

In the last few posts we reasoned that “growing cars” would mean somehow creating them without a human planning out all the details of...