Are academics miserable? Could science help us to be happy? In this conversation about alternative research environments we explore these questions and what sort of a research environment we might want. Pavel is now creating such spaces - like a week-long mindful research retreat this summer.

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,...

At my recent Vipassana retreat, I had a peculiar experience of feeling distinct physical sensations outside of my physical body... O_o

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

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...

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

Seeing is believing. Before we could accept the germ theory of disease, we had to invent the microscope to directly see the culprits of...

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

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...

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

Are mindfulness practices just attempts to reverse-engineer our brain's compression algorithms?

One of the most important and amazing feats that our brain learns to do in this complex world is to find compressed representations of...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...