Against the Paradox of Tolerance
[The ideas here followed from some great discussion with Jerome Warren in Brussels 2022] Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance argues that...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jun 28, 2022
- 18 min
A physicist's approach to Origins of Life
I spent the 6 years in my Ph.D. thinking of the broad topic of origins of life, or “abiogenesis”: how does non-living matter turn into...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Mar 26, 2022
- 3 min
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 30, 2022
- 3 min
Understanding the whole without the parts?
“I’m a physicist, I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains” –Sheldon, “The Big Bang Theory” While...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 13, 2022
- 2 min
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
- May 14, 2021
- 2 min
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
- Mar 12, 2021
- 3 min
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
- Jan 28, 2021
- 3 min
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 13, 2021
- 2 min
Designing environments to select designs
In the last few posts we reasoned that “growing cars” would mean somehow creating them without a human planning out all the details of...
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