Going for robustness: science

Can anyone fix science?

Science has always been in crisis. This is fine.

Hyperproblems: New Ways of Doing and Communicating Science - Hyperproblems

Hyperproblems: Hyperproblems are scientific challenges whose scale, complexity, novelty and interdependence overwhelm traditional research models, requiring…

Hyperproblems: New Ways of Doing and Communicating Science - Hyperproblems

Explorable - Think Outside The Box - Research, Experiments, Psychology, Self-Help

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default." - J.K. Rowling

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and at ...

How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?

I believe the central problem of the 21st century is how civilization co-evolves with science and technology. As our understanding of the world deepens, it enables technologies that confer ever more power to both improve and damage the world. There's currently much public discussion of this in the context of artificial superintelligence (ASI). However, it's a fundamental recurring challenge, affecting areas including climate change, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, geoengineering, brain-computer interfaces, and many more. How can we best benefit from science and technology, while supplying safety sufficient to ensure a healthy, flourishing civilization?

The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction.

Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it

Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…

On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

"There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”

When Nature Calls: The Enshittification of Science and Its Enablers

Proof-of-work papers, policy laundering, and the collapse of self-correction

A Data Utopia for Science-of-Science

Here I want to briefly sketch out a vision for how to solve a key set of problems facing science-of-science researchers, using the relatively new idea of a ‘data trust.’ In my ideal wor…

Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?

Bad papers are still published. But some other things might be getting better.

The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.