This is a repository of articles and books that I frequently come back to. They are formative in my understanding of science and research.
- More is Different (P.W. Anderson): a pure reductionist view of science is incomplete. Just because a larger entity is “made up of” smaller entities does not mean that everything there is to know about the larger entity can be derived purely from the properties of the constituent entities. More is different.
- Strong Inference (John R. Platt): a good theory is one that can be falsified with critical experiments.
- 50 Years of Data Science (David Donoho)
- Machines of Loving Grace (Dario Amodei): what would our lives look like if powerful AI successfully transforms the world.
- The Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton): “General methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.”
- Should social science be more solution-oriented? (Duncan Watts): social science has an “incoherency problem”, where a larege number of inconsistent theories are developed. This is fueled by an emphasis on the “advancement of theories over the solution of practical problems.”, and “one way for social science to make progress is to adopt a more solution-oriented approach, starting first with a practical problem and then asking what theories (and methods) must be brought to bear to solve it.”