The world was disordered, rains would come and the rivers would flood. No one knew when. When it rained, plants would grow, but no one knew which were fit to eat and which were poisonous. Sickness was rife. Life was precarious. The philosopher-king Yu dredged the rivers, cleaned them so they would flow into the sea. Only then were the people of the Middle Kingdom able to grow the five grains to obtain food. Generations…

Continue reading

Recently, I was chatting with Patrick Ellsworth about the merits of simulation vs analytic solutions in evolutionary game theory. As you might expect from my old posts on the curse of computing, and my enjoyment of classifying games into dynamic regimes, I started with my typical argument against simulations. However, as I searched for a positive argument for analytic solutions of games, I realized that I didn’t have a good one. Instead, I arrived at…

Continue reading

About a year ago, Vincent Cannataro emailed me asking about any resources that I might have on the philosophy and etiquette of mathematical modeling and inference. As regular readers of TheEGG know, this topic fascinates me. But as I was writing a reply to Vincent, I realized that I don’t have a single post that could serve as an entry point to my musings on the topic. Instead, I ended up sending him an annotated…

Continue reading

This past Friday, Facebook reported that they suffered a security breach that affected at least 50 million users. ‘Security breach’ is a bit of newspeak that is meant to hint at active malice and attribute fault outside the company. But as far as I understand it — and I am no expert on this — it was just a series of three bugs in Facebook’s “View As” feature that together allowed people to get the…

Continue reading

A few years ago, I wrote about the importance of pairing tools and problems in science. Not selecting the best tool for the job, but adjusting both your problem and your method to form the best pair. There, I made the distinction between endogenous and exogenous questions. A question is endogenous to a field if it is motivated by the existing tools developed for the field or slight extensions of them. A question is exogenous…

Continue reading

This week, as I was assembling furniture — my closest approach to a traditional craft — I was listening to Peter Adamson interviewing his twin brother Glenn Adamson about craft and material intelligence. Given that this interview was on the history of philosophy (without any gaps) podcast, at some point, the brothers steered the conversation to Plato. In particular, to Plato’s high regard for craft or — in its Greek form — techne. For Peter,…

Continue reading

Earlier this week on twitter, Brian Skinner wrote an interesting thread on how to distinguish good theory from crackpottery. He started with a trait that both theorists and crackpots share: we have an “irrational self-confidence” — a belief that just by thinking we “can arrive at previously-unrealized truths about the world”. From this starting point, the two diverge in their use of evidence. A crackpot relies primarily on positive evidence: he thinks hard about a…

Continue reading

Unless falsehood is the direct and immediate object of philosophy, our efforts must entirely fail of its aim.[1] It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of wrong that abounds everywhere in philosophy, and originates in the words and writings of the greatest thinkers themselves, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere error. Each separate mistake, as it topples an intricate system of thought, seems, no doubt to be something…

Continue reading

Earlier this week, I was at the Second Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology (Evol2018). It was overwhelming, but very educational. Many of the talks were about very specific evolutionary mechanisms in very specific model organisms. This diversity of questions and approaches to answers reminded me of the importance of bouquets of heuristic models in biology. But what made this particularly overwhelming for me as a non-biologist was the lack of unifying formal framework to make…

Continue reading

Tonight, I am passing through Toulouse on my way to Montpellier for the 2nd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology. If you are also attending then find me on 21 August at poster P-0861 on level 2 to learn about computational complexity as an ultimate constraint on evolution. During the flight over, I was thinking about fitness landscapes. Unsurprising — I know. A particular point that I try to make about fitness landscapes in my work…

Continue reading