This is the story of a research project that is so wild that no funding agency would have approved it—but we believe in it, so we are doing it anyway. My colleague Meren said we should record the story of this project as oral histories. He already started his, this is the start of mine. For about three years I will try to regularly update this page with the latest developments from the project.

The Idea: Human Progress

Academic disciplines make sense, sometimes. There is much to explore so you can’t expect people to be experts in everything at the same time. So it’s not a bad idea to form some tribes of people who are interested in similar things, use similar methods and generally agree on what is cool.

However, great progress is often made when someone manages to overcome a disciplinary divide and understands both sides and thus becomes a translator of ideas. The greatest such divide separates the STEM disciplines from humanities and social science. And of course in the past there were good reasons for having this divide: Humanities and Social Sciences were interested in incredibly complex high-dimensional questions, while the natural sciences were making good progress by radical simplification.

Except for some rare exceptions these worlds did not fit well together. Natural Sciences did not have the right tools to even accommodate the questions that the humanities were asking, and simplifying the systems from the humanities down to the point where the sciences could apply their methods would have meant losing the very aspects that scholars from the humanities were interested in.

But over the past decade both sides of the divide have changed. In the natural sciences we now have much better tools for addressing complex questions. Network science has given us many in roads to explore complex structured systems, and the study of complex systems has led to advances in the understanding of science itself that make it easier to recognize the tremendous work that the humanities have done. On the humanities side of the divide new methods have arrived, including distant reading and the use of AI to process large datasets.

As a result of the new developments social sciences and humanities can now produce solid statistical evidence that speaks to natural scientists, and natural scientists have finally got advanced their tools to the point where addressing questions from the humanities becomes achievable.

The idea of HUMAN PROGRESS is to bridge the divide between the sciences and humanities. Of course we are not the first to try that bridging. There are plenty of projects where natural scientists do their thing, and then their is a social scientists studying the reception of that research among stakeholders or the general public. But that is not what we want to do. There have also been plenty of projects where physicists set out to reform one humanity or the other, usually with limited success. This is also not what we want to do. What we want to do is to is to learn from the social sciences and humanities and let them change how natural sciences are done.

WOW! Wait a minute, do you really think a social scientist could tell a physicist how to do better physics? Yes, next question.

Okay, maybe a short explanation. HIFMB is a biodiversity institute, and I know that our needs help from the social sciences and humanities, because I, a physicist, constantly run into questions concerning humans. In fact for some years now I have been collaborating with people from the social sciences and humanities to address these questions. Now we will have five project with a full three-year postdoc position each to put these collabortions on a firmer basis.