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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc.

At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

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It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program with many many many academic papers behind it.

He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to provide guidance for those coming after him.

Stuart Kauffman is a figure in the field with much more difficult books if that's more to your liking.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

I think Kauffman has been developing this set of ideas for a while now. I remember reading his "the origins of order" and find a lot of the ideas from the book here in more evolved forms. He really got me into visualising complex systems and their state spaces etc.

Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or Medium? Hold me beer!

Yep. For example, a few years ago a "cryptography researcher" posted in arXiv a new method to factorize numbers. The fist 10 page were an explanation of the rule that if the sum of the digits of N is a multiple of 3, then N is a multiple of 3. Then he explained something more interesting but the details were uninteligible. I skeemed the second part and I thought it was wrong, but after reading the firt part I didn't bother to verify all the details.

M J Burgess, "semi-professional philosopher", doesn't recognize the context that this side of complex systems exists in and pooh-poohs the paper, demonstrating the "semi" more than the "professional".

Given a reply I take to be accurate,

> It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program

I'd say my comment is essentially correct. It is, indeed, a kind of blog article but summarising a massive research programme, rather than defining one.

I didnt speak to the validity or status of the content; I spoke to how odd it is in what's taken to be a journal. No journal (of science) would publish this as it is.

arxiv is suffering from major mission/feature creep. IMHO, it should be limited to math and physics and maybe quantitative finance. There are too many low quality or blog-like papers being published. Maybe it would be better if it was spun off to a different website.

>arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean too many?

it used to be just math and physics

There’s lots of crap on Arxiv.

like everything on arxiv

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