Munjung Kim, Sadamori Kojaku, and Yong-Yeol Ahn
Science Advances Vol 12, Issue 14

Progress in science and technology is punctuated by disruptive innovation and breakthroughs. To understand disruptive innovations and their drivers, the ability to operationalize and estimate “disruptiveness” is critical. Yet, this task remains difficult because scientific influence propagates through both direct and indirect citation paths, and discoveries are often fragmented across multiple papers. Here, we introduce an embedding-based metric of disruptiveness. When applied to large-scale publication data, the measure not only reliably identifies canonical breakthroughs, such as Nobel Prize–winning papers, but also finds simultaneous disruptions that eluded standard approaches. By enabling more robust identification of disruptive innovations and simultaneous discoveries, our method facilitates more accurate attribution of transformative contributions while providing insights into the mechanisms driving scientific breakthroughs.

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by George Musser

Funding agencies, AI, and even scientists themselves favor tried-and-tested research avenues over exploring new ideas, to the detriment of progress.

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Kaleda K. Denton, Marcus W. Feldman, and Jonathan F. Johannemann

PNAS 123 (25) e2530712123A continuous trait contains infinitely many variants on a spectrum, such as a spectrum of behaviors or ideologies. “Conformity” to such traits has been defined as the preference for the mean variant, even if this mean is not close to any individual variant (e.g., if half of the population falls on the far right and far left of a spectrum, respectively, the mean is in the center). Here, we define conformity as the preference for clusters of common variants, not average variants. Compared to trait-averaging models, this conformity model provides a better fit to empirical data on human decision-making under many conditions, and in simulations, it often produces different population-level outcomes such as faster shifts toward poles of a spectrum.

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Claus Metzner, Ali Ghebleh, Achim Schilling, Andreas Maier, Thomas Kinfe, Patrick Krauss

Complex adaptive systems often develop organized structures without centralized control. Yet the local mechanisms by which functional organization emerges and persists remain incompletely understood. Here we propose Surviving by Serving (SBS) as a general principle of self-organization: components persist as long as their outputs are utilized by other components, whereas prolonged non-utilization promotes adaptation and exploration. To investigate this idea, we introduce a minimal multi-agent model in which agents transform shared resources and receive only local feedback when their outputs are subsequently utilized elsewhere in the system. Despite the absence of global objectives, the system spontaneously self-organizes into functional interaction networks. We observe the emergence of stable transformation chains, core-periphery organization, and the generation of novel states that enable previously inaccessible target conditions to be reached. Remarkably, self-sustaining interaction networks can arise even without external selection pressures, creating a pre-adaptive search phase from which later functional solutions emerge. These findings suggest that functional utilization may provide a simple, substrate-independent mechanism for the emergence and stabilization of organized structure in complex adaptive systems.

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Klaus Jaffe

Infodynamics studies how energy and information interact and change over time. In social behaviour this interaction is especially visible: relationships involving asymmetric energy exchange, often take the form of parasitism or corruption. Corruption denotes behaviour that is unlawful, whereas social parasitism describes exploitative relationships that are socially damaging but legal. In contemporary societies a primary form of energy is money, and many instances of parasitic or corrupt behaviour revolve around its distribution and use. Social parasitic behaviour predate human society: primate studies document bribery-like exchanges for favours, status, food, shelter, transport, or priority in scarce resources, showing that moneyless systems are not immune to corruption. Corruption can cause incalculable harm to society as victims of earthquakes in Haiti, Tukey and Venezuela can attest. This essay reviews essential aspects of corruption and social parasitism among humans. Both phenomena are sustained when information is distorted and transparency is suppressed, preventing antagonistic or corrective forces from acting.

Read the full article at: papers.ssrn.com