Spatium Novum

Spatium Novum means "a new space". It is where I write about models: how they get built, what they leave out, and what happens when someone trusts them anyway.

My background is quantitative research. In practice that means building models of complicated systems, then spending most of the time working out where they break. That habit is the only thing holding this blog together, because the subjects do not: commodity trading and finance, machine learning, pharmacology, economics, cognitive science. I have not settled on which of them I will end up working in. Writing about all of them is, for now, how I find out.

The Levins line on the front page is the closest thing I have to a method. No single model is trustworthy. Several wrong ones, built on different assumptions, sometimes agree about something, and that agreement is worth more than any of them alone.

Anchor essays go up roughly every two weeks, with shorter reading notes in between. If something here is useful, or wrong, I want to hear about it.

Denis Joly
denis.a.joly@proton.me · LinkedIn · RSS