Daniele Fanelli Presentation on Measuring the complexity elephant in the metascientific room.

We are delighted to host our third SInnoPSis visiting scholar, interdisciplinary meta-researcher Daniele Fanelli, who is engaging with the SInnoPSis members and UCY colleagues.  His seminar about a unifying model for meta-science attracted considerable attention.

Claims that science faces a crisis of reproducibility and integrity largely result from an overly simplistic conception of scientific knowledge, which ignores how the varying complexity of phenomena and methodologies that characterize a research field shape the properties (e.g. the reproducibility) of the findings produced by that field. There is no defined methodology to measure these components yet, but this talk will overview promising results obtained with “K theory”, a paradigm that equates knowledge with information compression and uses a graphical methodology to measure the complexity of methods and theories.