Really recommend this article in Scientific American by M. Mitchell Waldrop (author of Complexity, one of my favourite books), about Science 2.0 (a term I think is silly) and the “open access” approach to publishing (i.e. social/online/dynamic/wiki-style) being adopted by a new generation of scientists; see MIT’s OpenWetWare project as an example. I want to consider the implications of scientific organizations & communities becoming more like the organisms & ecosystems they study. We’re all of a sudden much more able to design and observe social systems as models and analogies for more general sciences of complexity and life. It’s an expansion of what researchers like John Holland, Douglas Hofstadter, Paul Thagard have been doing for years with computers. But of course social systems aren’t as clean and hard and clear as computer models and math, and they’re a lot trickier to manipulate (both practically and ethically), but that’s precisely why I think we need to push this: at the very least, the attempt is good practice for improving how we address real social problems — challenges we don’t have the option of walking away from.
