Best Summary of A New Kind of Science

Wolfram's blog.

Bruno Latour

I've been reading a lot of Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and philosopher of science. His book, We Have Never Been Modern contains what may be the best review of another awesome book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Latour reconceptualizes their work as showing the invention of separate spaces for scientific versus political discourse, not just the clash between the two realms. Latour goes on to propose a three-category conceptual framework for everything: natural, social, and textural.

In the Prince and the Wolf, Latour out-argues a professional philosopher by refusing to believe in the necessity of a single viewpoint. Instead, he argues in favor of 'Occasionalism' which finds its philosophy in each new moment.

EF Schumacher on "Progress"

"He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."

Thinkers

Steven Levitt , author of Freakonomics
Seth Roberts, nutritionist and psychologist best known for experimenting on himself.
Stewart Brand, founder of whole earth catalog/magazine
H.L Mencken
Milton Friedman
Rustum Roy

Thinkers I don't agree with
Stewart Brand
Patrick Moore

Nuclear solutions?

Stewart Brand is a great visionary and thinker. But how did the inventor of the Clock of the Long Now become convinced that GMOs and nuclear power are a good thing? The main problem I have with his reasoning about technology is the premise he starts with; that we must maintain our current profligate and wasteful use of energy and natural resources.

If we are locked into such a zero-sum game then yes, nuclear and GMOs may be the best of many bad options. But if we can instead optimize our whole economic system we may find that designed efficiency improvements can completely eliminate our imagined need for more power plants. (I refer the reader who wants to learn more about market-based efficiency solutions to the ample work of Amory Lovins)

Unfortunately the real problem is not a lack of energy or resources (if anything, we produce too much) but a lack of price signals that would tend to optimize the current system. If the market reflects the true cost of energy (instead of reflecting subsidies and missed externalities) these efficiency improvements would already have happened and we would not be forced to choose between pollution today or pollution 10,000 years from now.

Brand argues based on the premise of the lesser of two evils, but when it comes to big, hard questions about adopting new technologies we have an obligation to do much better. Brand is at his best when he puts his faith in the emergent properties of complex systems. Unfortunately our current economic system is not perfect. The solutions do exist and it is the hope of our generation that we can implement them before we are scared into a future of increasingly hazardous big-technology fixes.