Attention conservation notice: 8000+ words of political theory by geeks. For quite a while now, Henry Farrell and I have been worrying at a skein of ideas running between institutions, networks, evolutionary games, democracy, collective cognition, the Internet and inequality. Turning these threads into a single seamless garment is beyond our hopes (and not our style anyway), but we think we've been getting somewhere in at least usefully disentangling them. An upcoming workshop gave us an...

Attention conservation notice: 1400 words on a friend's proposal to do away with peer review, written many weeks ago when there was actually some debate about this. Larry is writing about peer review (again), this time to advocate "A World Without Referees". Every scientist, of course, has day-dreamed about this, in a first-lets-kill-all-the-lawyers way, but Larry is serious, so let's treat this seriously. I'm not going to summarize his argument; it's short and you can and should go read it...

Sometimes, all you can do is quote verbatim* from your inbox: Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:31:57 -0400 From: Stephen Wolfram To: Cosma Shalizi Subject: 10-year followup on "A New Kind of Science" Next month it'll be 10 years since I published "A New Kind of Science" ... and I'm planning to take stock of the decade of commentary, feedback and follow-on work about the book that's appeared. My archives show that you wrote an early review of the...