THE WORLD AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann said that from the time of Aristotle to about 1800 the concept of society was almost identical with what we call social system, the encompassing system was called the political society. This conception lost its significance with the modern industrialized state. It has never been replaced with an adequate theoretical framework. Attempts to replace politics with economy or culture use a part of social reality to replace the wúhole. He suggests using systems analysis to "disclose the structure and processes which characterize the social system--the most important of all social systems which includes all others. " Niklas Luhmann- Contingency, risk, trust and reflection. Web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/path.pdf.
NetLogo Home Page. NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment.
It is used by tens of thousands of students, teachers and researchers worldwide. It also powers HubNet participatory simulations. It is authored by Uri Wilensky and developed at the CCL. You can download it free of charge. What can you do with NetLogo? A step in the right direction. By Greg Fisher On Thursday we co-hosted an event with the RSA called “21st Century Policy Development” (21CPD).
This blog is a sort of follow-up to that event, arising out of a number of the questions asked during Q&A. What I want to do is to illustrate quite how intractable social systems and the biosphere (and in fact the whole universe) are; and to contextualise what value I believe networks and complex systems add to our understanding (and, by implication, our ability to make good decisions).