On the prescriptive element: I don’t like to think of it as prescriptive – the way I use it, that word is a bit too controlling for my taste – but I am certainly trying to lay out a vision of what I think is possible, if certain choices are made. In the end, I’m guessing that what I’m aiming for is what you’d call prescriptive. Of course, much of the book is descriptive and explanatory, as well; if it were not, the vision would not be grounded in reality.

I confess to being very curious as to whether The Future of Science will include a prescriptive element (as William Osler’s writings on the future of medicine, for example, always did).

As I told Dave Bacon yesterday, when it comes to predicting the future, I personally belong to the philosophical school of Terminator 2 … meaning, the school that believes that there is a huge element of free will in the future of science, and therefore a central role for prescriptive elements in all serious attempts to foresee that future.

Because after all, who would wish to read a vision of future science that comprised a dreary catalogue of every possible future, most of which are—let’s face it—dismayingly dystopian? (although there is a wonderfully prescient 1955 essay by von Neumann titled Can We Survive Technology that is amounts to just such a catalogue).

Today’s physicians appreciate that William Osler did medicine an wonderful service by setting forth an explicitly prescriptive vision of the future of medicine … a vision that included an explicit commitment to openness in education and in practice.

So please accept, as a signifier of my optimism and respect, my hope that you (and other writers too) may accomplish the same wonderful service for the future of science.

Good luck, and please write fast!

Whew … Michael … doesn’t every-day experience teach us that in almost every sphere of human endeavor, the exact opposite is true?

My own field of medicine is a good example. Trauma surgery is taught by Osler-style methods of open immersive apprenticeship. This means that every aspect of trauma surgery is done completely openly … nothing is hidden … because the the greatest trauma surgeons operate with residents (literally) looking over their shoulder every single minute of every single case.

In other words, trauma surgery is already learned by methods that Michael would regard as utopian in their whole-hearted commitment to openness. Not just in principle, but in living daily reality.

The result, however, is the exact opposite of Michael’s idea that “everyone realizes that everyone else makes mistakes and does silly things routinely.”

Instead, trauma surgery residents swiftly realize, from the unimpeachable evidence of their own eyes, that top-level trauma surgeons almost never make mistakes and definitely never do silly things routinely.

The possibility thus exists—it is almost a certainty in my opinion—that increasing openness in science will cause the culture of science to resemble more closely the culture of trauma surgery.

Would this be a good thing, or a bad thing? In either case, the results almost certainly (IMHO) will not be the results what most proponents of open science foresee or advocate.

By the way, I am a huge fan of Osler-style methods of open immersive apprenticeship, and I definitely support Michael’s idea that science (and math and engineering) would benefit from being taught this way … my opinion as to the likely results differs from Michael’s mainly because of my intimate personal experience in observing the effects of these methods when put into daily practice.

Robert Boyle’s contemporary Pierre Bayle is worth studying too—both investigators have fine Wikipedia articles—because the energy released by the dovetailing of their two schools of thought helped nucleate the phase-transition that today we call “The Enlightenment”, from whose continued expansion scientists and engineers (and everyone else too) still benefit today (to adopt a physics metaphor).

But paradoxically, it may be that the most valuable work I can share with you (and everyone reading this blog) is not the best “future of science” essay ever written, but rather a contender for the worst “future of science” essay ever written.

This would be engineer Samuel Florman’s 2003 The Aftermath: A Novel of Survival.

An essay on why Florman’s novel is widely viewed as being “beyond bad” (as one Amazon reviewer put it) would be just as interesting (to me at least) as an essay on why Florman’s justly-acclaimed The Existential Pleasures of Engineering is good.

What’s in the middle, quality-wise? Norbert Wiener’s surprisingly good (IMHO) novel The Tempter.

The point being (if there is a point) that for several centuries, many people who contemplate the future of science and engineering have been motivated to construct narratives about this future … in other words, have been motivated to describe not just noble goals, but also, to prescribe realistic and exciting paths to achieving those goals … which I hope hereby to encourage you, Michael, to attempt also!

Because if not you, then who?

Mainly to stimulate some discussion, I will observe that the openness-related issues that Michael raises differ mainly in degree, not in kind, from issues that previous generations of scientists and engineers have faced.

As evidence, consider this fifty-year-old essay from Time Magazine (Monday, Apr. 29, 1957 edition) titled The New Age:

The house was like none ever built before. Its roof was a honeycomb of tiny solar cells that used the sun’s rays to heat the house and furnish all the electric power … The TV set hung like a picture, flat against the wall. … The radio was only as big as a golf ball. … The telephone was a movie-like screen that projected both the caller’s image and voice. … New companies need little equipment or capital, but they need plenty of brainpower … In Los Angeles, a new electronics plant is built every fortnight … Some day soon, big computers will be reduced to the size of a shoe box and sell for several hundred dollars.

Sound familiar?

My point is that the above 1950s narrative was both technically accurate (within reasonable expectation) and (equally importantly) it served an important social function. Namely, it provided an (highly imperfect yet functionally necessary) shared prescriptive narrative.

To summarize, widely embraced narratives like Time Magazine’s constituted (loosely speaking) a popular-culture Federalist Papers of the electronic revolution.

AFAICT, no similarly prescriptive technological and social narratives presently exist. Perhaps Michael’s book(s) will suggest some!