Resilience science links to a nice little video version of Steve Johnson's TED talk about his new book. They also link to Cosma Shalizi's review, which has a heap of great thoughts. Two of my favourite:

"... good ideas hardly ever come from isolated individuals thinking very hard and having flashes of inspiration; they come from people who are immersed in communities of inquiry, and especially from those who bridge multiple communities."

"Parts of the apparatus of scholarly communication can be rationalized as applying successive filters with more and more tolerance for false negatives, but it's hard to believe that this couldn't be much improved upon, or that the counterparts in any other domain are any closer to optimal."

Tim Harford mentions the connection to Jane Jacobs in passing. At some point I should write up my attempt to find out what Jacobs' "model" is. She's a bit of a weird one: like Hayek, normal academic practices weren't her thing. But there's still a great theory there: enough that I'm always a bit taken aback when work like Johnson's doesn't appear to mention her. Um, not that I've actually read the book, of course.