Social science explanations of collaborative phenomena must become largely probabilistic ('cloudy with a chance of collaborations') because social life involves many complex feedback loops making it more like predicting weather than gravity—even with full knowledge of inputs, predictability is far lower than the neoclassical model hopes, and such phenomena get stuck in special cases (you couldn't recreate Wikipedia with identical inputs because Wikipedia already exists).
factualpending
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Clay ShirkyEvidence Quote
“the best we could say is Cloudy with a Chance of collaborations”
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:28:59 AM
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