> After looking at Herbert's wiki, I feel like I've been creeping around his ideas for much of my life without realizing he was the progenitor
I had this exact feeling as well. Herb thought at the exact same level of abstraction that I like to think in, broadly construed as "models", not too rigorous to be mathematics, but not too loose to be raw observational psychology. Just right. Marvin Minksy is precisely the same but for AI systems rather than humans.
Scott E Page and his "Model Thinking" course on Coursera is in the same vein as these two. He's a complexity theorist that deals with proper representation of social networks and distributed decision-making. His books "The Difference" and "Complex Adaptive Systems" are academic but extremely readable, and don't harken after the same Cellular Automata and Chaos examples without at least operationalizing them into some application first.
I had this exact feeling as well. Herb thought at the exact same level of abstraction that I like to think in, broadly construed as "models", not too rigorous to be mathematics, but not too loose to be raw observational psychology. Just right. Marvin Minksy is precisely the same but for AI systems rather than humans.
Krakauer's website is where I would read Krakauer: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~krakauer/Site/Publications.html
Scott E Page and his "Model Thinking" course on Coursera is in the same vein as these two. He's a complexity theorist that deals with proper representation of social networks and distributed decision-making. His books "The Difference" and "Complex Adaptive Systems" are academic but extremely readable, and don't harken after the same Cellular Automata and Chaos examples without at least operationalizing them into some application first.