Ollerac is definitely onto what I was arguing in this article. Allowing people to 'opt-in' and vote with their feet in a system with greater policy experimentation through decentralized, competing jurisdictions is perhaps the closest we can get to scientific rigor (holding culture relatively constant, for example).
There is a section on "Exit and Voice" which discusses this on www.radicalsocialentreps.org/theory as well as a practical entrepreneurial proposal called "Free Cities" here: http://www.radicalsocialentreps.org/theory/free-cities/
You make a great point, but I definitely wasn't trying to argue that the constancy in phenomena ('natural laws') occurs in society. This obviously means that the nature of 'experiments' is different because social processes are more like complex adaptive systems which show indeterminate or chaotic qualities. This makes isolating variables, like a good scientist must try to do, very difficult.
The bigger point is evolutionary: the scientific method and evolutionary epistemology support that open systems of trial and error help us falsify bad ideas and evolve novel and more accurate explanations in the real world. It has worked wonders in science and is an anti-authoritarian stance, because any theory can rise and fall by falsification. Physical technology evolves in a similar fashion (see the work on 'combinatorial evolution' of technologist Brian Arthur for example).
The argument I am trying to make, as the whole website is arguing, is that we need a similar open system to evolve our knowledge of society (rules, institutions, laws, businesses etc.)
This does get complicated because of the points mentioned above. But fields like systems theory, evolutionary/complexity economics, and the work of thinkers like FA Hayek on spontaneous order in social science is where this perspective is coming from. There's a theory page on the site www.radicalsocialentreps.org/theory with more on this.
I think so. Obviously this is based on the standards of market preferences, which is in constant flux unlike the 'objective laws' of the physical world. Something might be a great idea but is wrongly timed in the sense that the market doesn't want it yet (or at all). In the sea of human preference subjectivity the only objectivity we can hope for, it seems to me, is sink-or-swim on the market.
In a sense the same might be said for science though.. such as if a theory is imagined long before we have the tools to actually test it out.