Science & Thinking

General
1

Science affects how we think about the world in two ways. First, indirectly through the technologies that it enabled the construction of. Second, it provides new terms and frameworks that can be used as analogies. No need for a technological medium.

The scientific method is used an analogy in startup land (e.g. “test your assumptions”). Karl Popper compared democracy to scientific discovery – both should aim at uncovering truths about the world.

We already have protocols (TCP/IP, Kyoto, the American handshake), but people don’t readily think in these terms. I think one of the most near-term profitable activities – which many people here are already smartly doing – is applying protocol analogies.

There are many ways to develop protocol literacy:

  • Using protocols as analogies or metaphors in existing debates
  • Identifying protocols in day-to-day life something like protocol watching
  • Reading relevant literature (Like the SoP research and, equally, external pieces like Das Protokoll)
  • Design and tinker with protocols in day-to-day life
  • Make memes and banter with other protocol-pilled people
  • Ask your bartender about their protocols
2

Building on some other discussion – was the generation/identification of analogies the goal of the PILLs, through the entangling capabilities of memetic function?

The analogy that you use with the scientific method is probably productive in a sense that there are low-friction transfers and applications of one to the other. It also makes me think of the ongoing goal of “life as a work of art” endemic to movements from Romanticism to Situationism, or Walter Benjamin’s description of fascism as the aestheticization of politics and communism as vice versa. Not to get even more philosophical, but one could think of Badiou’s four “conditions” of philosophy as different protocols – science being one, along with art, politics, and love.

Different protocols or their aspects might ‘map’ onto each other with varying degrees of ease or friction. Both are productive regarding insights, though.

So I might even suggest a low-tech, brute-force method of protocol literacy/attunement through a tweak of your list:

  1. Identify protocols in day-to-life through the assorted methods you describe
  2. Use them as metaphors or full-fledged guiding principles on a completely different aspect of life
  3. ???
  4. Profit