Science
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- Science is how humanity learns.
- Science is the main way humanity extends what we know about the world beyond what we can sense directly. Technology is how we use that knowledge to make our lives better.
- Science itself isn’t “true”. It’s a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of mistakes. Do not treat science as a dogma, but rather as a refining process to uncover truths about reality.
- Science is not clearly visible, like a comet bearing down on you. Science is like the Gnostic God. It exists, somewhere out there, perfect in itself. It is pure and right and beautiful. If you could hear it, it would certainly speak Truth. Yet here we are, in the stupid material universe, seeing through a glass darkly. Good sometimes looks like evil, evil often looks like good, and there’s some jerk with the head of a lion and the body of a snake psyching us out at every turn.
Metascience
Metascience is the science of science itself - studying how scientific research is conducted and how it can be improved. It offers frameworks for transforming the social processes of science through imaginative design and entrepreneurial action.
- Science’s discovery ecosystem is currently in near stasis, with strong barriers preventing meaningful change. The social processes of science can be dramatically improved through systematic intervention.
- Metascience operates as a three-part discipline combining imaginative design practice (envisioning radical alternatives), entrepreneurial discipline (building new organizations and processes), and research field (rigorously evaluating effectiveness).
- The Metascience Learning Loop provides a framework for systematic improvement: trial new social processes → evaluate effectiveness → scale successful approaches → amplify transformative changes. This mirrors Experimentation principles but applied to scientific institutions themselves.
- Key bottlenecks inhibiting scientific change include centralization of control, lack of clear change ownership, strong network effects, and absence of natural growth Feedback Loops.
- You can unlock science’s potential by exploring radical institutional alternatives, developing generative heuristics to detect “intellectual dark matter,” and taking entrepreneurial approaches to building new research Organizations.
- Scientific Coordination problems are a specific manifestation of broader coordination challenges - addressing them requires both structural diversity and decentralized experimentation.