Recently I posted about hammering wasps, in which I cited Bill Gibson’s post on the same subject, in which he used one of his favorite phrases:

I’ve heard that Kuhn fiercely lamented the application of SSR to anything other than the structure of scientific revolutions, but that’s how it usually is, when the street finds its own uses for things.

Indeed it does, as also noted by someone who kept finding the street using all sorts of theories in unpredicted ways:

Taken together the theorems associated with Godel, Lowenheim & Skolem, Tarski, Church, Turing, Chaitin, and others reveal that: Not only do the statements representing a theoretical system for explaining some aspect of reality explain that reality inadequately or incompletely but, like it or not, these statements spill out beyond any one system and do so in unpredictable ways.

–John R. Boyd, "Conceptual Spiral," July/August 1992, p. 14

Could this mean the street thus has an advantage over those who stick only to the intended uses of a theory?

Boyd has a slightly different take than Gibson on Kuhn’s point about old paradigm thinkers not understanding new paradigm thinkers:

People using theories or systems evolved from a [pre-given] variety of information will find it increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible to interact with and comprehend phenomena or systems that move beyond and away from that variety — that is, they will become more and more isolated from that which they are trying to observe or deal with, unless they exploit the new variety to modify their theories/systems or create new theories/systems.

As long as the old paradigm thinkers stick to the same set of information or information sources as they’re used to, they probably won’t get the new paradigm, if for no other reason than that they won’t be hearing anything that will cause them to doubt that the old paradigm explains everything. If they start listening to new sources of information, however, they may get the new paradigm or even come up with yet another one that embraces or supersedes both. Watching what the street does with the old paradigm may be a good start.

This may have something to do with why Skype, a tiny upstart company from a tiny country in eastern Europe is worth billions of dollars, and it is also why I say that Google is AI, or at least IA (Intelligence Amplification), which is a distinction that after some degree of IA becomes hard to distinguish. I suspect it has a lot to do with why many people don’t see google as AI: their paradigm for AI is autonomous agents that look like robots or computers.

In any case, if you want to build a disruptive product that can get you across the chasm, or you just don’t want to be left behind while others do that, more and better sources and use of information seem like good risk management.

-jsq