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?