More refined version:
Great Scenes Play Unique Games
Thoughts:
- The royal society didn't know that the game of scientific intrigue was going to change the world -- and even become arguably THE strongest pillar of the modern world.
- They were just 12 dudes who loved science, thought it was important, and wanted to share that with everyone who agreed.
- The great hacker groups might have had intuition that computers would become crucial, but mostly they just loved the game of hacking. There was no "computer science", they just loved computers more than anything, and one-upping each other in arbitrary games WAS their science.
- (is there a good example of a great band, which didn't try to be like anyone else. Which didn't compete?)
- Peter Thiel is famous for denouncing competition. Scenius seems to agree: by playing a new game, you create a totally new incentive landscape. A new status hierarchy. One scene gets "a monopoly" on exploring "The New Thing", and impressing your peers becomes all that matters, more than money or competition.
- Conjecture: any successful new science basically starts as a new game that a specific group of people love to play with one another. The incentives of that game shape the field.
Relevant Quotes:
“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Relevant Tweets
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1399600658097926144?s=20
https://twitter.com/TylerAlterman/status/1340677941592776704?s=20
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1326823134503161857?s=20
https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1433678357539930112?s=20