Science as an alien species might do it
Jordan Dworkin: Four years ago, in “A Vision of Metascience”, Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu asked the reader to imagine they were “a science fiction writer depicting a scientific discovery made by an alien species.” It seems likely, they say, that “such aliens will have radically different social processes to support science. What would those social processes be? Could they have developed scientific institutions as superior to ours as modern universities are to the learned medieval monasteries?” This week, I wish I were reading a series of vignettes creatively answering that call, exploring how scientific processes and institutions might look under the stewardship of dramatically different societies, cultures, minds, and technologies. Duly inspired by related endeavors from David, and Scott, and Scott, and Corin, and Scott again, these yet-to-exist vignettes have a flair for the humorous and bizarre, while also giving us valuable new frameworks for thinking about what is and what could be.
Original links:
- https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/
- https://bookshop.org/p/books/sum-forty-tales-from-the-afterlives-david-eagleman/ffcb41d6a7e3cf0b
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/25/list-of-fictional-drugs-banned-by-the-fda/
- https://corinwagen.github.io/public/blog/20250804_licenses.html
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/