Skip to content

Guest Talk with Sarah Perry | Protocols of Reproducible Science

TalkSarah Perry, Venkatesh Rao
researcherpractitioner
Guest Talk with Sarah Perry | Protocols of Reproducible Science
Open resource →

Sarah Perry argues that most social-science abstract nouns—aggression, humility, the subconscious—are 'weasel words' whose laboratory operationalizations (the Bobo doll, Taylor aggression paradigm, self-report surveys) are so varied and arbitrary that they fail to measure anything generalizable, a pattern she calls 'protocol as alibi' where following procedure substitutes for real knowledge. She contrasts this with 'protocol as checksum,' where minor, publicly checkable procedural details (IRB approval, properly sourced gel images, unmanipulated data files) serve as tells for whether hidden parts of a study were actually done honestly, illustrated through cases like Hwang Woo-suk's cloning fraud and Dan Ariely's disputed honesty and placebo studies. Venkatesh Rao introduces the talk by linking Perry's earlier ribbonfarm writing on architecture and ritual to her current focus on reproducibility and the generalizability crisis.

Topics

automaticitypriming-and-nudge-theorygeneralizability-crisisguest-talksprotocol-as-alibiprotocol-as-checksumprotocol-watchingprotocolsresearchweasel-words-abstract-nouns

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Geoff Manaugh | Burglary, Architecture, and the Protocols of “Nakatomi Space”

Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar's Guide to the City, argues that burglary is fundamentally an architectural and protocol-level phenomenon: criminals like the 'hole in the ground gang' and 'Roofman' exploit sufficiently granular knowledge of city infrastructure (storm drains, freeway on/off-ramps, fire codes, corporate franchise layouts) to identify repeatable spatial and temporal vulnerabilities. He develops the concept of 'Nakatomi Space' (named after Die Hard) as a parallel, hidden circulation system—air ducts, maintenance corridors, walls—that can be misused to move through buildings against their intended protocols, and discusses how rules meant to protect (fire code, corporate scheduling) simultaneously reveal how a system can be attacked.

Geoff Manaugh

Article

Haikus to Fly By

Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) are cryptic, haiku-like weather predictions produced continuously by meteorologists worldwide that directly inform pilot decisions and shape aviation operations at every scale. These terse textual protocols encode atmospheric phenomena and thresholds that determine individual actions, airport procedures, and global traffic patterns.

Matthew McDowell-Sweet

Talk

Seapunk: World Protocolizations On Reverse Imagineering as Method

Samuel Chua of Seapunk Studios presents 'reverse-imagineering,' a methodology for protocol studies that starts from speculative fiction worlds and works backward to infer the protocols that would need to exist to make them plausible. He illustrates this through three Seapunk worlds—South(east Asia) with neoanimist distributed AI and 'ghost machine' commons-hardening, SNOW Society's shanzhai-inspired peer-to-peer climate adaptation supply chains, and the 67th World's longevity/automation governance where immortality requires earning social legitimacy—arguing that building fiction first surfaces protocol ideas that direct present-to-future design work would miss.

Samuel Chua