Experimentation is Not a Reality Check

Running an experiment has almost nothing in common with building something real.

Building something real means creating a thing you or others might use, and placing it into natural environments to see if that’s the case.

Running an experiment is nothing like this. Running an experiment means setting up a contrived situation by design. There is no survival here, only some sterile low-dimensional version of the world, and a set of autotelic measurements that accompany it.

Experimentation is not more real than theory. Theory at least permits some conceptual alignment to what is, and rests its structure on consistent reasoning. But an experiment invents a fanciful sandbox to assess some disconnected demarcation of a phenomenon.

There is no substitute for building. Experimentation has nothing in common with it. Experimentation survives little more than narrative and detached precision.

Experimentation does not validate things real as much as it validates how well we forced the world into our contrived definitions. If we suck all the air out and strip away enough context then we just might measure what our minds invented; that’s experimentation.