I'm not sure if Feynman would endorse the scientific framing that is being applied, in that article, to the haphazard process by which society evolves. Science

I'm not sure if Feynman would endorse the scientific framing that is being applied, in that article, to the haphazard process by which society evolves. Science experiments should try and be, at least to some extent, repeatable. When the article starts talking about 'social experiments', e.g.: "He’s referring to laws of nature of course, but let’s take a step back and imagine that society is a scientific enterprise. Discovering good legal rules, good regulations, or good constitutions is hard — they are not ‘given’ to us. They evolved. They appeared through different experiments in different places at different times, by different people. They will continue to change." I think that's stretching it, and going towards the dangerous territory of framing social debate as if it were a science, and as if the 'disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs' was scientific experiment. I think Feynman was exacting about what could be considered an experiment. From his commencement address, on 'cargo cult science', which covers this general area: "I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control." He also points out that it can be bad to use the language of science, if you aren't really doing science: "Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals. Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts." http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.php http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.php I'm not saying the article is making the mistake of cargo cult science; but just that it seems to be skirting a little close to that territory, by applying the language of science to situations in which people are not trying for rigorous experiments, and where isolating variables is particularly hard. I don't think that disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs would meet Feynman's definition of science. I like the framing of a startup as a company set up to test a hypothesis about a business model, but I think there's a distance between entrepreneurship and science.