http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel/ From the authorized english translation by Nicholas J.L. Brown available as a free download in PDF format
Clearly, there was something in the recipe for the X effect that I was missing. But what? I decided to ask the experts, the people who’d found the X effect and published lots of articles about it [..] My colleagues from around the world sent me piles of instructions, questionnaires, papers, and software [..] In most of the packages there was a letter, or sometimes a yellow Post-It note stuck to the bundle of documents, with extra instructions: “Don’t do this test on a computer. We tried that and it doesn’t work. It only works if you use pencil-and-paper forms.” “This experiment only works if you use ‘friendly’ or ‘nice’. It doesn’t work with ‘cool’ or ‘pleasant’ or ‘fine’. I don’t know why.” “After they’ve read the newspaper article, give the participants something else to do for three minutes. No more, no less. Three minutes, otherwise it doesn’t work.” “This questionnaire only works if you administer it to groups of three to five people. No more than that.” I certainly hadn’t encountered these kinds of instructions and warnings in the articles and research reports that I’d been reading. This advice was informal, almost under-the-counter, but it seemed to be a necessary part of developing a successful experiment. Had all the effect X researchers deliberately omitted this sort of detail when they wrote up their work for publication? I don’t know.
From his memoirs: "Ontsporing" (English, "Derailment") Nov. 2012
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)
“Man anticipates events by construing their replications.”
Source: The Psychology of Personal Constructs, 1955, p. 37 in 2002 edition
“Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system”
Source: Daemon (2006), Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol
Context: Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.
Viruses of the Mind (1993)
Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 12
“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Source: The Selfish Gene
Source: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
“Space settlements would also contain biospheres replicating Earth conditions and atmosphere.”
Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 75
