For the last eighteen to twenty four months I’ve been saturating my brain with the idea of “motion-based approaches to computing and intelligence.” In essence: alternative paradigms of computing and intelligence that are fundamentally continuous and have movement as their foundation. Now, the time has come to shift from slouch-y consideration and slow consumption to something more active and agentic.
Initially, I was at a total loss as to how to make this transition. I am not an academic familiar with structuring and executing typical research programs. Nor am I an avant-garde deep tech wizard with the gravitational pull necessary to spontaneously manifest a scenius (or a startup). But I do have patience, curiosity, and a tendency to veer towards difficult questions. Oh, and I also read Venkatesh Rao’s post on permissionless research. That bumped me from “total loss” to “partial loss”. Venkat says:
“Producing imaginative and bold research takes a more methodologically and thematically opinionated approach that starts with what an individual researcher suspects will be personally interesting. If it turns out to be a rich vein rather than a dead-end, importance tends to follow naturally, and institutions and methodological discipline eventually emerge. Even within obviously important domains, such as seeking cures for cancer, interestingness is usually a better starting point.”
This is good. Starting point; check. I have a scent of interestingness and have clung to its aroma for a non-trivial amount of time. He then goes on to lay out some principles for institutional structures that could help facilitate the strange beast that is permissionless research. I will block quote the quad set because it’s easier:
First: laissez-faire management. In my experience of research institutions (universities and corporate labs), the best research managers strongly resist the temptation to tell researchers what to study or how, even when researchers seem desperate for such micromanagement. They realize that such managerial behavior can quickly harden into a conservative, risk-averse, permission-driven culture. Of course, funding programs require some sense of purpose and direction, but the best research missions manage to establish purpose and direction primarily via inspiration and catalysis rather than strong constraints on scope and methodology.
Second: mindful presence. The best research managers also resist the temptation to withdraw from process entirely, limiting themselves to the role of banker-protector-judge of a chaotic playpen. Instead they are intimately involved, as stewards of the evolving methodological anarchy. They challenge lazy assumptions, constantly test the rigor of unfolding thinking, point out and enable connections, and are generally mindfully present. Perhaps the most important effect of such presence is that it gets researchers to challenge each other continuously, while avoiding self-limiting groupthink. The late Bob Taylor of Xerox PARC famously drove the researchers to greater heights by having them vigorously test each other’s thinking.
Third: context-sensitivity. What counts as a solid research program design in 1960s California is not the same thing as what counts as solid research program design in a 2020s virtual network. The structure has to be thoughtfully entangled with its environment by design, upfront, and allowed to become even more entangled with it over its lifetime.
Fourth: porous boundaries. To the extent you are not certain of your answer to the fundamental question of methodological universality vs. anarchy, you should design an institution to hedge against the possibility that you guessed wrong. Since most traditional research institutions err on the side of being too closed and structured, this generally means being more open to unstructured anarchy than might feel comfortable.
This is also good. It’s like a genotype for permissionless research.
Next relevant artefact: the Summer of Protocols project and its multi-authored essay entitled The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols. Its authors—Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Danny Ryan, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps and Bastian Aue—say:
“While protocols vary in their effectiveness, the remarkable thing about them is they are unreasonably sufficient. They solve more of the problem than we expect, more completely than we expect, relative to their size and complexity. Good protocols, in short,manage to catalyze good enough outcomes with respect to a variety of contending criteria, via surprisingly limited and compact interventions.
As a result, despite the ritual moaning that is invariably part of the cultures surrounding established protocols, they inspire just enough voluntary commitment and participation to overcome the centripetal forces of defection and exit, and establish a locus of continuity and history. Good protocols tend to form persistent Schelling points in spaces of problems worth solving, around solutions good enough to live with – for a while. And surprisingly often, they manage to induce more complex patterns of voluntary commitment and participation than are achieved by competing systems of centralized coordination.”
Neat, huh? Fast forward some months to today. To where I attempt to hop from genotype to phenotype for my own little project. Now what?
Well, I’ve begun to realise that there’s a step prior to putting my own research into motion-based approaches to computing and intelligence on a more active footing. An opportunity for a meta-project: a permissionless research protocol.
Unfortunately, as stated above I am no academic, no wizard. And I am also no protocol architect. And there’s a little urgency on my part; twenty-odd months is enough time and I want pick up the pace. Fortunately, I have a scent. One strong enough to reveal the shape of the protocol I likely need. It accommodates:
- A mission or agenda
- A team of contributors
- A set of questions
- A collection of inputs
- A knowledge graph
- A collection of outputs
- A mechanism for sustenance
Enumerated like this it reads like a permissionless research kit. For example, one could simply string together:
- A static site (mission/agenda, contributors, questions, input, outputs)
- A Roam Research graph (knowledge graph)
- A Stripe account (sustenance)
Where this kit morphs into a protocol is when the “permissionless” descriptor is refactored from being about agency—absolving the need for permission to undertake research—to being about providing hardened underlying architectures and removing the constraints to provisioning, interacting with and evolving it. When the impetus becomes wrangling the interconnections over time and for the benefit of a larger collective, instead of providing the pieces for self-assembly to an individual in isolation. To convey the difference, consider the same list above as an informal diagram.
It still looks kinda of kit-like. But consider the dynamics when the contributors number more than one. When they number ten, or twenty, or a hundred. When the inputs to the knowledge graph total in the hundreds, in the thousands. When a question is birthed, shapes the inputs, steers knowledge graph contributions, catalyses an output, and is deactivated in favour of a newer, more evocative question. When choices are made about the syntax of the input and output lists, when decisions are made about the methods for commits to the knowledge graph. When contributors—like all humans do—converge and diverge and want to tilt the enveloping agenda in different directions. When sustenance drips in and must be equitably allocated. When one particular element starts to exhibit a little dysfunction. This is what a permissionless research protocol must accommodate.
Of course, I could get by with a kit. And I may just take that route and start iterating with a view to route towards a protocol—and with a more deliberate survey of existing terrain, like open, citizen and decentralised science. But the meta-project, the prospect of a permissionless research protocol, has me enamoured. And I intend to get to know it. At least for a little while. So holla if you’d like to come along for the ride.
Swell & Cut 