# §Tech Tree Model of Heuretics Imagine a tree growing “up” with “root nodes” “lower” or “deeper” in the tree. The height is some monotonic function of time, but it definitely isn’t 1:1. * [[The tech tree is fractal]] * [[The tech tree model of heuretics is a directed acyclic graph]] * [[Each node on the tech tree can recursively be decomposed into more nodes]] * [[The tech tree is a scaffolding inside the knowledge frontier]] * [[Connections create new knowledge]] * [[The tech tree creates new nodes either through idea sex or learning by doing]] * [[The upshot of learning by doing being a first class process is that the implementation is as important as where the idea came from]] * [[Tech trees first showed up in the Civilization boardgame in 1980]] but [[There do not appear to be any intellectual connections between video game tech trees and history+philosophy of science+technology]]. [[Tech trees are intuitive]]. ### Heuretics * [[As a platonic ideal, research is an unscheduled quest for new knowledge and inventions with hard-to-predict outcomes]] * [[Heuretics are either inventions or discoveries]] * [[Heuretic is a better word than innovation]] * [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]] * [[Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans*]] * [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]] * [[Brains are wombs for heuretics]] * [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]] * [[Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic]] * [[Implementation is the actualization of the heuretic in the real world]] * [[The process of creating a new heuretic node is like building something out of legos]] * [[Science and technology advance through the same fundamental mechanism]] * [[Modularization enables pieces to be used in many different technologies]] * [[Modularization enables the higher level technology to improve continuously even if pieces improve discretely]] * [[The affordance of a heuretic dictates how it can connect with another node on the tech tree]] * [[Each heuretic by default inherits the constraints affordances and assumptions of its parents]] * [[Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart]] * [[There is a higher probability of accidentally unlocking a closely related node on the tech tree]] * [[Uptimal solutions in science and technology are rarer than you think]] ### Dispersion * [[Dispersion is the process of a heuretic impacting the world]] ==needs work== * [[Dispersion does not happen instantly and often requires a lot of work]] ==needs work== * [[List of things that affect dispersion]] * [[Constraints limit the impact and dispersion speed of a heuretic]] ==needs work== * [[Dispersion is a more appropriate word than dissemination or diffusion for heuretics]] ### Specialists and Generalists * [[The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature]] * [[Modularizing ideas and specialization are the same thing]] * [[The difference between specialists and generalists is not clean but depends on which nodes they can extend]] * [[Fast moving fields have lots of unconnected nodes]] ### Other Phenomena * [[General purpose technologies are technologies that are lower on the tree]] * [[Macroinventions are the tail end of the impact power law distribution clashing with our intuition]] * [[The phenomenon of seemingly trivial technologies becoming incredibly important happens because there is fog of war on the tech tree]] ## Tech Tree is analogous to evolutionary tree * [[Impact in innovation is analogous to fitness in evolution]] * [[A heuretic’s impact is not endogenous to the technology but depends on the environment]] * [[There are many heuretic environments]] * [[Ring Species are situations where group A can mate with group B and B can mate with C but C cannot mate with A]] * [[There are scientific and technological problems that make other technology advances irrelevant by altering the environment]] * [[In the same way that species don’t suddenly replace each other, technologies and ideas don’t suddenly replace each other]] ## Upshots * [[Technodiversity is important]] * [[The tech tree model suggests that more work on more root nodes is important]] * [[How do you incentivize people to work on nodes farther down the tree?]] * [[People are incentivized to work on nodes higher up the tech tree]] * [[Systems must take performance hits to get out of local optima]] * [[The tech tree model suggests that explicitly drawing out tech trees is important]] * [[The structure of the tech tree can inform actions that are short term suboptimal but long term useful]] * [[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]] * [[What does technological genetic engineering look like?]] * [[What does technological husbandry look like?]] * [[What does technological mutation breeding look like?]] ### References * [[neumannOneProcess2020]] * [[Breakthrough fundamental science]] * [[bhattacharyaStagnationScientificIncentives2020]] * [[arthurNatureTechnologyWhat2009]] * [[narayanamurtiCyclesInventionDiscovery2016]] * [[Road-mapping Biology - Article]] * [[Adam Marblestone Podcast 2020-03-31]] * [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Tech+Tree+Model+of+Heuretics) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Tech+Tree+Model+of+Heuretics)