The best DARPA program managers are the ones who can look at an entire literature in an area and notice a systemic bias

Exploratory Program Organization

DARPA Program managers pull control and risk away from both researchers and directors

DARPA PMs need to think for themselves, be curious, and have low ego

It is hard for a private ARPA to capture value without hamstringing impact

By definition outlier analysis can’t rely on data as comparison to other organizations

Where do ideas come from?

Who is the ARPA Model for and what do I hope to achieve

DeepMind combines bottom-up research work with top-down strike teams

Lessons learned from publishing ARPA Model

ARPA Model Conclusions

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

Why try to emulate DARPA and not Bell Labs

Why doesn’t ARPA use prizes instead of grants?

ARPA-E faces different industry incentives than DARPA

DARPA works on a mix of Big H and Little H hard problems

# §ARPA model
This is not meant to be a primer on *how* the ARPA model works or a history of DARPA. See references for plenty of good writing on that. It is *not* meant to be an unbiased presentation of the facts or argue for a general thesis about the world (though it hints at some.) The explicit goal of this analysis is to acknowledge that DARPA is a massive outlier and to figure out which of the attributes of DARPA contributed to its outlier results with the explicit intention of creating more organizations that can enable more outlier results.  [[§How do we get more awesome sci-fi shit?]]

The nature of outliers means that you can’t do a data-based analysis. Perhaps controversially, I think it’s foolish to try to find patterns among outliers because outliers are outliers in *different* ways except in the most broad strokes. Instead, I dig into the things that seem distinctive and ask why they might lead to outlier results.  At the end of the day, this is storytelling. But stories are powerful.  Of course, it’s easy to take this approach too far and create a story about how  *anything* weird about an outlier contributed to their success. “Steve Jobs only wore one outfit which is important because it allowed him to have EXTREME FOCUS.”  I try to avoid this by focusing on why the pieces lead to outlier performance *in combination* - many people who try to replicate outliers fail by picking and choosing the pieces they want to replicate.

There is some relevant history to deciding what to pay attention to without [[Cargo cult]]ing.

- [[The definition of the ARPA model has changed over time]]
- [[ARPA became DARPA in 1972 because of the increased scrutiny on military spending both in the government and outside of it]]
- [[Most of DARPA’s outlier output happened before 1972 when it was ARPA]]
- [[Was the shift from ARPA to DARPA a focus change or a process change?]]
Upshot:
- [[Pay attention to DARPA’s informal process and ignore formal process]]

### Program Managers
Anything written about DARPA agrees that it’s all about the program managers.
* [[DARPA Program managers pull control and risk away from both researchers and directors]]
* [[The best DARPA program managers are the ones who can look at an entire literature in an area and notice a systemic bias]]
*  [[DARPA is incredibly flexible with who it hires to be program managers]]
* [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] 
* [[Why do people become DARPA Program managers?]]
* [[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]] 
	* [[Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community]] ::new::
* [[DARPA PMs need to think for themselves, be curious, and have low ego]]
*  [[The dependence of DARPA on high quality program managers mirrors the obsession with “talent” in other disciplines]] ::Updated::

### Incentives and Structure
* [[The government’s influence on DARPA is buffered by opacity and the director]]
* [[Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success]]
* [[DARPAs director is important]] ::needs work::
* [[DARPA does multiple levels of top-down problem generation and bottom-up solution generation]]
* [[The transient nature of most people at DARPA enables ideas to be revisited]]
* [[DARPA is relatively tiny and flat]] 
* [[DARPA Employees aren’t paid very much compared to what they could be]]
* [[DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk]]
* [[DARPA doesn’t do any research in house]] ::Updated::
* [[DARPA works on programs that go against the established paradigm]] ::new:: ::needs work::
* [[The ARPA Model is an unbuffered system]]::new::
* [[DARPA Staff are Important]] ::new:: ::needs work::
* [[Negative results are important to DARPA]]

### Funding
* [[DARPA is ~0.5% of the Department of Defense Budget and ~12% of that is basic research]]
* [[DARPA is more ideas limited than money limited]] 
* [[DARPA funds wacky things that go nowhere]]
* [[It is relatively easy for DARPA PMs to re-deploy funding]]
*  [[Program Managers have the ability to deploy money without much overhead]] 

### Process 
* [[The DARPA execution framework boils down to showing that thing is not impossible, showing that thing is possible, and then making that thing possible]] 
* [[There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model]] 
*  [[The initial exploratory tranche of a DARPA program is approximately $1.5m]]
*  [[DARPA PMs use seedling programs to ‘acid test’ the riskiest pieces of a program idea]]
* [[The ‘framework’ DARPA PMs use to create a program is by modeling the tech council]]
* [[Every program at DARPA is intensely technically scrutinized by the tech council]] 
* [[DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers]]
* [[DARPA provides a derisking role for people in other organizations]]
* [[Decoupling from market discipline is like cave diving]] ::new:: ::Needs work::
* [[DARPA works where markets dont]] ::New::

### Riffing on ARPA
- [[A handful of organizations have riffed on the ARPA Model with mixed success]]::New::
	- Answers:  [[How does IARPA work? What are its successes?]]
* [[It’s easy to set out to build a DARPA but end up building a Skunkworks]]
* [[Most DARPA clones start too big or with heavy process]]
* [[Can the ARPA model exist outside of the government?]]

### Closed Questions
-  [[How successful did DARPA look ten years in?]]
	- Pretty successful

## Open Questions
Because a lot of this is just storytelling there are a lot of open questions about different knobs, what happens when you turn them and what they mean in different domains.  

* [[When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?]]
*  [[Is it essential that a research org is a small fraction of the money factory’s budget?]]
*  [[Why doesn’t ARPA use prizes instead of grants?]]
* [[Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results?]]
- [[How could the ARPA Model take advantage of the internet?]]

## Conclusions
* [[ARPA Model Conclusions]]
* [[Things about ARPA that can be improved]]

## Related

## References
* [[Funding Breakthrough Research]]
* [[“Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems]]
* [[Sam Moleneux convo 16/1/20]]
* [[Sam Moleneux Conversation 31/10/2019]]
* [[Know When to Fold ‘Em: An Empirical Description of Risk Management in Public Research Funding]]
* [[What makes DARPA tick]]
* [[What else makes DARPA tick]]
* [[Cloning DARPA Successfully - Article]]
* [[fuchsRethinkingRoleState2010]]
* [[Mark Micire Podcast]]

 
          
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DARPA does multiple levels of top-down problem generation and bottom-up solution generation

§ARPA model

DARPA PMs use seedling programs to ‘acid test’ the riskiest pieces of a program idea

The DARPA execution framework boils down to showing that thing is not impossible, showing that thing is possible, and then making that thing possible

Program Managers need to be entrepreneurs

Workshops could be a way to start small building a private ARPA

Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

DARPA underutilizes the internet to execute on its model

There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

fuchsRethinkingRoleState2010

How do you have skin in the game around ideas?

One function of a private ARPA is to fill in the gap once filled by corporate R+D

DARPA provides a derisking role for people in other organizations

How to think about the differences between FROs and private ARPA programs

Focused network building is a valuable early step for riffing on ARPA

weaverNSNotesOfficer1946

PARPA needs to be obsessed with PMs

How could the ARPA Model take advantage of the internet?

Wide vs deep networks and Clusters with respect to DARPA

DARPA is a coordination mechanism

The ARPA model can lead to inbreeding

What do online DARPA workshops look like?

Matthew Feldman Conversation 30 Apr 2020

Q2 2021

# A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building
 [[fuchsRethinkingRoleState2010]] points out that DARPA program managers act as [‘brokers’ and ‘boundary spanners’ - terms of art for people who connect relatively unconnected clusters of people](https://funginstitute.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Brokerage-2C-Boundary-Spanning-2C-and-Leadership-in-Open-Innovation-Communities.pdf). DARPA PMs network in the literal sense of creating networks, not just plugging into them.  

The idea of *focused* networking is important. DARPA program managers have a clear purpose for building the network - first to generate a clear target in an area, then to solicit paths towards the target, and then to make sure that the people who are executing on those paths know about each other so small adjustments to the plan can happen as frictionlessly as possible.  It is easy to network in an indeterminate way, hoping that the connections you make will be useful one day. This indeterminate approach is how much people go about networking. 

[[“Networking” is just jargon for ‘building relationships with people who aren’t shoved in front of you by life’]] and PMs need to do this at every step of [[The DARPA execution framework boils down to showing that thing is not impossible, showing that thing is possible, and then making that thing possible]].  What does this tactically look like in practice?

In the first step of the process, PMs need to find and become friends with (ideally) everybody who is working on ideas adjacent to the area where they want to have an impact to get a sense of what’s possible. It’s important for PMs to come from the research world so that they already have many of these connections. *Realistically, PMs are able to get this access because they bring the possibility of funding.* PMs also bring these people together in small groups to dig into which possibilities are not impossible and what it would take to make them possible. If the PM is doing their job well the people at the `workshops` won’t already know each other and will continue to poke at ideas together on their own.   The second step of the process leverages the network built during the first step to quickly do seedling programs. [[DARPA PMs use seedling programs to ‘acid test’ the riskiest pieces of a program idea]]. 

During the third step of the process, PMs depend heavily on the network to send unique solutions their way. The PMs host `performer days`  - small private conference for all the people working on different pieces of the program. These conferences force people to talk about the work they’re doing *while* they’re doing it, which while uncomfortable, enables people to share solutions to tricky problems and form more connections. You could imagine this leading to problematic correlation between results because everybody would want to copy whatever the shiniest group is doing but at this point all the performers are locked in to whatever approach they’re trying.

You could think of DARPA PMs as manually playing the role of a [[Designed Serendipity]] system. Both connecting the right people at the right time and giving them an incentive to help each other out. 

[[waldropDreamMachine2018]] talks about how [[JCR Licklider]] was always flying around to different university groups.  In addition to bringing together all the people who thought they were crazy to be interested in human-focused computing, he also helped create several new lab groups.  Today, [[A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going]]. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any organizations devoted to seeding labs in a structured way beyond funding new professors who would have worked on those ideas anyway.

PMs also build networks of people in different classes of organizations - government, academia, startups, and large companies. Connections between different verticals is one way that [[The definition of the ARPA model has changed over time]] -  in 1960’s, large companies had much more academic R&D arms and startups were barely a thing. In this way, DARPA PMs are acting to [[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]].  This shift in the PM role is important. Two reasons that we don’t have more awesome sci fi shit ([[§How do we get more awesome sci-fi shit?]]) that I’ve seen over and over are 1) technology that needs actual manufacturing or high capital investment isn’t able to jump the gap from a lab to a startup prototype or from a startup prototype to a real scalably manufactured product and 2) there are many pieces of technology that are amazing but don’t warrant an entire VC backed startup on their own. It seems like building connections between different organization classes while the technology is being built could address both problems. Worth digging into more. 

In a way, the Program Manager acts like a product manager in a tech company, talking to the customer and modeling their needs. For DARPA the military is the customer but the difference is that the ‘product’ isn’t something that can be purchased (TRL 9) but something that is proved out enough that other branches of the military.

### Related
- [[DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers]]
- [[Definiteness means that you have a long-term plan]]
- [[The ARPA model may be able to utilize the internet for awesome]]
- [[DARPA underutilizes the internet to execute on its model]]



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§Academia Constraints

Notes and statements should be bloody

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Is peer review a good idea - paper

DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers

# Academic credit is a first-to-the post system
Everybody in academia pays attention to ‘who was the first person to discover this thing.’ The way that it counts is by publishing something about it.  

The first-to-the-post system and the existence of preprint servers means encourages people to create a lot of false positives. This would not be a problem if there was a good way of alerting the world that something was a false positive but there is no good system for that. 

The first-to-the-post system makes everybody obsessed with being “scooped” because the first person to publish an idea gets the credit even if someone comes along afterwards and explains it better. Of course, it doesn’t always happen like this and you also get into fights where there is a better known expression of an idea and the person who originally came up with it spends an inordinate amount of time yelling that they came up with it *cough* Schmidthuber *cough* 

This is why [[The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia]] - extending an existing idea is not in high esteem even if it’s an important reframing that can unlock something important. 

The first-to-the-post system doesn’t encourage dispersing a concept beyond making sure everybody knows that you came up with it and will cite you as such. ([[Dispersion is the process of a heuretic impacting the world]]) But [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]]. 

### Related
- [[weinsteinBretWeinsteinPrediction]]
-  [[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]]



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gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012

Bell labs brought many disciplines together under the same roof and broke down barriers between them

Bell Labs enabled free radicals

PARPA will take a massive hit to effectiveness if it is a remote organizations

# Architecture matters for creativity
Maybe it’s just a just a weird pattern or a framing device, but the effect of architecture on outlier institutions comes up over and over again. 

Observers have noted that the Pixar office[^1], Bell Labs[^2], and the (old) DARPA office were all set up (by design or accident) so that you were constantly running into people. Physical [[Designed Serendipity]]. These serendipitous meetings led to more [[Idea sex]]. 

In [[How Buildings Learn]], [[Stewart Brand]] calls out how MIT building 22 (and many other high-performing institutional-places) were incredibly reconfigurable. It turns out that Bell Labs was as well. [[Lockheed Skunkworks]] was literally in a reconfigured corner of a building and a reconfigured Bourbon plant.

This reconfigurability enables people to do things that weren’t necessarily imagined when the building was created. Hand-wavingly the ability to easily remake your local environment encourages a more expansive mindset around remaking the world. [[Environment shapes our thoughts]]. 

Going one step further, the trope of “starting in a garage” might actually be a specific subset of “reconfigurable architecture.” Garages are one of the most configurable spaces in a house - it’s basically a big box with a concrete floor with no expectations on cleanliness where you can get large things in/out easily and it’s completely legitimate to mount things on the walls or ceiling. Warehouses are basically big garages - my hunch is that there’s something slightly magical to working in a reconfigured warehouse. 

Architecture can also have negative effects on creativity. It’s become clear over time that open-office plans are detrimental to the ability to do deep work. So there’s some balance between running into people regularly and *all the time*.

There is a *feeling* of being around other people that doesn’t happen when you are not physically around other people. Physically being around other people being productive subconsciously encourages productivity. 

Of course, all of these anecdotal patterns may just be spurious noise to which we’ve attached a narrative. I have a lot of trouble believing that based on my own experience. 

### Related
- [[Where do ideas come from?]]
- [[Third spaces are physical Schelling Points]]
- [[The ability to say ‘huh that’s funny’ is important for discovering new phenomena]]

[1]:[[Creativity Inc.]]
[2]:[[gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012]]

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# Cloning DARPA Successfully - Article
- [[Richard Van Atta]]
	- It is independent from service R&D organizations
	-  it is a lean, agile organization with a risk-taking culture
	-  idea-driven and outcome-oriented
- PMs talk to active researchers a lot
- Program managers are in regular contact with senior military officers
- DARPA-DSRC - 
- Meet with research groups to see their capabilities - bottom of the roadmapping tree
- Once they receive funding from DARPA, researchers are then required to share their work with each other in workshops
- Federally Funded Research and Development Laboratories (FFRDCs) are not allowed to apply for DARPA solicitations - they use FFRDCs to prepare solicitations
- Funding entire tech stack

- [[ARPA-E]] started off with only one program manager because of low funding
- What do ARPA-E program manager terms look like?
- Clear problem with technology that doesn’t have the military as a ready customer
### Published
2009
## Questions
- [[What is the minimum amount to fund a project in a lab?]]
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
[[Erica Fuchs]]
## Link
[Cloning DARPA Successfully | Issues in Science and Technology](https://issues.org/fuchs/)

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§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics

Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation

Modularization requires legible interfaces

New ideas need to come out of a single mind

Specialists create knowledge within fields

Idea sex

The tech tree creates new nodes either through idea sex or learning by doing

The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation

Fast moving fields have lots of unconnected nodes

Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes

Science and technology advance through the same fundamental mechanism

A ‘related’ section can serve as kindling for an evergreen note

Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart

How can you describe the difference between learning by doing and idea sex?

Untapped technical people near the end of their careers may have more potential than young people

Slow moving fields are almost “fully connected”

Being at the frontier in many dimensions helps advance the frontier

If new knowledge is combinations of other pieces of knowledge, can macro inventions in the mokyr sense exist?

Memorizing creates the mental anchors to create connections between

# Connections create new knowledge	
# Connections create new knowledge	

### Rererences
- Originally from [[How to Take Smart Notes]]
- [[neumannOneProcess2020]]



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A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building

# DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers
**PMs**
The DARPA office is physically laid out to enabled people interact (similar to how supposedly the Pixar headquarters were designed.) Everybody is probably an expert on something and there is a culture people dropping and asking each other about the subject of their expertise (similar to [[Bell Labs didn’t have a unique model]].)  The culture also encourages PMs discussing their programs with other PMs. This is special because it would be easy for everybody to mind their own business asa everybody is working on their own programs. The fact that [[DARPA is relatively tiny and flat]] probably helps.

**Performers**
People who get DARPA funding are required to share research with each other at workshops. ([[Cloning DARPA Successfully - Article]])  Since they are all presumably working on different aspects of the same problem as coordinated by the program managers this seems valuable. It has some of the aspects of open science but much more focused and making sure the people who might really benefit from the knowledge know about it.  This stands in contrast to normal academia where everything is first to post so people are worried about getting scooped so they pipet out information. [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]].

### Related
- [[Idea sex]]
- [[Connections create new knowledge]]
- [[Architecture matters for creativity]]
- [[Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community]]



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Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success

DARPA doesn’t do any research in house

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

The transient nature of most people at DARPA enables ideas to be revisited

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk

PARPA should create a replicable institutional model

DARPA is more ideas limited than money limited

ARPA-E did a poor job riffing on DARPA

# DARPA is relatively tiny and flat
As of April 2020, there are 124 staff and three layers - director, deputy director, and program managers.  That number is right around [[Dunbar’s Number]]. It’s not explicitly designed that way but I suspect that it emerged as the right number for the Director to be able to vaguely pay attention to everything that is going on and for everybody in the organization to have vague context on what everybody else is working on. [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]].

There are three layers - the Director, office directors, and program managers (with a few people like deputy director thrown in.)  Culturally and physically DARPA is set up so everybody is talking to each other all the time, so there is lots of ability for [[Idea sex]]. 

The size of DARPA may help minimize internal politics. [[The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank]].

The small organization means that there are no “group projects” so every PM is directly responsible for the program they’re working on and you can’t have slackers. 

I suspect the small size also helps keep PM quality high. Quality tends to slip when there is flexibility in who you can hire ([[DARPA is incredibly flexible with who it hires to be program managers]]) and there is pressure to hire a lot of people. 

The downside of the tiny flat organization is that there don’t seem to be any checks on the Director’s power, so if they don’t like a project or a person they’re out. This is why politicization seems dangerous. [[Starting in 2001, DARPA directors began to sync up with presidential administrations]]. It would mean that the director prioritizes aligning their goals with the administration outside of the organization more so than the institution’s nominal goal.  



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The ARPA model may be able to utilize the internet for awesome

# DARPA underutilizes the internet to execute on its model
[[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]] and the internet is one of the greatest network building tools of all time.  However, DARPA doesn’t have a strong web presence and avoids hiring internet people.  ([[DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk]]

At the same time, [[DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence hints at a way that the internet has eroded institutions]] and [[DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk]] suggest that there are good reasons for the low-internet utilizations. This contradiction suggests that there is a tradeoff between internet utilization and the risks associated with it. However, the [[Polyplexus]] project suggests that DARPA may realize that it may no longer be at the Pareto front of this tradeoff and that it might be able to more effectively use the internet to execute on its model.

Ways DARPA could use the internet to more effectively *do things it already does*
	- Finding people who are working on the edge of a space. 
		- Tools like twitter and reddit effectively gather people with obscure interests
	- Fostering communication between groups of people working on a common goal
		- [[DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers]]
	- Leaving open a “serendipity hatch” for people who weren’t explicitly solicited for projects to propose things to the program managers
	- Finding gaps in the state of the art

### Related
- [[The ARPA model may be able to utilize the internet for awesome]]



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Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic

Architecture matters for creativity

Idea sex probably happens more often in generalists

It’s interesting that idea sex/learning by doing + invention (technology)/discovery(science) really do form a good 2x2

# Idea sex
Another reformulation of the idea that [[Connections create new knowledge]] when the new knowledge comes from the connection between two pieces of old knowledge.

### References
- [[How to Take Smart Notes]]



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DARPA works on programs that go against the established paradigm

Online ARPA Community

# Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community
[[Presenting to peers regularly encourages you to get shit together]] as a general rule, but when you’re working on weird things it is harder to find those peers. DARPA helps solve this problem because [[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]]. 

Since it is harder to find peers when you’re working on something weird, you might decide that it is just not worth the effort. In that case you may move more slowly than if you did have peers ([[Connections create new knowledge]].)

[[Adam Wiggins]] pointed out that a big value add of early batches at [[Y Combinator]] was the feeling of community around doing something weird. 



### Related
- [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]]
- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]



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Benʼs working notes

DARPA facilitates idea sex both between PMs and Performers

Related

Links to this note