# Projects need to build narratives of perceived progress on top of pieces of evidence     How can you build support for long-term high uncertainty projects? Why do some projects and news reports feel exciting and high potential while others feel meh? Why do [[Random SpaceX launches are more exciting than either the Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin first launches]] even though SpaceX regularly fails to hit its milestones on time? My hunch is that it has to do with whether the pieces of evidence that the project produces create a narrative that your brain can extrapolate along a smooth trajectory into the future. People think in narratives.[[Narratives are how we deal with uncertainty]] and are the most effective (only?) way to generate emotion. In order to get the real resources to make real progress on a project, supporters need to *feel* hope. [[People like funding winners]], and narratives are how we decide which situation feels like a winner, unless you’re in an extremely constrained state space. Nobody can logic themselves into a feeling. The only way people can make bad-feeling but quantitatively correct decisions is when there is low uncertainty (but it could be high risk) — eg. Possibility space is bounded. These narratives are how [[Perceived progress can unlock real progress]] — a narrative of success can generate the resources a project needs to succeed.[^1] These [[Narratives are like trend lines drawn between pieces of evidence]]. Pieces of evidence can be boiled down to the acquisition of critical *inputs* like funds or key hires or intermediate *outputs* on the critical path towards success like a demo, a published paper, or a product launch. The trick is that what counts as a key input or output varies wildly based on both on your ability to weave them into the broader narrative of success[^2] and the audience. [[People have different noise floors for what constitutes evidence]]. Given the critical role of evidence in supporting narratives and the role of narratives in generating support for a project, a key question is: *“what pieces of evidence support the narrative?”* Ideally the pieces of evidence are also on the path towards real progress. Real progress is never smooth or monotonic — the trick is to “sample” it in such a way that it supports a smooth monotonic narrative for people that doesn’t either oversell (leading to a narrative bubble) or undersell (leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of research starvation). You can guide people towards a specific emotional outcome by telling stories that sketch the trendline and sampling evidence that supports it. In effect you draw the trend line and then figure out what data points you’re going to create in order to match it. Long term, fuzzy outputs mean that the evidence you’re targeting (ie. Milestones) needs to be biased towards inputs to the system instead of targeting outputs that are unambiguously on the critical path towards success. The timing of evidence matters as well. More specifically, timing *consistency.* If you’re used to hearing updates about something weekly and then there’s no news for a month or two, most people’s brains automatically start assuming that things aren’t going as well. That narrative decay doesn’t happen if a project consistently shows evidence of progress every six months, even though the absolute time between data points is longer. Consistently-timed narrative-reenforcing evidence is the fuzzy thing I think we’re referring to when we talk about a project having “momentum.” Although it’s not momentum in the mass*velocity sense, the word still connotes the feeling of “hard to stop.” Things that are hard to stop are more likely to get where they’re headed and hopefully that’s whatever winning is if you’ve successfully established where that is via the narrative. Another strategy towards maintaining a narrative of progress over long timescales is to have a number of parallel threads that you can show progress on, one at a time. These threads need to *feel* directionally similar to maintain narrative. [[Orthogonal projects destroy narratives]]! The trick is to keep all the projects live at the same time. [[SpaceX]] is the master of this approach: Starship test! Drone ship landing! Stat about how many successful launches in a row they’ve done! Crew dragon! I also have a hunch that you shouldn’t announce something until you know how the piece of evidence it creates feeds into the broader narrative and what evidence people will be expecting afterwards. There’s a distinctive “what ever happened to that?” feeling that happens where a company makes a big announcement about a new project but then it’s never heard of again. The [Lockheed miniature fusion reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion_Reactor) comes to mind. A piece of evidence with no followup creates a narrative of failure. #### What does evidence look like? Anything *can* potentially count as evidence if it’s been properly set up within the narrative. However, different communities have different consensuses about what constitutes evidence. Deviating from these community standards isn’t impossible, but it does run the risk of smelling like BS. In the startup world, for example, VC firms have a pretty clear set of things that count as evidence: funding events, product releases, key hires, exit events, raises, closing big customers. Startups also illustrate things that people often try to pass off as evidence of progress but that most observers who know what’s up will discount — eg. Letters of Intent, invited talks at big conferences, publishing papers, or high-status advisors. However, in academia — those talks and papers *do* count as evidence. Even within academia, what counts as evidence differs — in robotics, for example, conference papers count more than journal papers, while in chemistry the opposite is true! In less-established disciplines (like weird nonprofit research organizations) there are much weaker evidentiary standards. As a result, many more things *could* be evidence if the narrative supports them, but at the same time it’s easier to hit a dud. Here’s a list of some things that could be evidence: * Demos * Artifacts * Official sanctioned written artifacts like papers * Unofficial written artifacts * Code * Videos * Press releases * Media articles * Kickoffs * An internal type of milestone * Funding events * Zeitgeist * Some kind of number that can consistently go up or down * Hitting intermediate goals * A trick is that intermediate goals need to be different *or* show * People need to grok * Impressive people getting on board * One off “we did a thing!” Does not feel like momentum ### Case Studies * Positive * The artist Fnnch seems really good at generating this feeling of progress. * [[Magic Leap]] was good at this for a bit, and then it wasn’t * The jump from the CGI demos to the real demos updated the trajectory heavily * [[SpaceX]] (and [[Elon Musk]] in general) are amazing at this * George Church * Ed Boyden * Negative * [Princeton Fusion Systems](https://www.princetonfusionsystems.com/) This looks awesome but I literally cannot tell where they started, what they did, and how long it took ### Related * [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]] * [[Things shift from impossible to inevitable when you remove bottlenecks]] * [[Real bottlenecks make a situation feel intractable or hopeless]] * [[Hypothesis-based Milestones for PARPA]] [^1]: Of course, resources do not guarantee success. At the same time, it is (by definition) impossible to succeed without them. Resources are necessary but not sufficient. [^2]: See [[linStoryLieStory2020]] and [[dancoAreFoundersAllowed2020]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Projects+need+to+build+narratives+of+perceived+progress+on+top+of+pieces+of+evidence) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Projects+need+to+build+narratives+of+perceived+progress+on+top+of+pieces+of+evidence) <!-- #evergreen #publishing/unpublished -->