§PARPA

You can create a program design discipline that enables better research and development

The value of planning is inversely proportional to the cost of experimenting

Program design could be thought of as creating a causal graph of blockers and hypotheses about how to mitigate those blockers

Program design is like creating the lego instruction book

Treating Science Fiction as case studies from a future history

Instead of planning not working as well as people in the past thought, as a society we’ve become worse at technological planning

How does money work in PARPA?

Physical experiments are expensive

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

What role does scenario planning have in technological program design?

The distinction between areas, programs, and projects

Maps help you figure out possibilities

There was a high return to technological roadmapping compared to not roadmapping in the past

Enabling Mission Impact - Funding Strategies for High-Risk High-Reward Innovation

An ontology around peoples attitudes competency and roles is important for program design

Top of mind

An ARPA-like program could be the first step towards making general-purpose telerobotics inevitable

The tech tree model suggests that explicitly drawing out tech trees is important

Funding is path dependent and funding curves matter

Explaining things like I’m five helps avoid the Einstellung Effect

How do you measure real progress in research?

A predictably successful idea is composed of known unknowns that that a team can execute against

Planning to Start vs Planning to Finish

Say ‘X is more important than Y’ instead of ‘X is important’

What are the different kinds of bottlenecks?

The role of a visionary is to bootstrap the new from the old

What is PARPA’s edge?

There are two kinds of program design conversations — expansive and focused

What does a modified PARPA Heilmeier catachism look like?

Roadmapping is related to the ability to create leading metrics for success

How do you think about the risk profile of PARPA programs?

Jim Matheson and Joshua Krieger conversation 14 Jul 2021

Work backwards with questions and work forward with answers

Joe Rollin conversation 10 May 2021

The crux question of program design is when to commit

Precisely listing entrenched beliefs could be an important part of bottleneck analysis

Abstractly you want a good way of visualizing a bunch of chained vectors

Block Diagrams need to be in easily editable format

Geoff Anders conversation 7 Jun 2021

Geoff Anders conversation 9 Jun 2021

Getting people to talk about speculative research extensions is hard

Josh Greenberg Conversation 18 May 2021

Roadmaps should have statements like “if we gain the ability to do X then we should do Y”

# §Program Design
- [[What are the goals of the program design process?]]
- [[Program design is like creating the lego instruction book]]
- [[Program design could be thought of as creating a causal graph of blockers and hypotheses about how to mitigate those blockers]]

### Hypotheses
- [[The first step of roadmapping is frontier mapping]]
- [[A roadmapping framework may make the ARPA model more effective]]
- [[Talking to experts can expose bad equilibria, the moves necessary to get out of them, and considerations for doing them like cost constraints]]
- [[You can create a framework for talking to people that makes it easier to generate a roadmap]]
- [[You could build tools to make program design more efficacious]] 

### What are roadmaps
- [[What are the properties of maps?]]
- [[Roadmaps have two pieces - the map and the path]]
-  [[Roadmaps are a theoretical construct to escape inadequate equilibria]]
- [[List of Roadmapping Examples]]
-  [[Most roadmaps suck]]
	- [[Most roadmaps are not execution oriented]]

### Why Roadmapping
- [[Instead of planning not working as well as people in the past thought, as a society we’ve become worse at technological planning]]
- [[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]]
- [[Roadmaps can enable faster progress than blind exploration]]
- [[Technological roadmapping can give an idea of where technological evolution can go and how to get there]]
- [[A roadmapping framework may make the ARPA model more effective]]
- [[Program design is like performance debugging a vision]]
And of course we need to look at the possibility that this is all BS
- [[The roadmapping process is heavily context dependent and there may not be a generalized roadmapping process at all]]

### Building better roadmaps
- [[Design for roadmapping system]]
-  [[Person targeted questions for roadmapping]]
- [[What are the eight steps of Wigmore analysis translated to science?]]
- [[Technical Planning Principles]]
- [[Good roadmaps work backwards from a goal]]
- [[Good Simulations could be the ‘why now’ of roadmapping tools]]

### Glossary
- [[The distinction between areas, programs, and projects]]
- Bottlenecks -> Roadmap -> Execution
- Language
	- Binding Constraints
	- Affordances
	- Dependencies 
	- Project
	- Program
	- Area
	- Causal graph of blockers
- Steps
	- Frontier Mapping
	- Finding the right people
	- Comparing different paths
	- Goal setting
	- Finding serious contexts of use
	- Different institutional ‘moves’
	- Respectability cascades
	- Spending curves

### References
- [[And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared]]
- [[Wigmore Guide - Paper]]
- [[The trade-off: a central concept for biomimetics]]



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§Program Design

When should we defer to experts?

We need more metaexpertise

# Talking to experts can expose bad equilibria, the moves necessary to get out of them, and considerations for doing them like cost constraints
### Sub Hypotheses
- People in a discipline *know* where the bad equilibria are
- People in a discipline have hunches about possibilities for getting out of bad equilibria 
- People would talk to you about things if they think that it will enable them to work on things
	- This would suggest that we need to connect in their mind with the possibility of funding

The danger here is that [[Structuring knowledge is expensive]] 

The reason for the conversation piece is that [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]

### Questions

### Experiments
- Have multiple ‘exploratory’ conversations in multiple disciplines with experts and play with different ways of asking questions, but make sure you’re targeting clear 

### Related
- [[You can create a framework for talking to people that makes it easier to generate a roadmap]]

Super hypothesis:[[You can create a program design discipline that enables better research and development]]
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You can create a framework for talking to people that makes it easier to generate a roadmap

# What causes people to give super fuzzy answers to precise questions? 
I’ve repeatedly run into situations where I craft what I think is a very precise technical question for a professor and they go off on an extremely high level tangent that really just sounds like philosophical mumbo jumbo. For example: “What are some specific experiments or projects that would drive systems integration in this one technology?” “You need to think about thermal energy.” It’s confusing because these people are technical experts.

One explanation is that they’re so far from the experiments/code/equations that they’ve gotten manager-brain. Another is that making specific assertions is scary because they might be wrong?

### Related
- [[There are secretly three kinds of experts]]


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Talking to experts can expose bad equilibria, the moves necessary to get out of them, and considerations for doing them like cost constraints

# You can create a framework for talking to people that makes it easier to generate a roadmap
### Sub Hypotheses
-  There is a set of useful verbs and nouns in the system that get the most interaction out of people 
	- [[Nouns and verbs for roadmapping system]]
- Eventually you can encode the framework in software
	- [[You could build tools to make program design more efficacious]]

Superhypothesis:[[You can create a program design discipline that enables better research and development]]

### Questions
- [[What causes people to give super fuzzy answers to precise questions?]]

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Good roadmaps work backwards from a goal

# You could build tools to make program design more efficacious
- ‘knowledge mapping software’

Sub hypothesis of [[You can create a program design discipline that enables better research and development]]

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Ben's working notes

You can create a framework for talking to people that makes it easier to generate a roadmap

Sub Hypotheses

Questions

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