iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"putting scientific contributions to use requires far more coordination than putting them into print"

traditional science funding often leads to “lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists” but without measurably affecting their supposed mission

For an FRI, funding work that led to a Nobel Prize would be a failure if it didn’t actually make something better for the community. The former head of the US National Institutes of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, once lamented that during his 13-year tenure, the organization spent US$20 billion on research into mental disorders without measurably reducing suicides or hospitalizations or improving recovery for people with mental illness. What those billions did buy, he said, was “lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists”—exactly what agency grant reviewers are primed to select.

Has anyone tried updating this matt.might.net/articles/phd... for PhDs in the age of AI?

Humorous infographic using concentric circles and arrows to show how bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and research papers each progressively deepen specialization, with research papers taking you to the outer edge of human knowledge.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/08/2026

Agreed! It makes me think of this matt.might.net/articles/phd... It used to take half of a PhD to get to the frontier of human knowledge, maybe with these new tools we could get there faster? But either way yes we'd still have to be aware of the new system™️

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"Our hypothesis: at this point in the overall progression of science, network sciences can be revolutionized by networks of people; we just need to figure out how to choose, organize, and facilitate these people."

The path to ground truth biology is different in a way that allows it to be accelerated. While problems in physics are fundamental, those in biology and medicine are not - they are network problems, running on top of existing physical principles. The goal of ground truthing biology, then, is to understand biological systems as computational systems that run on top of the building blocks and interactions of chemistry and physics. We know what we are looking for: a list of the chemicals (e.g., biomolecules) and how they interact - which should be, with appropriate technology, measurable and controllable. Thus, we are dealing with “knowable unknowns”. Our hypothesis: at this point in the overall progression of science, network sciences can be revolutionized by networks of people; we just need to figure out how to choose, organize, and facilitate these people.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/08/2026

I like this thought experiment demonstrating the limits of directly planning breakthrough science

The moon landing itself was a feat of engineering, more so than science: the underlying physics foundation was solid, so the science risk was low. But imagine attempting a moon landing in the year 1600 (explored more in3). Most likely, all the money on Earth wouldn’t get you there, due to the fundamental scientific unknowns at the time. People would tie kites to chairs, and then die. Could you have launched a moonshot (so to speak) in the year 1600? You’d first have to organize people to go after the ground truth: fund mathematicians to develop calculus, physicists to figure out the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics, and chemists and material scientists to map the elements and work out the principles governing chemical reactions.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/08/2026

For 3, just to be sure I understood you correctly, you mean you would want to see an "open in new tab" here ?

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 23/08/2026

"Different language/branding/technology isn't enough. If we want to build a different internet, we have to practice building it differently" Such an inspiring talk by @marisa.blacksky.team at @atproto.nyc 🔥

Presentation slide titled "Building power on the protocol" with the heading "Move as One." A speaker stands at a microphone below the projected slide. The slide text discusses building a different internet by practicing differently: using open protocols for technical architecture, coalition building for different relationships between builders, and collaborative roadmaps for decision-making. Two historical protest posters are displayed on the slide—"The Government Does Not Care, We The People Must Help Each Other" and "Rainbow Coalition: Class Struggle." The slide concludes with "We look forward to working with you." Slide number 14 is shown in the bottom left.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 12/08/2026

Thanks! Should we be able to vote on this survey as well?

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 10/08/2026

Lots of implications here for the design of better epistemic environments to protect our attention from manipulation. For example, having more accurate signals around what people actually think is worth attending to (vs bots or other noise). This is one of our key goals with @semble.so!

We might, for example, develop better mechanisms for measuring how representative an opinion is. Consider Twitter ‘trending topics’. That a topic is trending is a reason for other users to attend to it. But that a topic is trending might represent far fewer people attending to it in a first-order fashion than we tend to think. Further, and probably more significantly, much of the engagement is likely bot-driven. Bots may be programmed to amplify certain topics, or they may simply respond to what others attend to, causing a snowball effect. Better measures of how much attention is genuinely first-order—reflecting people’s assessment that the topic is worth attending to—and how much is bot-driven might reduce the power of attentional hijacking. Social media is often a hijacking amplifier: we need to develop algorithms that dampen such hijacking.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 10/08/2026

Capturing our Attention by @neillevy.bsky.social "we possess sophisticated capacities of epistemic vigilance, which work reasonably well to distinguish reliable from unreliable information, but ... we do not have parallel defences against attentional capture" > www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 09/08/2026

Cool example of participatory research from The Long Haul. Different from many citizen science projects where scientists bring the questions, in the Appalachian land study people chose the question, learned the method, did the work, and found answers to problems that mattered to their community

Before the participatory research was finished , people were so incensed by what they were finding-and so empowered by knowing how to get information-that they started organizing. In Alabama, a number of absentee coal mine owners had gotten a bill introduced that would reduce their already low tax rate and it was about to be passed. As a result of the land study and subsequent organizing the bill was defeated. The people who had organized then started a process by which they got taxes increased. This was all done because the people there were involved in the study. Some other people set up an organization in Kentucky to deal with the tax problems. Later they began to focus on strip mining. The absentee owners were just destroying the environment so this group pushed to have a bill introduced in the legislature and started a court case. There are many examples of people starting to act as a result of being involved in the land study. One county paper in Kentucky published the entire study verbatim over a period of three months, and it was read all over Appalachia.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 06/08/2026

Nice - I saved an AI-pilled piece on the need for new institutions, @semble.so recommended a journal paper on how AI destroys institutions. Collective sensemaking is about building more comprehensive understanding of diverse perspectives

Screenshot of Semble showing a card for "Pax Machina: Institutions in a World with Powerful AI," with a related card below from Stanford's cyberlaw center about how AI affects civic institutions.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 05/08/2026

I'm impressed by Less Wrong's formidable array of reactions. Where emojis are a cornerstone of social networks, maybe "epistemic emojis" like these will play a foundational role for emerging sensemaking networks? What do we call them? Epojis?

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 28/07/2026

Meanwhile on the other site... Is this real or a Baudrillardian joke?

Job posting for Simulation Game Director at Founders School, offering $400,000 USD/year, on-site full-time in New York City. The posting describes Founders School as a radical new high school launching Fall 2026 that promises students will make $1,000,000 in profit by graduation. The role involves creating the first business simulation game where progress is gated by mastering real business skills like pricing, marketing, and operations. The posting emphasizes the school's pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship philosophy and expects the game to reach hundreds of thousands of players within three years.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/07/2026

"Most people are plenty smart enough to make a contribution to science, and many of them are interested. All that’s lacking are tools that help connect them to the scientific community in ways that let them make that contribution. Today, we can build those tools."

Cynics will say that most people aren’t smart or interested enough to make a contribution to science. I believe that projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Foldit show those cynics are wrong. Most people are plenty smart enough to make a contribution to science, and many of them are interested. All that’s lacking are tools that help connect them to the scientific community in ways that let them make that contribution. Today, we can build those tools.

Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/07/2026

Large scale human collaboration is as beautiful as the cosmos itself (Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science astronomy project where people classify galaxies, started in 2007 and still going!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_... #astrosky

I can honestly say that Galaxy Zoo is the best thing I’ve ever done. . . . I don’t know quite what it is, but Galaxy Zoo does something to people. The contributions, both creative and academic, that people have made to the forum are as stunning as the sight of any spiral, and never fail to move me. —Alice Sheppard, volunteer Galaxy Zoo moderator

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 24/07/2026

Remarkable how over a decade ago @michaelnielsen.bsky.social pointed the way towards solving long standing issues plaguing science to this day (issues that are all the more relevant in the age of AI mediated science)

These are just a few ideas to stimulate your thinking about how online tools and collective intelligence can be used to change science. Of course, far more is possible. Imagine completely open source approaches to doing research. Imagine a connected online web of scientific knowledge that integrates and connects data, computer code, chains of scientific reasoning, descriptions of open problems, and beyond. That web of scientific knowledge could incorporate video, virtual worlds, and augmented reality, as well as more conventional media, such as papers. And it would be tightly integrated with a scientific social web that directs scientists’ attention where it is most valuable, releasing enormous collaborative potential.

Reinventing discovery: the new era of networked science

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So much potential here! For example, today I saw a new collection by @aiueo.ooo around the Cyclospora story & wanted to get up to speed, so I asked Claude to summarize it (w/ @desertthunder.dev's lectito to fetch full texts) Personal curation shaping AI summaries is a really interesting direction.

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Re "machines are also proving humans cant predict what their machines will be capable of" there is def a lot of truth in that, but also interesting to note Moravec's paradox which is actually standing the test of time pretty well so far (from 1988) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec...

5/ On the need for metascience, and experimentation with new institutional forms for science. Nice to see references to Michael Nielsen and @convergentresearch.bsky.social

China is not the only country reforming its scientific enterprise. The United Kingdom, for example, has restructured its funding system to address internal inefficiencies, including creating a metascience unit to collect data and develop novel funding mechanisms. Norway has organized its national research council around a portfolio-based model, with boards that allocate funding across thematic priorities drawn from the government’s long-term research plan, alongside disciplinary portfolios. With new ideas bubbling up across the world and within our own vibrant philanthropic, metascience, and academic communities, it falls on the United States as the world’s premier scientific power to take a hard look at how we can accelerate our own scientific machine as well.

The shape of an institution determines the shape of the science it produces.59 The university laboratory, centered on the principal investigator and a rotating cast of graduate students, excels at curiosity-driven research and at training the next generation within established disciplines. The industrial R&D lab, with its permanent staff and tight feedback loops, is suited to engineering projects.60 The national laboratory and large-scale, multinational scientific projects maintain unique capabilities too large for any single actor to sustain. Each form is a container that dictates what research becomes possible and what research never gets attempted.

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4/ I also think that science DAOs have been a fascinating development that merit a lot more experimentation. Not a fan of hyperfinancializing science (has been tried w/little success in the desci space), but IMO there is great promise in collective governance for science funding and decision making

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, communities that pool resources and allocate them through collective governance, are beginning to fund scientific research directly without going through traditional institutional gatekeepers.185 Prediction polls, augmented with proper scoring feedback and statistical aggregation, have also been shown to forecast scientific developments better than prediction markets, based on technological trends already underway.186 Together, these mechanisms can direct resources toward problems based on the wisdom of crowds rather than committee review, potentially faster and more effectively.

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3/ Credit attribution - a cornerstone of @discoursegraphs.bsky.social , @continuous.foundation and our work at @cosmik.network. Do we really need blockchain for it or are other decentralized networks like #atproto or Nanopublications enough?

One key building block of this transformation will be more granular credit attribution. Blockchain-based systems can create immutable records of scientific contributions, timestamping every dataset uploaded, every analysis run, and every hypothesis proposed, and linking each to its creator.184 When the record is fully traceable and captures every contribution comprehensively, credit attribution need not be zero-sum. Contributions to shared resources, such as datasets, code libraries, and protocols, become properly visible and rewardable.

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