I’ve been collecting my thoughts on the idea discussed last week in the 2R research call, especially the proposal to initiate sub-circles as a new collaborative research structure. These thoughts may still be somewhat unpolished, but this feels like the clearest way I can express them.
My sense is that the impulse behind creating sub-circles is generally positive and directionally correct, but still somewhat ill-defined. It seems to be a response to something real, but what exactly? That was my impression, at least. This is not to say the proposal is a knee-jerk attempt to shake things up. There have been recurring conversations over the past months about making the research group more impactful, more action-oriented, more generative. But those conversations have often been short on mechanism.
In some ways, I do not think the changes go far enough. What sub-circles get right is the introduction of more specificity and more autonomy. Instead of discussing the response to the metacrisis only in general terms, we could engage particular questions in a more focused way. And rather than limiting ourselves to a discussion format, a sub-circle could become a vehicle for something else to emerge. One can easily imagine a sub-circle evolving into a business, an art project, a field experiment, or some other concrete initiative.
What seems missing is some gentle structure that would make outcomes like these more likely. Like a stake used to guide the growth of a plant, some guiding principles could help ensure that sub-circles do not simply become smaller-scale repetitions of the last few years of research group activity, but instead become an augmentation and continuation of those efforts.
One possible objection is that the format will already be different: the groups will be smaller, the topics more specific, the people involved different, and so the outcomes should also differ. But to me these feel more like message-level changes than medium-level changes. The overarching 2R research group frame already exists, and it provides a behavioral template people will naturally tend to reproduce. A real change in medium would mean structuring conversations differently, defining outcomes differently, creating different incentives, and in general introducing a different kind of priming. If you invite a group of people onto a research call, they will tend to behave in ways that repeat the patterns of previous research calls. So my expectation is that sub-circle discussions will indeed be interesting, because discussions have been interesting in the past, but may still fail to generate outcomes meaningfully different from what has already happened.
This concern seems underscored by the fact that the most tangible idea proposed so far is to re-examine past research. Would those discussions be interesting, lively, and perhaps even illuminating? Probably. But how would they constitute an augmentation or continuation of the last few years rather than a repetition, if the content is quite literally the same themes revisited?
On Friday’s call, I suggested that we should take seriously the question posed in the sub-circle document about how we move toward a 2R future. So far, most answers to that question have been theoretical and abstract. The next step, as I see it, is to make something practical, concrete, and testable. The former mode of engagement treats the question as rhetorical. The latter treats it as a matter of practical necessity. We are living through the metacrisis now, and further characterizations of it are not enough. At some point, after analysis, one has to begin testing solutions.
Doing so requires more than head and heart, though many of us have both in abundance. It also requires hand: the capacity to engage discomfort, learn from failure, and adapt quickly through feedback.
The sub-circle idea has real potential to introduce a spark of creativity into our discourse. But if these groups were explicitly framed as generators of solution spaces, that would be a way of realizing the idea more fully.
One possible approach would be this:
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Imagine a future in which a sub-circle has become wildly successful.
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What has made it so? What qualities does it have? What kinds of interactions does it enable What outputs or effects does it produce?
Then, with that end state in mind, we could work backward to the present. This is a form of backward induction. For example, if the ideal sub-circle eventually develops an autonomous media or outreach capability that distributes its ideas more widely, what earlier steps would have been necessary to make that possible?
I would propose doing something like this not only for one sub-circle, but for the sub-circle model in general. It would amount to defining a kind of “sub-circle factory”: if we knew the conditions that make sub-circles successful, how would we reproduce those conditions intentionally?
We have a great deal of talent and experience in this research group, and I think we could generate strong ideas here. My suspicion is that we would arrive at something resembling Ostrom’s core design principles, along with some important additions specific to our context.
So why not consciously encode those principles into our substructures?
That would require making sub-circles somewhat more formal, with clearer boundaries and expectations.
To be clear, much of this is already implicit in the sub-circle document Jonah shared last week. But while more accountability has been introduced into the 2R research group as a whole, the structure and identity of sub-circles still seem largely unspecified, and where there is a void, the default is often to repeat past behavior.
How might we address that? Ostrom’s design principles offer one example. A sub-circle might benefit from clear boundaries, conflict-resolution mechanisms, monitoring, and so on. These would obviously need to be adapted to the purpose and culture of the specific group, but the larger point is that sub-circles should be designed in ways that help them produce better ideas and better outcomes.
To sum up this already long post, the key point for me is that we need some way to:
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define what a good sub-circle is
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notice how a given sub-circle measures up
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improve a sub-circle on the basis of that feedback
In other words, what we need is a learning loop for sub-circles: something that applies not only to one instance, but to the model itself.
My own research has focused on trust and feedback mechanisms, and I tend to see this as a problem best addressed through bottom-up, iterative processes rather than through a top-down design that tries to achieve perfection from the outset.
I’ve been developing a framework based on promise theory for creating prescriptive definitions of what ought to be expected from the things we interact with, and for making it easier to notice and respond to discrepancies between intended behavior and actual behavior.
On that view, we could define a sub-circle as an agent, or as something that makes promises, which can then be assessed by independent observers.
For example, a sub-circle might promise to articulate a clear guiding question, one whose adequate resolution would indicate that the sub-circle had succeeded in its purpose.
There are many ways such a question could fail to be clear. But once an unclear question is proposed, it can be assessed, revised, and improved in the next iteration. That is simply the learning loop in action, and it is very close to the core logic of promise-based feedback.
Whether or not promise theory is the right framework, my broader point remains the same: the tendency to repeat past behaviors is the default, and that is what we will do unless we make the sub-circle model more specific.
We could also draw on other specification frameworks, such as Jobs to Be Done, Cucumber, or other methods for clarifying purpose, expectations, and feedback.
I think introducing constraints like this would generate more interesting subgroups. For example, I would like to propose a subgroup focused on cognitive sovereignty - specifically, prototyping actionable ways to help people break out of the passive consumption of legacy cultural narratives. Instead of just discussing the degradation of our media ecology, this subgroup would focus on interventions. This is a topic that can be bounded, tested incrementally, and measured through specific field experiments. Frameworks like the ones I mentioned above are what give this idea teeth: by defining exactly how we will demonstrate validity, make our interventions reproducible, and measure their impact, a theoretical discussion transforms into a viable, exciting project.
What matters most to me is that we use this opportunity to improve on past results by taking stock of what the last few years have produced, and asking honestly whether responding in the same way will be adequate for the next few years.