As part of preparation for our annual retreat, we prepared an update for the board. You can see that update here:
The main takeaways:
We’re still low on funds. We’ve written about the evidence for our expected impact and will be speaking to more supporters about it. If you want to positively affect the future and think science is a way to do that, please consider donating.
One staff member departed. Larissa did a great job helping us to move from a scrappy underground research lab to a professional institute, and more! We wish her the best in her future endeavors, and are glad she’s continuing as an advisor on engagement.
We ran Bottlenecks 2023 in Japan. The conference was a success. We learned a lot, got great feedback, and had the chance to learn a lot more about Fukushima. Read about it in the update, see our brief Twitter thread, and stay tuned for future updates.
We finished our Hauksbee study. Our sixth case study in the history of science, we’re now half way through electricity, from Gilbert to Maxwell. Read the case study and see our research highlights on our website.
Apart from those, we’re working on engagement challenges. We’re now shipping regularly, talking to supporters, and have a new aesthetic.
We expect engagement to continue to be a focus for a while. We’ve got great content, but we were essentially starting from scratch on communication, which means that we’re missing maybe 20 different things that people might find obvious.
One thing we’re working on: warmth. We’ve concluded that some of our team members are better at warm communication than others (😢/ 😂), so we’re starting to take that into account, though it’s actually quite hard to talk about science and technology in a way that is both precise and warm. So we’re working on it!
Another thing we’re working on: professional document format. We graduated from bullet point documents and technical language to documents in prose with images, through a series of color schemes and fonts, to google docs with images. We’re now converging on a cohesive aesthetic and upgrading the design of our reports.
Speaking of which, we’re starting to publish regular reports, and are putting those into better and more professional-looking documents.
Oliver is surprised it took us this long to get here, and finds it annoyingly plausible that it’s just a huge bunch of obvious lessons we have to learn, one after the other. But as we know from our introspection research, that’s how learning frequently works.
Until next time,
Geoff
p.s. We’re rebranding “History of Science” to “Metascience” and “Exploratory Psychology” to “Introspection.” If you’d like to be part of a discussion of metascience or introspection, feel free to join our Discord.