DARPA anthropologist talks culture, science, teamwork, and replication

DARPA has a cultural anthropologist with interesting insights:

Cultural anthropology really studies the world we make for ourselves. There we veer into the realm of collective fiction: the economies, the organizations, and the identities we have and share and develop.

That was Adam Russell on the podcast “Voices from DARPA.”

Voices of DARPA podcast with Adam Russell, Program Manager

Russell attributes the idea of “collective fiction” to Harari’s book, Sapiens. He explains:

Our species competitive advantage is we agree to believe in things that actually aren’t real, but in the process make them real. Economies are just like that, and that is the challenge of social science.

We want to model financial crises or crashes as being fundamental physical laws, trying to adopt models from physics and other natural sciences. The problem is by virtue of actually modeling the phenomenon you can lead people to believe that it could occur. You’ve created the phenomenon you were trying to understand in the first place.

The scientific method relies on first isolating systems from their context and second decomposing them to an account of their parts. This reductionism seems easier in the natural sciences than in social sciences because we don’t think electrons have feelings and emoti ons.

But when we get down to the very small levels in physics, the intended distinction between observer and observed becomes blurred. As Steven Weinberg commented:

As much as we would like to take a unified view of nature, we keep encountering a stubborn duality in the role of intelligent life in the universe, as both subject and student.

Back to Adam Russell at DARPA. He finds that collective fictions can help us solve coordination problems. I would add that laws, property rights, and contracts are sorts of fictions. Belief in these fictions will produce a totally different set of outcomes than an alternative set of cultural beliefs.

DARPA itself seems to have a productive culture that is manifested through teams.

Getting to know some folks who work both in DARPA and for DARPA, its hard to not get affected by that cache. You realize that they really do walk the walk. They’re willing to take these chances and risk investments that that in other areas might be considered too risky.

One of the biggest problems in the DOD is transitioning projects from promising experiment at labs like DARPA to full-scale developments. This is often called the “valley of death” and is very closely related to the difference in cultures on either side of Milestone B. One culture is flexible and innovative, the other is rigid and cost conscious. More on this problem later.

Russell is a program manager at DARPA with four programs in the social sciences. Here is a snippet from one program, Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE):

The Department of Defense (DoD) often leverages social and behavioral science (SBS) research to design plans, guide investments, assess outcomes, and build models of human social systems and behaviors as they relate to national security challenges in the human domain. However, a number of recent empirical studies and meta-analyses have revealed that many SBS results vary dramatically in terms of their ability to be independently reproduced or replicated, which could have real-world implications for DoD’s plans, decisions, and models. To help address this situation, DARPA’s Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program aims to develop and deploy automated tools to assign “confidence scores” to different SBS research results and claims.

Once again DARPA shows itself willing to fund projects that would hardly pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis in terms of foreseeable military outcomes. They focus on the people and ideas rather than the procedures and guidelines.