(Haha, I did wonder about having so many headings, but it just felt so organised that way, you know 😉)
With regards to removing content we published online, I think we hit the obvious failure mode I expect a lot of new researchers and writers run into, which was that we underestimated how time-consuming, but also stressful, posting publicly and then replying to all the questions can be. To be honest, I kind of suspect early and unexpected negative experiences with public engagement led Leverage to be overly sceptical of it being useful and nudged them away from prioritising communicating their ideas.
From what I understand, some of the key things we ended up removing were:
1) content on Connection Theory (CT)
2) a long-term plan document
3) a version of our website that was very focused on “world-saving.”
With the CT content, I don’t think we made sufficiently clear that we thought of CT as a Kuhnian paradigm worth investigating rather than a fully-fledged, literally true-about-the-world claim.
Speaking to Geoff, it sounds like he assumed people would naturally be thinking in terms of paradigms for this kind of research, often discussed CT under that assumption and then was surprised when people mistook claims about CT to be literal truth claims. To clarify, members of Leverage 1.0 typically didn’t think about CT as being literally true as stated, and the same is true of today’s Leverage 2.0 staff. I can understand why people got this impression from some of their earlier writing though.
This confusion meant people critiqued CT as having insufficient evidence to believe it upfront (which we agree with). While the critiques were understandable, it wasn’t a reason to believe that the research path wasn’t worth following, and we struggled to get people to engage with CT as a potential paradigm. I think the cause of the disagreement wasn’t as clear to us at the time, which made our approach challenging to convey and discuss.
With the long-term planning documents, people misinterpreted the materials in ways that we didn’t expect and hadn’t intended (e.g. as being a claim about what we’d already achieved or as a sign that we were intending something sinister). It seems as though people read the plan as a series of predictions about the future and fixed steps that we were confident we would achieve alone. Instead, we were thinking of it as a way to orient on the scale of the problems we were trying to tackle. We think it’s worth trying to think through very long-term goals you have to see the assumptions that are baked in into your current thinking and world model. We expect solving any problems on a large scale to take a great deal of coordinated effort and plans to change a lot as you learn more.
We also found that a) these kinds of things got a lot more focus than any of our other work which distorted people’s perceptions of what we were doing and b) people would frequently find old versions online and then react badly to them (e.g. becoming upset, confused or concerned) in ways we found difficult to manage.
In the end, I think Leverage concluded the easiest way to solve this was just to remove everything. I think this was a mistake (especially as it only intensified everyone’s curiosity) and it would have been better to post something explaining this problem at the time, but I can see why it might have seemed like just removing the content would solve the problem.
Hi JP,
(Haha, I did wonder about having so many headings, but it just felt so organised that way, you know 😉)
With regards to removing content we published online, I think we hit the obvious failure mode I expect a lot of new researchers and writers run into, which was that we underestimated how time-consuming, but also stressful, posting publicly and then replying to all the questions can be. To be honest, I kind of suspect early and unexpected negative experiences with public engagement led Leverage to be overly sceptical of it being useful and nudged them away from prioritising communicating their ideas.
From what I understand, some of the key things we ended up removing were:
1) content on Connection Theory (CT)
2) a long-term plan document
3) a version of our website that was very focused on “world-saving.”
With the CT content, I don’t think we made sufficiently clear that we thought of CT as a Kuhnian paradigm worth investigating rather than a fully-fledged, literally true-about-the-world claim.
Speaking to Geoff, it sounds like he assumed people would naturally be thinking in terms of paradigms for this kind of research, often discussed CT under that assumption and then was surprised when people mistook claims about CT to be literal truth claims. To clarify, members of Leverage 1.0 typically didn’t think about CT as being literally true as stated, and the same is true of today’s Leverage 2.0 staff. I can understand why people got this impression from some of their earlier writing though.
This confusion meant people critiqued CT as having insufficient evidence to believe it upfront (which we agree with). While the critiques were understandable, it wasn’t a reason to believe that the research path wasn’t worth following, and we struggled to get people to engage with CT as a potential paradigm. I think the cause of the disagreement wasn’t as clear to us at the time, which made our approach challenging to convey and discuss.
With the long-term planning documents, people misinterpreted the materials in ways that we didn’t expect and hadn’t intended (e.g. as being a claim about what we’d already achieved or as a sign that we were intending something sinister). It seems as though people read the plan as a series of predictions about the future and fixed steps that we were confident we would achieve alone. Instead, we were thinking of it as a way to orient on the scale of the problems we were trying to tackle. We think it’s worth trying to think through very long-term goals you have to see the assumptions that are baked in into your current thinking and world model. We expect solving any problems on a large scale to take a great deal of coordinated effort and plans to change a lot as you learn more.
We also found that a) these kinds of things got a lot more focus than any of our other work which distorted people’s perceptions of what we were doing and b) people would frequently find old versions online and then react badly to them (e.g. becoming upset, confused or concerned) in ways we found difficult to manage.
In the end, I think Leverage concluded the easiest way to solve this was just to remove everything. I think this was a mistake (especially as it only intensified everyone’s curiosity) and it would have been better to post something explaining this problem at the time, but I can see why it might have seemed like just removing the content would solve the problem.
(totally unrelated to the actual post but how did you include an emoticon JP?)
⌘-^-Space, gets you emoji and unicode on any text field on a Mac. I assume other operating systems have their own versions.
Thanks JP and Edoarad! 😄
Winky-. on Windows (That’s the windows key + dot) 😊