(I've already been over this idea with Ray and Aaron by phone, so I'll keep it short here.)
Let me start by saying that I'm not strongly opposed to concepts. Actually, I think they're great, or at least, they can be. It's just that we have so many interesting concepts floating around that have not gone anywhere beyond the stage of conceptual development.
What I think we need is a strategy for pairing concepts with the implementations, experiments, or other actions that will test them out, and get them out of the conceptual realm.
All too frequently in the past, the different parties in our discussions will agree about a suitable course of action – and then appear to call it a day, as the action in question is put on ice indefinitely. This needs to change. A course of action is not all that suitable unless it includes a strategy for deployment.
It is fine and good for users to come up with Feature Requests, for example, but it would be way better to have a way to translate these requests into filled requests.
Just to make it clear that I am not speaking in hot air balloons right now, let me mention that this strategy of pairing concepts with actions – and forming realistic goals and expectations about our actions – is precisely what we are working on now with our new Schedule.
I hope we can keep the good concepts coming – but I also hope we can focus this year on pairing our existing conceptual work with practical action. (Cf. Ray's Focussing Inward essay.)
--jcorneli
I think of this as a flow issue — under healthy circumstances, there is a steady flow of projects from concepts to deliverables. However, if something goes wrong then the usual problem shows up — stuff piles up at some point and stagnation sets in. In this case, one might wind up with a backlog of concepts or plans or unfinished projects depending on which location along the pipeline has the mismatch.
For me, I find priorities to be an important issue. In my personal life, I don't really mind having projects on ice indefinitely as long as I am sure that important items are moving along at a reasonable pace. For instance, I have some plans for a dream shop in my basement. While I think about this from time to time and have all sorts of ideas about how I would like it to look, these plans are all on ice. The reason this doesn't bother me is that I know that there are much more urgent things pulling on my attention and it is pretty clear to me that there is no time left for these other items. At the same time, I don't consider it a waste to put spare hours when I am too tired to do much else to thinking about these things conceptually becasue I expect it will pay off when I finally get a chance to do things like actually work on building my dream shop in the form of a much better planned shop.
Put another way, I have no problem with putting concepts on ice indefinitely as long as it is done strategically as part of a larger plan as opposed to something that just happens. Whilst I have no problem postponing my dream shop indefinitely, I have a real problem with the way HDM development has been postponed because all sorts of other stuff came up for the last year and a half. This is why I find it important in our planning to identify the important items such as HDM research and deveolpment and fundraising and be sure to have a sane schedule which allots enough time to make reasonable progress on those items. While it would be nice to get other stuff done as well, it won't bother me if other stuff stays on the back burner or even in the refrigerator should it turn out that the high priority items required more attention than originally anticipated.
Another factor to consider which Aaron mentioned last night is means. Obviously, something will have to stay at the conceptual stage if the means to bring it about are lacking. For instance, the reason the feature requests haven't been done is because a. we don't have programers b. we don't have the money to hire programmers and c. the Noosphere code needs to be documented better. This doesn't really bother me anymore, it doesn't even bother me that new requests are still being added, because we are aware of these issues and actively working on remedying the problems. It was different two years ago when I saw the bugs and feature requests piling up but no realistic plan for how to deal with them, which is why I decided that, in addition to adding content, I might have to take a role in the organizational side of PM. --rspuzio
I agree with your point that progress freezing at the concept level is only one of several ways that deliverables can fail to appear. Also that one should be aware of the whole pipeline (even to the point of coming up with a better metaphor!).
Yet, the reason I wrote as I did above is that I think I've seen frighteningly consistent stalling at (or, more precisely, just after) the conceptual phase, in both PM and some HDM efforts (although in somewhat different ways and maybe for different reasons). There are many different scenarios that have come up, with different sets of agents involved, and so there is a lot of diversity that is getting lumped into one aggregated lump sum in my comment. Certainly, different agents have taken different courses with respect to the conceptual landmarks we've identified. For example, you and me working on organizational and networking efforts shouldn't really be construed as "stagnation" of concepts, just that it is part of a somewhat complex approach. Which is only natural.
As a scholium to your theme of "popping" the PM community off of the stack now that we've processed some important intermediate goals, my theme here is to pop the set of concepts we've previously identified as "worth working on eventually" and see if now might be the strategically appropriate time for some of them, and if so, do that work (again strategically).
We are in the process of carrying out this plan. But I wanted to give a new conceptual label to that process, i.e., "against concepts" :).
Notice the difference between just saying we "should" carry out a given process, and pointing out that we are carrying it out! Now, if I was to go on to give a big spiel about this stuff from a philosophy standpoint, I'd be generating or linking in a bunch of new concepts, which would be hungry for pairs that they don't have and might not get for the forseeable future. So, I won't go on about that just now.
I would like to say a little more about "flow". I think it is very good to "follow through" on thoughts or ideas you might have. E.g. I might note that the philosophical idea I wanted to explore above is called "ecology". But one doesn't want to follow through too far on each tangent, or one gets sidetracked. So I'll leave this comment at that one word and we can come back to it later if that seems valuable. The way this relates to flow is that flow is about follow-through, and a project that flows all the way to the end has complete follow-through – if "end" is even a meaningful concept!. At the other end (i.e. the beginning) of the spectrum – a contribution that doesn't even have a vector showing where the flow can go to doesn't lead so easily to follow through, whereas one that comes with a vector does. (E.g. the next step for your dream shop might be clear to you, even if you don't anticipate yourself taking this step right away.) Continuing work on some vectorless contribution amounts to figuring out and then attaching a suitable vector. More developed contributions will typically have many dimensions, and vectors pointing all over the place. This is the status of something like PM or HDM, for example. For something simpler like MUSN, there are only a handful of "next steps" involved. We'll almost surely have to take these steps in order to see what the next next steps will be.
My hypothesis is that one reason so many discussions at PM don't have a sufficient supply of next steps attached to them all the time is that the PM contributors are mathematicians who are used to working in the abstract realm. If they work something out conceptually, then they think it is "right" and that they can stop there. But programmers and physicists know that this just isn't how the world works (even though frequently they are willing to work with various idealized models)! Not to be too self-congratulatory or too self-deprecatory, I get the sense that we are taking good steps at present, and I think we have learned a lot about how to keep this process flowing along in the future.
--jcorneli