Our Current Programs
An essay in the Leverage Introduction series
Ambitious Efforts
The bulk of Leverage Research’s efforts go into our three central programs: History of Science, Exploratory Psychology, and Bottlenecks in Science and Technology. Each of these programs was selected because we believe there is a special opportunity available to contribute to progress in nascent and struggling fields and thereby substantially improve the world.
History of Science Program
Through our History of Science program, we are conducting case studies on the major discoveries in the history of successful sciences in order to determine how those discoveries were made. To what degree has scientific advance depended on theory? Or experiment? Or the development of new instruments? We hypothesize that patterns in the history of science are identifiable and transferable. That is to say, we believe that the actual causes of scientific discovery can be determined to an important degree, and that knowledge of these causes can be applied to make present-day scientific research faster and more effective.
Our efforts thus far have focused on the history of electricity. There appear to be approximately thirteen important discoveries in the early history of the field, from Gilbert’s isolation of static electric attraction in 1600 to Maxwell’s statement of the equations governing electromagnetism in 1865. We have conducted mid-depth case studies on nearly half of these discoveries, with encouraging results: in each case we have been able to reach a plausible account of how the discovery was made, and every case study so far has yielded new lessons.
In terms of the total scope of the project, we estimate that each case study takes 6–9 months on average to complete and that there are between 200–400 important discoveries in the early histories of successful sciences. This yields 100–300 person years of effort, which will be supplemented by further analytical studies of various types. This quantity of effort may be daunting to lone researchers, but is entirely within reach for a dedicated team with a long-term research program.
The eventual outcome of this program, if successful, will be the early history of science rendered accessible, with it now being easy to examine the data set of discoveries from the history of successful sciences and draw conclusions about the early scientific process. It is then our expectation that this will yield insights that improve how research is done today.
Exploratory Psychology Program
From 2012–2019, researchers at Leverage Research engaged in an extensive exploration of the mind using introspective methods. During this time we tested a variety of introspective methods, developed our own techniques and practices, and sought to map out the conscious and unconscious mind.
Our Exploratory Psychology program marks the next phase of this research. We are now working to teach external researchers to use our research methods and engage in introspective research themselves. We expect a responsibly managed external community of researchers will both confirm many of our previous findings and discover new things themselves. We also expect that where we made errors in our own research, external researchers will be likely to identify and help us correct those errors.
The first techniques we are working to release are belief reporting, which we believe helps people introspect on their underlying beliefs more reliably, and charting, a method for organizing introspective reports into diagrams that display the relations between beliefs, actions, and goals.
For the purposes of our program, a thriving community of 100–200 external researchers is likely sufficient. We then expect to publish results. In the ideal case, this leads to the development of a fruitful new sub-field of psychological study, one whose methods are inexpensive enough to encourage routine and widespread replication.
Bottlenecks in Science and Technology Program
Over the past decade, we’ve heard narratives of extreme technological progress and the absence thereof — singularity or stagnation. The reality is likely somewhere in the middle and also dependent on choices individuals make.
Through our Bottlenecks program, we are aiming to convene researchers, funders, institution designers, and creative thinkers to help determine how much progress is being made in different fields in science and technology, what the bottlenecks are to future progress, and to create the conditions for new ambitious projects that will break those bottlenecks.
We launched this program in the summer of 2021 with an inaugural workshop, “Bottlenecks in Science and Technology” (aka “Bottlenecks 2021”), hosted at the headquarters of supersonic flight company Boom Supersonic. Researchers presented on the bottlenecks in more than ten different fields, including supersonic flight, energy (fusion, fission, and geothermal), metagenomic sequencing, life extension, telerobotics, psychology, and neuropsychiatry. The workshop was very well-received, sparking conversations that led to the creation of a new aging research grant program and a carbon dioxide removal initiative.
The institute received a generous Emergent Ventures grant for its work on bottlenecks, and interest for follow-on workshops has been strong. We expect to run further events, organize researchers to write careful analyses of bottlenecks in different fields, and otherwise contribute to the creation and successful execution of ambitious projects that will drive responsible scientific and technological progress.
Other Projects
In addition to the above programs, the institute also has a few smaller projects. Of these, two worth highlighting are:
- Coordination Research. Since 2011, the institute has studied, both experimentally and theoretically, how people can work together effectively and well. At present, we are learning about how defining the institute better and communicating more publicly contribute to internal and external coordination.
- Research Archive. Much of our research from 2011–2019 has not been written up. We periodically put effort into writing up this research and publishing it online. Previous research reports have covered topics such as consensus and intelligence amplification; future reports will cover other topics as well.
We frequently have ideas for other programs and projects, though with our current ones we more than have our hands full.
Learn More
To learn more about our programs, see the information on our website. For other information about LR, you can also read other essays in this series:
- Introduction to Leverage Research
- Our Current Programs (current essay)
- Challenges We Face
More essays coming soon:
- Our Strategy for Impact
- Join the Team!
