Epistrons: Knowledge Artifacts for Hyperproblems

I haven’t written in a while, but here I am, repenting my sins with a post that uses all of @leaflet.pub ’s capabilities.

In my introductory post on hyperproblems , I ended with Common Source - open source plus people sharing - as the circulatory system for collective intelligence. I hadn't said what exactly was circulating, but if you look at the practice of science today, we have:

Papers, but not only papers, since most papers are frozen objects.

Data, but not only data, which by itself doesn't solve anything.

Models, but not only models, since (as Box reminded us) all models are wrong and only some are useful.

Experimental techniques and apparatus’ - the least standadized of the lot IMHO.

And we are missing out on systems that hold papers, data, models and other knowledge artifacts together. What’s the word for all of these knowledge artifacts and more?

The missing word was one I had tried to coin a decade ago, in an essay called Epistrons .

Naming the category changes what you can see and plan for, the way "infrastructure" changed how socities thought about roads and power grids. I had completely set aside my work on Epistrons until I started thinking about hyperproblems last year. Common Source circulates epistrons - knowledge artifacts, products, devices or systems built to satisfy our knowledge desires.

Click on the link below to learn more about Epistrons

The second section is a preliminary count of the species of Epistrons (genus instead of species?). I am not trying to be Mendeleev; this is a first pass. Still, several species come through clearly, pairing into object and systemic forms: physical devices and physical institutions, mental devices and mental systems, computational epistrons and media forms.

Modern science produces papers en masse because we settled on the peer-reviewed paper as the canonical unit and built incentives around that unit. But that’s a monoculture of knowledge artifacts at a time when we need diversity: we can’t address hyperproblems with only one kind of knowledge artifact attracting social capital.

My hope is that computational epistrons, the youngest species, will help dissolve boundaries between the others - papers becoming interactive, provers generating theorems, universities reorganizing into platforms.

Click on the link below to learn more about the Epistron Zoo

The third section is about level-mismatch. Epistrons come in rough sizes that correspond to the scale of the problem they address. A thermometer is small; a periodic table larger; a university larger still; a constitution larger again. The levels are not linear. A university is several orders of magnitude removed from a thermometer in design complexity, institutional weight, and maintenance burden. Mismatch shows up most sharply at the interface between an epistron and the world. My canonical case is the IPCC: planetary-scale content shipped as an Assessment Report that a farmer in Indonesia cannot query, a municipal planner in Chennai cannot parameterize, a trader in Tokyo cannot stress-test. What we need is something closer to a Large Planet Model with a multimodal UI. Mismatches run the other way too - a university's ethics apparatus can smother a routine experiment - and in the most dangerous direction we aim a tiny epistron at a civilizational problem, as when PageRank made a single algorithm the custodian of human knowledge. The mismatch persists because small epistrons are legible in ways large ones are not: countable, fundable, career-bearing. Can we do better at matching? Yes. But our incentive systems still pay for smallness.

The rest of the essay sketches what large-scale epistrons might look like, what I think an epistron designer should be trained to do, and a proposal for a common-source catalog of epistrons.

this essay is a work in progress, and I will keep adding pages over time