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Beyond Consensus - Protocols as Digital Institutions - Martin Harrigan

LectureMartin Harrigan
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Beyond Consensus - Protocols as Digital Institutions - Martin Harrigan
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Martin Harrigan, a lecturer and teaching fellow at SETU in Ireland, presents a method for using LLMs to study protocols: first building an LLM context file by transcribing and clustering ideas from the entire Summer of Protocols YouTube channel, then using that context plus a 10-property framework from 'The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' to roleplay protocols (like his 'Kevin the dinner host' example) and test properties such as defensibility, mortality, and legitimacy. He walks through building prompts, meta-prompting, and steering LLM conversations to demonstrate these properties, while noting weaknesses like circular reasoning and the difficulty of generalizing from a single instantiation.

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hardness-joshua-starkllm-generated-protocol-studies-contextmeta-prompting-and-conversation-steeringprotocol-school-2025protocolsresearchroleplay-based-protocol-analysistechnologyten-properties-of-good-protocols-constrained-generative-defensible-mortal-etc

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