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Unprotocolized Knowledge

PaperKara Kittel, Toby Shorin

This paper by Kara Kittel and Toby Shorin examines how knowledge production occurs outside formal institutional frameworks, contrasting the democratization of scientific discourse through digital platforms with traditional academic gatekeeping. The authors explore how amateur scientific dialogues and unstructured knowledge creation can generate comparable influence and attention to institutionally-organized research in the context of evolving scientific epistemology.

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Paper

Unprotocolized Knowledge (Revised)

This paper examines how knowledge can exist and accumulate outside of formal protocols and institutional structures, arguing that unprotocolized forms of knowledge generation—from amateur scientific dialogues to open-access communities—can rival institutional science in generating attention and insights. The authors use the 2021 arXiv paper 'The Autodidactic Universe' as a case study to explore how decentralized knowledge-sharing networks challenge traditional gatekeeping in academic discourse.

Kara Kittel, Toby Shorin

Handout

Protocol Selection Pressures

Stinson-Schroff identifies six distinct selection pressures that determine which protocols propagate through populations: efficiency-safety trade-offs, power asymmetries, differential agency constraints, bandwidth limitations, and network topology factors. These pressures create a Darwinian landscape where protocols succeed not through optimality but through alignment with actor capabilities, incentive structures, and the cognitive and physical constraints of the systems in which they operate.

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Paper

The Fundamentals of Protocol Systems

Angela Walch argues that protocol systems exhibit bistable perception—they can be understood either as cohesive wholes with defined boundaries or as temporary assemblages of component parts—and proposes a humanized framework for studying protocols by examining the experiences of individuals embedded within them.

Angela Walch