Guest Talk with Geoff Manaugh | Burglary, Architecture, and the Protocols of “Nakatomi Space”

Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar's Guide to the City, argues that burglary is fundamentally an architectural and protocol-level phenomenon: criminals like the 'hole in the ground gang' and 'Roofman' exploit sufficiently granular knowledge of city infrastructure (storm drains, freeway on/off-ramps, fire codes, corporate franchise layouts) to identify repeatable spatial and temporal vulnerabilities. He develops the concept of 'Nakatomi Space' (named after Die Hard) as a parallel, hidden circulation system—air ducts, maintenance corridors, walls—that can be misused to move through buildings against their intended protocols, and discusses how rules meant to protect (fire code, corporate scheduling) simultaneously reveal how a system can be attacked.

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Guest Talk with Sarah Perry | Protocols of Reproducible Science

Sarah Perry argues that most social-science abstract nouns—aggression, humility, the subconscious—are 'weasel words' whose laboratory operationalizations (the Bobo doll, Taylor aggression paradigm, self-report surveys) are so varied and arbitrary that they fail to measure anything generalizable, a pattern she calls 'protocol as alibi' where following procedure substitutes for real knowledge. She contrasts this with 'protocol as checksum,' where minor, publicly checkable procedural details (IRB approval, properly sourced gel images, unmanipulated data files) serve as tells for whether hidden parts of a study were actually done honestly, illustrated through cases like Hwang Woo-suk's cloning fraud and Dan Ariely's disputed honesty and placebo studies. Venkatesh Rao introduces the talk by linking Perry's earlier ribbonfarm writing on architecture and ritual to her current focus on reproducibility and the generalizability crisis.

automaticitypriming-and-nudge-theory generalizability-crisis guest-talks

May 2023

Sarah Perry, Venkatesh Rao

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Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

May 2024

Daniel Bashir

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Protocol Town Hall with Chenoe Hart | Addressable Space

Chenoe Hart presents her Summer of Protocols research project 'Addressable Space,' tracing how built environments are remapped through informational systems — from 18th-century European house-numbering schemes that decoupled addresses from physical geography, to skipped floor numbers and hidden 'mechanical voids' in skyscrapers, to elevators as random-access devices. She argues these spatial protocols reshape human experience much like digital file systems, and calls for 'protocol empathy' — the practice of imagining how built space appears from a protocol's or computer system's point of view.

addressable-space arbitrary-vs-geographic-addressing-systems mechanical-voids-and-hidden-floors

Feb 2024

Chenoe Hart