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Towards a New Social Science of Protocols - Yige Wang

Lecture Yige Wang
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Yige Wang (going by 'IU'), a sociologist, presents the design of a new undergraduate course 'Toward a Social Science of Protocol,' structured around core theoretical lenses (functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism), micro-level linguistic/pragmatic protocols like Grice's cooperative principle, and macro-level historical analysis using Norbert Elias's 'The Civilizing Process' and Chinese vs. Western civilizational protocol divergence (protocol pluralism vs. protocol monoculture). She runs live interactive experiments with the audience (cross-disciplinary paraphrasing exercise, Zoom chat protocol-spotting) to demonstrate implicit versus explicit protocols in real time.

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Lecture

Kickoff

In this kickoff session for Protocol School 2025, an unnamed orientation leader uses the bristlemouth fish (the most abundant vertebrate on Earth, yet unknown to most people) as a metaphor for how protocols pervade daily life unnoticed, introducing 'protocol watching' and 'protocol built' as practices for cultivating awareness. Tim then argues protocols are 'engineered arguments' that produce Whitehead advances, using an Ethereum flash-loan transaction and the concept of 'hardness' (atoms, institutions, now cryptography/code) to show how Ethereum functions as a 'mesoprotocolized world.' Timber closes by advocating a meso-level focus for protocol intervention, introducing the 'carrier bag theory of management,' tension-based protocol design, and a capability maturity model for AI adoption, alongside housekeeping for the week's certificate program.

carrier-bag-theory-of-management engineered-arguments hardness-atomsinstitutionscryptography

Tim, Timber

Lecture

Applied Protocol Thinking - Timber Stinson-Schroff

Timber Stinson-Schroff closes Protocol School 2025 with a capstone talk on 'Applied Protocol Thinking,' arguing that protocol literacy is best built through 'protocol watching'—a low-intensity, habitual practice analogous to an endurance athlete's easy-pace training—before attempting high-stakes protocol design. He introduces frameworks like hazard-oriented protocoling (analogous to object-oriented programming), the Chesterton's Fence vs. Gordian Knot heuristic, and Erik Hollnagel's ETTO (efficiency-thoroughness trade-off) principle reframed as an ongoing tension to manage rather than solve, illustrating concepts with examples from dog-walking, library shelving carts, tree-trimming crews, and GitLab's engineering trade-offs.

chestertons-fence-vs-gordian-knot-heuristic etto-principle-efficiency-thoroughness-trade-off-as-managed-tension hazard-oriented-protocoling-hop-modeled-on-object-oriented-programming

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Lecture

Beyond Consensus - Protocols as Digital Institutions - Martin Harrigan

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.

hardness-joshua-stark llm-generated-protocol-studies-context meta-prompting-and-conversation-steering

Martin Harrigan

Topics

civilizing-process-and-etiquette-as-embodied-protocol cooperative-principle-as-pragmatic-protocol functionalistconflictsymbolic-theoretical-lenses-on-protocol metrological-infrastructure-benchmarks-as-protocol protocol-polarism-vs-protocol-monoculture protocol-school-2025 protocol-watching protocols research school