[This post is also crossposted on Less Wrong.]

The ‘research speedrun’ is a format that I’ve been playing with on here for the last year or so. It’s been more popular than I expected and it looks like there’s a lot more that could be done with the idea. So I thought I’d write it up here and see if anyone else wants to experiment with it themselves, or suggest different things to try.

The format

It’s a very simple format, so this section will be short:

• Pick a topic
• Set a one hour timer
• Find out as much as possible about the topic before the buzzer goes off while writing up a live commentary
• Do a very quick editing pass to fix the worst typos and then hit Publish

So far I’ve done speedruns on Marx on alienation, the Vygotsky Circle, sensemaking, the Prussian education system, abacus schools, Germaine de Staël, and mess.

What I’ve used it for so far

Obviously, there’s only so much you can learn in an hour – calling this ‘research’ is a little bit of a stretch. Sometimes I don’t even manage to leave Wikipedia! Even so, this technique works well for topics where the counterfactual is ‘I don’t read anything at all’ or ‘I google around aimlessly for half an hour and then forget it all’. Writing notes as I go means that I’m making enough active effort that I end up remembering some of it, but I know the process is timeboxed so it’s not going to end up being one of those annoying ever-expanding writing projects.

Here are a few rough categories of topics I’ve tried so far:

• ‘Sidequests’. Speedruns are great for topics that you find interesting but are never going to devote serious time to. I have a very minor side interest in the history of schools and universities, so if I come across something intriguing, like Renaissance abacus schools, it’s a good way to learn a few basic things quickly. I have one or two more ideas for speedruns in this area.
• Historical background. An hour is quite a good length of time to pick up a few fragments of background historical context for something you’re interested in. One hour won’t get you far on its own, but the good thing about historical context is that it builds nicely over time as you get a better picture of the timeline of different events and how they affect each other.
• Finding out what something is at a basic level. I did the ‘sensemaking’ speedrun because I’d heard that term a lot and had very little idea what it referred to.
• Dubious or simplistic claims. The Prussian education system post was in this category. If you read pop pieces about education by people who don’t like school very much, there’s often a reference to ‘the Prussian education system’ as the source of all evils, maybe alongside a claim that it was set up to indoctrinate citizens into being good factory workers. If you’re starting with an understanding this simplistic you can improve it significantly within an hour. (The Prussian education system really did introduce many of the elements of modern compulsory schooling, but the factory workers bit doesn’t really hold up.)
• Random curiosity. The Germaine de Staël one happened because I was reading Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism and she sounded like she might have had an interesting life (she did have an interesting life).

What I’ve got out of it

Sometimes the answer ends up being ‘not much’, but in that case I’ve only wasted an hour. I expect these to be pretty high variance. Some outcomes so far:

• I discover that a topic is more interesting or important than I realised, and decide to spend more time on it. This happened with the Vygotsky Circle post – the actual speedrun was frustrating because I didn’t find any good quality sources about the intellectual scene, but I did realise Vygotsky himself was more interesting than I’d realised and ended up reading and making notes on his book Thought and Language.
• I get good comments from more informed people and end up learning more after the speedrun as well. The sensemaking post was like this: in the speedrun itself I learned about the term’s origins in organisational studies, but not so much about the more recent online subculture that uses the term. After I posted it it ended up attracting a fair number of comments and twitter responses that explained the connection. (The root tweet is here, for people who have the patience to trawl through a branching twitter thread.)
• I get exactly what I bargained for: an hour’s worth of basic knowledge about a topic I’m mildly interested in.

Another minor benefit is that I keep my writing habit going by producing something. This was actually pretty useful in the depths of winter lockdown apathy.

Other possibilities

My sense is that there’s a lot more that could be done with the format. Some potential ideas:

Speedrun events. Tyler Alterman first suggested this on twitter:

I like this idea of a research speedruns

Party format:
5min everyone brainstorms topics of interest into a chat
1hr each person speedruns on one
1hr mini presentation from each person

I tried a tiny one with three people and it worked pretty well. I don’t love organising events and I doubt I’ll do this often myself, but if someone else wants to try it I’d probably be up for joining.

Chaining speedruns together. Multiple speedruns on the same topic would allow going into more depth while still having the ability to iterate every hour on exactly what you want to focus on.

Technical topics? I’m also interested in quantum foundations but I haven’t tried any maths- or physics-heavy speedrun topic yet. It sounds a lot harder, because that type of work tends to involve a lot more stopping and thinking, and maybe nothing would appear on the screen for long periods. Could still be worth trying.

Livestreamed speedruns. It could be funny to do an actual Twitch-style livestreamed speedrun. Or it could be atrociously dull. I’m not sure.

I’d like to hear suggestions for other ideas. I’d also be keen to hear from anyone who tries this as an experiment – please let me know how it goes!

This speedrun is a bit of an experiment and might go terribly. It’s a more open-ended topic than the ones I’ve tried before, and I’m not sure what I even want to know exactly.

The background is that I’m a big fan of Sarah Perry’s Tendrils of Mess in our Brains. This is a sketch of a satisfying theory of what mess is: interference from multiple conflicting ordering principles. (That’s probably too concise of a summary – see the post for more details and many good examples.)

I’d like to be able to contextualise this post, to have an idea about what other people have said about mess. Are there any other Big Theories of Mess? I’m not too sure where to start, even, but probably there is a Wikipedia article on mess. If not I’ll dredge Google Scholar. Let’s find out.

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There is no Wikipedia article on mess 😦 Unless you’re looking for the military term.

Google Scholar is giving me articles written by people called Mess. This isn’t going well…

‘Theory of mess’ maybe? All sorts of things are coming up, mostly uninteresting. Maybe this paper on ‘Attuning to mess’? Oh it’s a book chapter, in some kind of military strategy context. Doesn’t look that promising for what I want.

Ok, try ‘What is mess’. Now I’ve found a paper that’s just called ‘Mess‘, by Tanggaard and Tue Juelsbo.

This text is about mess, feelings of loneliness and loss, and their potential creative power. In a recent paper on collaborative writing, Wegener (2014) shares her experience with the reader on how a writing refuge almost turned into a prison. Having spent two days at the refuge, piles of papers with interview transcripts and field-notes were in a total mess. The themes in the writing seemed irrelevant and boring. Feeling lost, Wegener realised that she needed to break free and do something, and so she eventually decided to leave the research files behind and enjoy life in the sun outside the dirty windows in her room (Figure 10.1). She walked out along the beach and, when she came back, she began reading A. C. Bryatt’s A Biographer’s Tale, which she found by chance in her messy suitcase. The book was just meant to be a leisurely read and not intended to serve as a research tool and yet, soon, Wegener found herself writing a fictional dialogue with the protagonist Phineas from the tale about feeling lost and in need of creative inspiration (see also Chapter 8).

Getting warmer, still not really what I want.

Further down there’s a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Abrahamson and Freedman. The book preview looks kind of entertaining, but probably not going to get into any deep theory of mess. Hm, though I did just find this bit:

Mess Isn’t Necessarily an Absence of Order. Often a system is messy to some extent because of the lack of one specific type of order, even though other forms of order are present in abundance… What’s more, mess often arises from a failed order rather than from an absence of order.

This is sort of close to Perry’s thesis. But the book seems to be mostly more first-principles musings on mess, rather than helping me find more standard references. (Are there standard references? Where are the Established Theorists of Mess hanging out?)

There’s a categorisation of types of mess that may be worth returning to later, I’ll just add a screenshot in:

That’s probably all I’ll get out of this source for now. None of the other search results look useful. What about a general google search? Nope, totally useless, pages of dictionary definitions and other useless crap.

Hmm. This is not easy. It’s a mess, in fact. 41 minutes left, what to try next? Let’s search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for the word ‘mess’. Nothing really about mess as such, just the word cropping up in various unrelated contexts. Where’s my Grand Theory of Mess??

OK I’ll go back to the original blog post and check for leads there. Oh OK there’s Alan Watts:

When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. A dirty old ashtray full of junk may be a mess but clouds do not look like that. When you look at the patterns of foam on water they never make an artistic mistake and they are not a mess. They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order.

Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy, p. 27.

I’ve always got some weird resistance to reading Alan Watts that I don’t fully understand but if this is the source I’d better go there. I don’t know though, I’m googling this quote and the context is sort of more first principles talking about mess. I’m still unclear what I do want but this isn’t really it. Ugh.

Back on Google Scholar looking up various combinations of ‘mess’ and ‘aesthetics’. Haha I just found a paper called ‘Chocolate or shit: aesthetics and cultural poverty in art therapy with children’. Not what I want either but… interesting I guess? I’m over half way through now and getting nowhere.

Hmm, this isn’t particularly promising but I just searched ‘theory of mess’ in google and found a review of something called Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction by David Trotter. This at least seems to have some links to other works:

The only strange feature of this admirable book is its title. Baudelaire, the writer who pre-eminently characterized the creation of art in terms of the culinary and the cosmetic, described the metamorphosis of raw reality into crafted artefact, as the transformation of mud into gold, in a way which the anecdote from the childhood of Mary Butts, cited by David Trotter, barely encompasses. The sub-title of the book gives a far clearer picture of its range and content: the poetics and politics of “mess-theory” in Western fiction and painting, from approximately 1860 to 1900. “Mess” is to be understood in Samuel Beckett’s use of the term, in his 1961 interview with Tom Driver, when he spoke of seeking in art “a form that accommodates the mess.” Beckett, however, equated this activity with “chaos,” whereas Trotter, in his book, differentiates between the two. More precisely, Trotter makes a distinction between a theory of “waste” and a theory of “mess” (17). “Waste” is an effect which can be traced back to its cause and, ultimately, to human agency: it can be recycled and can be linked to renewal. Philosophically, in terms of order and disorder, it is related to determinism. By contrast, “mess” is governed by chance. It can be “good,” in that it may mark the beginning of an illusion (as in desire), or “bad,” in that it may mark the shattering of an illusion. It may be creative, as in the clutter of the studios of Edgar Degas or Francis Bacon, who each, in their different ways, produced some of their finest works in an environment of extreme “messiness.” Philosophically, it is linked to the concept of contingency and is, aesthetically, the harbinger of modernism.

But ‘mess’ as ‘governed by chance’ isn’t really what I’m looking for.

Now I’ve found a book called Making the Most of Mess by Emery Roe, which seems to be about policy and management. Quotes the Trotter piece: ‘Those interested in the role of mess in other fields should begin with mess theory in literary criticism (Trotter 2000), rubbish theory in anthropology (Thompson 1979), or the heap paradox in philosophy’.

I’m out of better ideas so let’s look up ‘rubbish theory in anthropology’. OK the book is Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value by Michael Thompson. Seems to be about waste and not particular about mess.

Oh god, 12 minutes left. Back on Scholar looking at stuff to do with mess and aesthetics. Debris, Mess and the Modernist Self? Making Sense of Mess. Marginal Lives, Impossible Spaces? This last one seems to theroise about mess at least a bit:

In the following few paragraphs I sketch some of the main concepts that animate our understanding of ‘mess’, as a way of attempting to outline a tradition of thinkers that were fascinated by lack of formal order, by chaos or filth; I hope
then to draw a constellation of keywords which help us clarify the connotations of the term we intend to use as a guiding idea running throughout this issue.

In its comparative understanding, as the opposite or ‘lack’ of order, balance, and clarity, mess reminds us of the canonical Dionysian/Apollonian dialectic as famously articulated by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

… Fast-forwarding to more recent times, it is noticeable that postmodern culture is certainly deeply fascinated by mess, by simultaneity and overlapping, by directionless hyperactivity and the overcrowded physical scenarios of mass society
and conspicuous consumption.

Bla bla Lyotard, bla bla entropy. Doesn’t go too deep, seems to just be an introduction to a book of essays with a fairly typical pomo-ish inverting-the-order theme: ‘It also contributes, I believe, to questioning the rationale behind a value system that prioritizes order and rational organization of space, objects, and people.’

I just found another potentially interesting reference: Thomas Leddy, “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty,'” This is in something called ‘Everyday Aesthetics’ by Yuriko Saito. I’ve only found the first page of the Leddy so far and don’t have long left, and it looks like it probably won’t go deep on mess, though it might be worth reading anyway.

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Ding! Ok, yeah, that did go pretty terribly. But my lack of success is least suggestive that there really isn’t a lot of deep theory of mess out there. There’s still a chance that I’m missing the right search terms, but I have no idea what the right ones would be. If you have any good ideas, let me know…