crizh wrote:

You know if I were one of those academics and I recognised these failings in myself and my peers I'd be coding and grooming an AGI that didn't have them. Expert systems that were able to manage groups of nutters effectively.

Gamification might work. What if, instead of trying to herd cats, a set of general guidelines were put in place, and specific achievements could unlock badges in one's profile that were tied to those achievements and one's reputation? =-=-= Golden Fleece Even the oldest of the Argonauts ten years after the fall of Transhumanity are uncertain as to who came up with the idea to call achievement badges Golden Fleeces. Regardless, the cryptographic proofs-of-work represented by having a golden fleece hanging on one's mesh profile mean much more than how much code one has written or how many hours one has spent pushing chemicals through microfluidics in an orbital lab. One does not earn their Golden Fleece unless they have contributed significantly to an open Argonaut project that has been adopted outside of a laboratory environment. Adoption, deployment, and usefulness are the harbingers of the coveted Golden Fleece achievement; merely having hack value is insufficient. Victor-242 earned his Golden Fleece by publishing the source code to a less-limited AI that acts as surrogate, playmate, and intermediate schoolteacher to AGIs while striking a balance between human-like responsiveness and the non-transhuman cognitive properties that the Mercurials prize in (in truth, it was born from his frustration with the muse he was originally given in the Argonaut mesh-creche he was compiled in) that became popular among AGI researchers. Protocol hacker Jason Byzantium-Smith was given his Golden Fleece by his thesis advisors at TAU for the publication of his research into novel mesh routing protocols that were later licensed by a half-dozen hypercorps for infrastructure deployment throughout the Inner System (they wisely chose to not push the issue of the three-clause license it was published under; after all, it is adoption that is important to force a technology to evolve). There is talk amongst the younger Argonauts of making the algorithms that calculate the effectiveness, popularity, and overall public satisfaction of projects more stringent, in effect raising the bar of what it means to earn this coveted achievement badge.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Any other argonaut "signature techs"? Note that I am not saying they all came from an argonaut lab, only that the argonauts have been pushing them in certain directions.

Contributions to the Human Cognome Project? Federation of social data services to help offset transmission lag between habitats (delay-tolerant networking)? Distributed and phased-array sensor networks? Person-portable neutrino detection equipment, without which a lot of communications in the world of Eclipse Phase would be at a significant disadvantage? Early versions of the bio-modifications that went into Hibernoid morphs, possibly before the widespread deployment of egocasting? It seems that, before egocasting was popular putting morphs into hiberation was a common thing, and the proto-Argonauts would have had a hand in that for the white to light-grey intellectual challenge. Some of the 'glue' technologies that went into making mass production of pod morphs feasible? Growing bodies is one thing.. growing organs is another thing.. but integration of the two was an interesting (white) problem.

So everything in this thread has been great. Really awesome stuff to want to know about the Argonauts. I want to know about that too. Though I think we missed a key thing. What is science academia in Eclipse Phase? What is a achieving higher education in EP, and in particular with Argonauts. Yes, presumably most serious Argonauts come into the faction with Formal Eduction and Professional experience in their chosen field, but becoming an Argonaut is important. How do you get a higher eduction? What is a post graduate work and post doctoral work? Or more openly, how do you get accreditation in your chosen fields? What is Peer Review for Argonauts? Are they still writing papers for formal review in journals? That seems awfully cryptic and closed with their open information stance. With Immorality being a thing, how do paradigms shift? How do new idea topple over the old. Yes, ideally you get the evidence and prove your hypothesis and have a theory that makes predictions. But in reality. There are politics, and reverence for figures. You have friends. Objectivity is ideal, but if you spent the last 40 years being a stalwart Champaign of a model, you're going to get emotionally invested in it. Its not uncommon for radical ideas to be pushed after the head of the ideas they're challenging has passed on. Rude may not be the best language for that, but I think its close enough. How has the tedium of science changed? What do Argonauts eggheads do with the extra free time, since all data collection is automated , and all analysis would also be conducted absent of egos. This isn't meaning to imply that science is an automated process. Though a lot of it, could be. You still would need creative inference and intuition to make the data into something meaningful. How do Argonauts compete for resources? Eclipse Phase, isn't quite yet a post scarcity economy. And exploring the world around us, can have a hefty price. I dont think Argonauts can build LHC per project or make a new (ep equivalent) Hubble Telescope per random idea either. Are they still submitting application for grants? How does this grant process work? Maybe Argonauts can just make LHCs for everyone that wants them. That'd be interesting to know too.

These are all very good questions, don't feel bad for asking them. I like the idea of funding via grants. I imagine most of it functions like autonomists tend to. We know they have a governing body called the Senate, so maybe they hear proposals and endorsements by high-rep members who've made valuable contributions can help move you up on the queue? Academia can be quite cutthroat, but I imagine it might be a little bit better when you remove the financial incentive. Argonauts that operate in old and transitional economies might have it rough requisitioning credits though, it could be a sort of weak spot for the organization.