The coordination problem

I started CompNeuroSociety during a week campus was closed for snow. There wasn’t a mission statement or a plan behind it. I was just tired of waiting on someone else to fill a gap.

The backstory is less romantic than “founder.” I transferred to FSU because I wanted a stats minor and my old school wouldn’t let me add it. I came off a computational neuroscience summer at CMU with basically no research experience going in, and then got to FSU and found maybe two to four people in the whole field on campus. I emailed faculty. I tried to join a lab and it went quiet on me. I ran out of patience. So during the snow week I just made the thing, and then spent a lot of nights reading textbook chapters and papers so I’d have something to stand on when I ran the first meeting.

Running an org taught me things that never show up in a paper. A paper is the finished version of the work, so you don’t see the part underneath it, where a lot of what moves research forward is dealing with people.

Mostly it taught me about motivation and follow-through. I used to think those were the same thing. They aren’t. Motivation is cheap. Everyone who shows up is motivated, that’s why they showed up. But it’s only step one, and it fades once the semester gets busy. People will hand you real ideas and then not touch them again unless you get annoying about it. I don’t say that with any bitterness anymore, it’s just the base rate. Twelve people say they’ll come, four do, and the four are never the four you’d have bet on. After a while you stop planning around the average and start planning around the variance, because the variance is the part that decides things.

I also had to learn to stay calm inside all that, which for me was the hard part. Early on I burned some bridges reacting to things that were genuinely done wrong to me, but being right about them cost me a lot more than just letting them go would have. There’s a line I keep coming back to, turn the other cheek, and you don’t have to be religious about it to see the math. Your own peace and your community are worth more than winning a specific fight. Take the action that keeps it from happening again, and don’t become the asshole dictator about it. (I’ve been the asshole. It’s not worth it.)

The clean way to end this would be to say the org made me a better scientist. I’m not sure I buy that, and not buying it is kind of the point. It reminds me of a superposition, where two things that shouldn’t both be true kind of are at the same time. It’s just a student org and I probably shouldn’t take it that seriously. It has also been the most useful training I’ve had in what research runs on, which is coordination much more than intelligence.

I’ll say the obvious thing my whole field wants me to say, which is that an org is a distributed system with nobody really at the center, where the behavior of the group falls out of a hundred and twenty people following their own local rules. That’s roughly what I think a cortex is doing too. It’s even a little true. But I don’t fully trust it, because a neat analogy like that is just the finished version again, and the mess is where the learning happened.

What I really took from it is smaller and harder to put on a resume: a feel for what knowledge costs when you count it in people and time instead of in insight. It’s made me more patient when results come slow, and warier of anything that looks too clean. Whether any of that helps the actual research, I don’t know yet, and I’d rather leave it there than force some neat conclusion.