I have been working on TESSERRA in one form or another for quite a while now, but I don't talk about it very often. Even people who know that I am working on it probably don't have a very good sense of what I actually spend my time doing or how much the project has changed. I thought it might be useful to start occasionally writing about where things stand, both as a record of the project's development and for friends, family, and colleagues who are curious about what I have been working on.
These aren't intended to be formal announcements or finished descriptions of TESSERRA. A lot of the work is still developmental, and some of the ideas I write about here will probably change.
Where things are right now
Most of my attention recently has been on Synnoema, which is the most developed part of TESSERRA. Synnoema is a framework I've been developing for mapping lived experience and the patterns that develop across experiences over time.
One of the basic problems I'm interested in is what happens between someone describing an experience and us deciding what that experience means. In psychology, and probably just in everyday life, it is very easy to move quickly from what someone tells us to an explanation of why it happened or what it says about them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can become difficult to separate what the person actually described from the conclusions we reached about it.
A lot of my work on Synnoema has involved trying to slow that process down.
What I've been working on lately
Recently I've been focused on a fairly specific problem: how do we decide when several experiences should be treated as examples of the same recurring experience or pattern?
That question turned out to be harder than I expected.
For example, suppose someone describes several occasions when their mind seems to go blank during a stressful interaction. The experiences sound similar, but how similar do they need to be before we treat them as the same thing? What differences matter? How much information do we need? And at what point are we seeing something that is actually present in the person's account versus creating a pattern because we expect one to be there?
I've been developing a process for working through those questions more systematically.
One recent addition is something I'm calling Candidate Formation. The name is more complicated than the basic idea. Before deciding whether several pieces of someone's experience belong together, I first want to be able to state clearly what it is that I think might belong together.
So instead of jumping directly from someone's account to "this is a recurring pattern," there is an intermediate step: Here is the particular experience I think may be recurring. Now, does the evidence actually support that?
That distinction seems promising, but I'm currently testing it rather than treating it as settled.
More testing, less building
This is also probably the biggest change in the project recently.
For a long time, much of the work involved developing Synnoema itself: figuring out what concepts were needed, defining them, revising them, and trying to make the different parts work together.
Increasingly, I'm trying not to add things.
Instead, I've been creating test cases and seeing what happens when I apply the rules I've already developed. I'm particularly interested in situations where the answer isn't obvious, because those cases are more likely to show me where the method isn't clear enough or where I've made assumptions that I didn't realize I was making.
I'm currently working through a small set of cases using a partially blinded process. Some information about how the cases were constructed is intentionally being kept from me while I evaluate them. Once I've finished, I can compare what I concluded with the information that was withheld.
I'm curious to see what happens.
Something else I'm beginning to notice
Working this way has also made me think differently about TESSERRA itself.
Originally, TESSERRA and Synnoema were much more intertwined in my thinking. As Synnoema has become more developed, I'm starting to see a possible distinction between them.
Synnoema is specifically concerned with representing lived experience. TESSERRA may eventually describe some of the broader principles I've encountered while trying to build Synnoema carefully.
One example is a principle I've tentatively been calling epistemic conservation. The basic idea is that conclusions shouldn't become more certain simply because we've moved farther away from the original evidence.
If someone's description is ambiguous, putting that description through several stages of analysis shouldn't somehow make the ambiguity disappear. Ideally, the uncertainty should remain visible unless we actually obtain information that resolves it.
I don't know yet how central that idea will ultimately be to TESSERRA. I'm intentionally trying not to answer that question too quickly.
So, where is the project?
Synnoema is much more developed than it was a year ago, but I'm also less interested right now in making it bigger.
The current work is mostly about figuring out whether the method actually behaves the way I intended it to when I apply it to difficult examples. I'm finding places where the rules aren't clear enough, trying possible solutions, and then testing those solutions rather than immediately incorporating them.
That means progress can sometimes look fairly small from the outside. I might spend quite a bit of time working through what seems like a narrow question about whether two experiences should be considered the same experience.
But those are increasingly the questions I think I need to answer.
Current snapshot
Main focus: Synnoema
Currently working on: Candidate Formation and Structural Evaluation
Current phase: Testing and refining the method
One question I'm thinking about: How much evidence should we require before deciding that several experiences represent the same recurring pattern?
Next: Finish the current set of blinded test cases and see what they reveal.
I'll use these notes occasionally to document where the project is and what I've been working on. They reflect work in progress rather than a finished description of TESSERRA or Synnoema.
