Missionloops · a research instrument
Cognition a laboratory cannot reproduce.
The programme is being assembled now and most seats are open, with nothing to commit to yet: bring the question you would pursue, and sign on only if the work is funded. It is Canadian defence research, proposed to protect civilians from broad-spectrum cognitive attack and to keep Canada sovereign as an open society.
A living laboratory
What we offer is a living laboratory. People work on it under genuine stress, helping each other through long-term campaigns against problems that span the entire spectrum of Canadian society. The doctrine they work from is grounded in John Boyd's OODA loop, and in whatever else helps with strategy, forced creativity, and lateral thinking. It keeps evolving with their field experience, so the method itself is tested and revised in the open. A real population, real stakes, and a method that keeps moving: a place to run research you could not run anywhere else.
The work matters for Canadian sovereignty, and the incentives around it line up rather than pull apart. The people who use the system are helped by it, and the defence department is asked to fund the research because the same capability protects civilians from cognitive warfare. Both interests point the same way, and that is the case for funding it. The specialties below are a menu, not a programme; on each, the research will be defined by who takes the seat.
Eight research specialties, one seat each. Meredith Franklin holds the measurement seat; the other seven are open. The full twenty-nine-study portfolio, grouped by the proposal's own clusters, is on its own page.
| Research specialty | Who holds it |
|---|---|
| Statistics & measurement | Meredith Franklin, University of Toronto |
| Strategic reasoning under an adversary | Open seat |
| Metacognition & calibration | Open seat |
| Judgment & rational thinking | Open seat |
| Cultural evolution & anthropology | Open seat |
| Volition & goal-setting agency | Open seat |
| Innovation & creativity | Open seat |
| Institutional receptivity | Open seat |
Statistics & measurement
A latent cognitive capability appears only under real stakes, where it cannot be observed directly. The open question is whether you can infer it from indirect behavioural proxies, validate that inference, and put a number on its error, the way measurement science recovers an unobservable quantity from proxy signals.
Why here: the substrate is months of content-blind behavioural telemetry from a real operator network, with held-out controls to validate the inference.
Measurement is the seat the others rest on. This team makes the research possible at all: it designs the instrument so it measures what it claims to, and pushes methodological discipline into every study the programme runs. That discipline is what separates findings that hold from a system that merely produces numbers.
Seat: Meredith Franklin, University of Toronto (confirmed).
Strategic reasoning under an adversary
Some people reliably see the unseen dimension of attack: the move no one else spotted, the requirement a system's designers never questioned, the angle that cracks an opaque problem open. Red teamers, troubleshooters, and rare creative problem-solvers do it under real pressure. The open question is whether that capacity can be trained and transferred, or whether the platform only surfaces the people who already had it.
Why here: operators reverse-engineer real adversarial and institutional systems under genuine stakes, where the hidden move either reveals itself or it does not, and a guide supplies the metacognition and transfer that solo practice lacks.
Example studies
- Rule-Discovery as InnovationDoes the platform train a transferable rule-discovery skill, finding the real ruleset and redesigning your position to it, or only showcase people who already had it?
- Symmetric Adoption in NegotiationWhen both sides of a real dispute bring strategic empathy, does it converge to win-win or escalate into an arms race of cleverness?
Seat: open.
Metacognition & calibration
The open question is whether a second observer who sees an operator regularly improves their calibration, the agreement between felt confidence and actual ability, and shows where that self-assessment systematically parts from performance.
Why here: the guide relationship and the operator's own revision history give a long-run record of monitoring and control that a one-shot task cannot, and let a blind behavioural estimate be scored against the operator's own self-assessment.
Example studies
- Calibrating Self-Knowledge Through the GuideDoes working with a guide make an operator's sense of how good they are match how good they actually are, where practising alone does not?
- Detecting and Countering Shaped SilenceCan a shaped-silence cascade be staged as a controlled wargame that measures who can see through it and choose how to act?
Seat: open.
Judgment & rational thinking
Intelligence does not guarantee rationality, and on identity-charged questions the ablest reasoners are often the most biased. The open question is whether real-stakes practice strengthens the thinking dispositions that make a person resist the easy mental shortcut and update against their own side, where a test of ability cannot predict it.
Why here: operators work their own contested problems under genuine cost, the condition that separates a disposition from a test score, and a second observer checks the reasoning the operator cannot check alone.
Example studies
- Real-Stakes Practice and Identity-Protective CognitionDoes real-stakes practice protect judgment on identity-charged questions, the kind where sharper reasoning usually deepens bias instead of reducing it?
- Trained Judgment Under AI Denial and CompromiseWhen the AI is denied or turned against the operator, does trained judgment hold where AI-reliant judgment collapses or gets steered?
Seat: open.
Cultural evolution & anthropology
The open question is whether field-tested method transmits through a trust network faithfully enough to accumulate across people, and whether what governs that is the structure of the network rather than the size of the population.
Why here: the network is live and growing, so transmission and branching can be measured directly rather than reconstructed, and the structure of the ties is observable rather than inferred.
Example studies
- Cross-Community Bridges and RecombinationDo cross-community pairs produce creative leaps that same-community pairs do not, or does the friction of bridging cancel the benefit?
- The Self-Spreading Cure Under AttackDoes attacking the network make it stronger or weaker?
Seat: open.
Volition & goal-setting agency
The most upstream form of agency is deciding what is worth deciding about, and a tool that removes the effort may quietly erode it. The open question is whether AI that supplies answers atrophies self-authored goals while AI that teaches method preserves them, and whether the two ways of measuring agency, what a person says and what they do, converge.
Why here: the instrument can vary the AI's role and watch self-authored goals form over months, and it captures both a behavioural signal and a self-report, the two measures whose disagreement is the open problem.
Example studies
- Self-Authored Goal FormationWhere does the human-AI handoff stop, and is goal-revision the floor it cannot cross because the AI cannot read the inner state that revises the goal?
- Graduated AI Access and Judgment AtrophyDoes graduated AI access sharpen or atrophy independent judgment, and where does it flip?
Seat: open.
Innovation & creativity
Genuine novelty comes from breaking a frame and rebuilding it, not from selecting a better answer within it. The open question is whether real-stakes practice with a guide who supplies fresh perspective lets an operator reframe under pressure rather than freeze, and whether reframing can be measured as the frequency of restructuring rather than the output produced.
Why here: operators restructure their own frames on real problems, where the reframe leaves a process signature the platform can detect without reading the content.
Example studies
- Rule-Discovery as InnovationDoes the platform train a transferable rule-discovery skill, finding the real ruleset and redesigning your position to it, or only showcase people who already had it?
- Resilience and Innovation as One PropertyAt the operator level, is resistance to cognitive warfare the same capacity as innovation that survives conformity?
Seat: open.
Institutional receptivity
The open question is whether an institution absorbs the bottom-up doctrine a network produces, or rejects a disinterested signal precisely because it arrives from outside, and which design of the channel changes that.
Why here: a structured policy channel routes a real field-friction signal to government, where its uptake or rejection can be observed against the design levers meant to move it.
Example studies
- Institutional Reception of a Disinterested SignalDoes the institution act on a routed friction signal and change a rule, or absorb it into activity that looks like a response while nothing closes?
- The Network–Government BoundaryOf the friction operators hit working real problems in the North, how much can the trust network resolve in the field, and how much is genuinely rule-stuck?
Seat: open.
The next step is a conversation, not a commitment: ask for the white paper on the instrument and the measurement, and it is yours, free.
scott (at) missionloops (dot) ca