Missionloops · a research instrument
The researchers.
Missionloops is a training platform being proposed to Canadian defence as a research instrument, to protect civilians from cognitive warfare. The proposal names its researchers, so the team is being assembled before the money exists. Holding a seat costs nothing before the funding lands: bring the question you would pursue, lend your name to the proposal, and commit to nothing unless it is funded.
A living laboratory
The platform is built for people running long campaigns on their own real problems, under genuine stress, across Canadian society. The doctrine is grounded in John Boyd's OODA loop and the craft of strategy and creative problem-solving. It evolves with field experience.
The incentives are aligned: the platform is built to help the person using it, and defence is asked to fund the research because the same capability protects Canadian civilians. The specialties below are not exhaustive; whoever takes a seat defines the research on it.
Nine research specialties, one seat each. Dr. Meredith Franklin (measurement) is the prime.
| Research specialty | Who holds it |
|---|---|
| Statistics & measurement | Dr. Meredith Franklin University of Toronto |
| Political psychology & resilience to influence operations | Dr. Bradford H. Morrison University of British Columbia |
| The hacker mindset | Open seat |
| Metacognition & calibration | Open seat |
| Judgment & rational thinking | Open seat |
| Cultural evolution & anthropology | Open seat |
| Volition & goal-setting agency | Open seat |
| Innovation, from mind to culture | Dr. Liane Gabora University of British Columbia Okanagan |
| Institutional receptivity | Open seat |
Statistics & measurement
We want to measure how well a person thinks under real pressure. The platform never reads anyone's work, so this must be inferred from indirect signals: timing, structure, behaviour rather than content. This seat decides whether that inference is honest: whether the numbers mean what they claim, and how wrong they might be.
Why here: the platform is built to produce months of behavioural records per person, none of it content, with control groups to test the inference against.
Measurement is the seat the others rest on, and the one seat inside every study the programme runs. Our engineers build the instrumentation; Dr. Franklin's team specifies what it must capture and verifies that the data will hold up to analysis over the long term. Each study's design and claims pass through them before they count.
Seat: Dr. Meredith Franklin, University of Toronto (confirmed).
Political psychology & resilience to influence operations
Influence operations destabilize a society through polarization, tribalism, distrust, and closed-mindedness. The open questions are which psychological dynamics make people resistant: in particular, the social dynamics that generate friend-enemy distinctions independent of any actual difference in political beliefs, and whether an intervention such as OODA-loop training is associated with increased cognitive complexity in how a person describes their own thinking about a topic.
Why here: a real civilian population under genuine stakes, long-run behavioural records rather than one-shot surveys, and the OODA-loop training itself as the intervention to score a resistance measure against.
Seat: Dr. Bradford H. Morrison, University of British Columbia (confirmed).
The hacker mindset
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. A small subset of red teamers, troubleshooters, and creative problem-solvers can 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, from mind to culture
Genuine novelty comes from breaking a frame and rebuilding it, not from selecting a better answer within it. A reframe that stays in one head helps one person; culture changes only when the lesson spreads. The open question is whether real-stakes practice with a guide trains the reframe, and whether a network can make what one member learns transmissible, so that lessons accumulate instead of dying with the person who learned them.
Why here: operators restructure their own frames on real problems, and the reframe leaves a process signature the platform can detect without reading the content. The doctrine loop that carries one member's lesson to the rest makes the balance of invention and imitation observable in a working network.
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: Dr. Liane Gabora, University of British Columbia Okanagan (confirmed).
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