This repo is for my desk at the Open Research Institute. This is where you can ask me questions in public & I can answer in public (by opening an issue here: https://github.com/OmarShehata/OmarShehata/issues)

I run an "applied sociology lab" called Prosocial Engineering. Relative to ORI, my work is primarily on the "backtier" or "bottom floor". My primary question is: once a solution is discovered by smart people, how long does it take to propagate to everyone who needs to understand it? Can we measure & accelerate that?

And what happens when solutions to open problems come from outside of elite intellectual circles? Is there a pathway for these solutions to be noticed & "bubble up" the hierarchy to where they need to go? Can we measure and accelerate that ?

My operating slogan at Prosocial Engineering is:

Let's turn this "culture war" into "culture science"

My day to day work is similar to that of academic sociologists, except as a private company, we are allowed to run interventions and experiments, not just passive observation. It's different than the typical marketing & social engineering media company because we exclusively conduct operations that still work when the methods are revealed & open sourced (must take into account 2nd order and all nth order effects). We're building something like an Open Street Map / Wikipedia for information warfare.

Previously I was at Snapchat working in computer graphics, on Snap Map.

🌳 Based in Ithaca NY.

If this is your first ORI profile that you're stumbling on - I encourage you to write your own and then find your neighbors in idea space via internet-wide semantic search tools. See the first 2 min of How to semantic search the internet.