Cat HicksFeb 15, 2025

In November, @anthrocypher and I published the first version of our Cumulative Culture Theory of Developer Problem-Solving as a preprint, synthesizing evidence and theory from 90+ refs (yeah...my job requires reading *a lot*). -> https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw_v1

But we missed one! A remarkably relevant one! About a month ago I stumbled on this study. And in true "cumulative culture" spirit, it just filled me with joy and validation to see parallel work.

So I wanted to share it and tell you about it

OSF

Show threadCat HicksFeb 15, 2025

Here's the paper: "Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests" (2018)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04494-0

Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests - Nature Communications

The cumulative development of culture has proven difficult to study in the laboratory. Here, the authors examine entries to a series of large programming contests to show that successful entries are usually ‘tweaks’ of existing solutions, but occasional ‘leaps’ can bring larger benefits.

Nature
Show threadCat HicksFeb 15, 2025
Their summary of some fascinating data: "Here we present a detailed investigation of cumulative cultural evolution in a large-scale context that reflects the real-world complexity of human behaviour. We analysed a database of 21,745,538 lines of computer code in total and 483,173 unique lines, originating from 47,967 entries to 19 online collaborative programming competitions organised over the course of 14 years by the MathWorks software company. "
Show threadCat HicksFeb 15, 2025

What a joy it was to find other folks publishing in this space. While I am a little astonished my previous lit review didn't turn this up for me, this just further goes to show how any individual work is made better by open sharing and iteration...EXACTLY the points of both of our papers 🥰 .

I will be integrating this reference into our preprint! A wonderful source of continued evidence that backs up everything we were arguing, by my read

Show threadCat HicksFeb 15, 2025
I think a wonderful contribution of this kind of work is that it helps us see past our simplistic models about programming work: for instance, we might be tempted to think "oh, an online contest is about isolated and individual solutions." Instead, by seeing the importance of the *relationships between solutions* and the *dialogue we are in, as a collective,* this analysis is so much richer (and more accurate), thinking about solution-crafting as dynamic across a population
Show threadCat Hicks

Science is about sharing, dialogue, and converging evidence, to me. It's a huge gift to our shared cultures to do "free revealing" (as per Von Hippel); I don't know anything about this team or these authors but knowing how much work it is to gain access to and work with data of this sort, I am so impressed by this project.

Sometimes competition feels the only language we're allowed, but I am bored by that limitation. I am proud to be a translator, to cite others, and to be in community

Feb 15, 2025 at 5:50pmWeb
Show threadCat HicksFeb 15, 2025
I'm relieved and grateful when others do work that I didn't have access or opportunity to do, and I'm excited to build on it. I have approximately thirty thousand manuscripts in progress right now but when you see a new version of the Cumulative Culture preprint go up, here is your context and you can look forward to this great paper being integrated into our references as it deserves. Here the processes of iterative open science allow us to transparently draft out loud and share that with you!
Show threadHoward Chu @ SymasFeb 15, 2025
@grimalkina every advance is built on what came before, it all comes from cooperation. Competition is inherently wasteful because competitors each have to duplicate the entire foundation before they can begin trying to advance. And yet most of our world praises and rewards superstar competitors and not collaborators. Sigh...