Although I think my question was stupid for other reasons. Might a better means of funding knowledge be solely with prizes? Institutions of certification would arise from that sort of arrangement. Of course there would still be the problem of what prizes to pick, but I think that problem is more self-evident than the problem of who to fund, and how much.

Maybe the “other” complexity theory (i.e., the kind Wolfram does)?

Scott, I’d be interested to hear of a counter-example of a field where hard to evaluate conceptual work is over-weighted.

Grant, you have in mind certifying students, I’m talking about certifying the professors.

Might a solution be to divorce institutions of education from institutions of certification? If organizations devoted solely to certification could do a better job at certifying than universities do today, the demand for pure academic credentials could drop couldn’t it? Sometimes I wonder how much the blogosphere approximates this, although I think its effects are more or less limited to the Internet.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the absence of backlash from the AI field against my own ideas and the more general intelligence-explosion concept – though it may just be due to sheer absence of notice. We’ll see how that develops, but I was expecting much worse (perhaps based on selective experience of ideas that had been controversial enough for me to be aware of how they had been received).

Motives are not singleplexes. People don’t want just one thing, with only one part of themselves. Yes, academics want to make things easy on themselves; and they also want, via quite a different sort of wanting, to promote deep conceptual progress.

We got some nice results using a very simple approach … we could not get these results [published]. …

So I wasn’t out on a limb when I mentioned it last time?