How can we best promote scientific research? (I’ll use “science” broadly in this post.) In the usual formulation of the problem, we have money and status that we could distribute, and they have time and ability that they might apply. They know more than we do, but we aren’t sure who is how good, and they may care more about money and status than about achieving useful research. So we can’t just give things to anyone who claims they would use it to do useful science. What can we do? We actually have many options.
30 years down the line, we could also grant monetary prizes or shares from relevant future patents. In this case, the researcher could sell her future option to get the prize money, so that there will be some sort of market with direct incentive to publish important results.
This seems better for figuring out what the ideal allocation of prestige would be. But it's not clear that it has plausible deniability: it might be too obvious that we're following prestige, whereas we'd probably rather say we were doing something more prosocial.
I suppose you imagine the "should-have-been prestige-rank" would just be described in terms of the qualities its evaluated on (influence, counterfactual influence if people paid attention ...), rather than explicitly stating that it's about prestige? Are there particular framings that best veil the prestige function of the measure?
Historian study of the past focuses on unusual people and issues; I want to know what random things look like per the issues I listed. Academics are fond of ranking people in their field, but historical analysis doesn't much inform this practice.
"One very useful exercise would be to hire historians to try and evaluate and rank scientific work from 30 to 300 years ago. We’d like to see how such rankings vary with time elapsed, topic areas, effort levels, and different random teams assigned."Doesn't this sort of research already exist? Characterizing and ranking eminent psychologists is a fairly popular topic area stretching back several decades. Personally, based on those lists, I don't hold out much hope that this will do much to fix the problem.
Would prediction markets even work that well that far into the future, simply due to time value of money? Even assuming a shorter period of 20 years, purchasing such as asset means I'd be losing out on 20 years worth of interest on that bet.
30 years down the line, we could also grant monetary prizes or shares from relevant future patents. In this case, the researcher could sell her future option to get the prize money, so that there will be some sort of market with direct incentive to publish important results.
This seems better for figuring out what the ideal allocation of prestige would be. But it's not clear that it has plausible deniability: it might be too obvious that we're following prestige, whereas we'd probably rather say we were doing something more prosocial.
I suppose you imagine the "should-have-been prestige-rank" would just be described in terms of the qualities its evaluated on (influence, counterfactual influence if people paid attention ...), rather than explicitly stating that it's about prestige? Are there particular framings that best veil the prestige function of the measure?
Historian study of the past focuses on unusual people and issues; I want to know what random things look like per the issues I listed. Academics are fond of ranking people in their field, but historical analysis doesn't much inform this practice.
"One very useful exercise would be to hire historians to try and evaluate and rank scientific work from 30 to 300 years ago. We’d like to see how such rankings vary with time elapsed, topic areas, effort levels, and different random teams assigned."Doesn't this sort of research already exist? Characterizing and ranking eminent psychologists is a fairly popular topic area stretching back several decades. Personally, based on those lists, I don't hold out much hope that this will do much to fix the problem.
No. You can bet an asset that appreciates as fast as any other, so your bet winnings increase your expected return over that.
20 years would on average more than double my asset value, so won't the subsidy have to be prohibitively large relative to the asset?
They would work, though they might cost a larger subsidy to induce any give level of accuracy.
Would prediction markets even work that well that far into the future, simply due to time value of money? Even assuming a shorter period of 20 years, purchasing such as asset means I'd be losing out on 20 years worth of interest on that bet.