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Robin Hanson proposes fixing Academia(TM) using (spoilers) futures markets (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/y02l1t/robin_hanson_proposes_fixing_academiatm_using/)
posted on October 10, 2022 02:00 AM by u/blakestaceyprime
40

Hot off the stack:

Academia functions to (A) create and confer prestige to associated researchers, students, firms, cities, and nations, (B) preserve and teach what we know on many general abstract topics, and (C) add to what we know over the long run. […] Most of us see (C) as academia’s most important social function, and many of us see lots of room for improvement there.

“Most of us” = 2 Twitter polls

Apparently, all kinds of social status for all entities from individuals to nations can be summarized on the single axis of “prestige”, and prestige is determined by “gossip” entirely separately from whether or not knowledge has been added to what we know. Bit pomo, that. Also, science has gotten worse at (C) since 1800. Really, we peaked the year that Volta invented the electric battery.

u/DELETED 40 points at 1665372739.000000

[deleted]

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u/GSSOAT 0 points at 1666967066.000000
>"they quit holding knowledge after 1799" is so patently wrong because that's a misinterpretation that you completely pulled out of your ass
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -4 points at 1665430005.000000
That's not what he's arguing. He's arguing that academia is worse at rewarding success now than it was in 1800. He is not arguing that academia post-1800 has been useless.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 19 points at 1665439974.000000
That’s not what /u/maroon_sweater is arguing. They’re arguing that Hanson’s putative driver of success (at least implicitly, Hanson is not clear enough) predicts against the enormous scientific advances post-1800. They’re not arguing that Hanson thinks academia post-1800 has been useless.
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u/AprilSpektra 18 points at 1665370566.000000

Sure, I mean speculation has benefited so many other things so far, like housing!

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u/Nixavee 4 points at 1665789761.000000
You can't have a "bubble" in a prediction market, because your payout is determined by whether your prediction actually turns out to be right, not by whether you can convince someone else it's right.
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u/IHateReddit_9001 28 points at 1665387365.000000

Rationalists constant whining about credentialism reeks of insecurity

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u/DELETED 12 points at 1665434535.000000
[deleted]
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u/blakestaceyprime 7 points at 1665439095.000000
Yeah. The modern grant-allocating bureaucracy is a flawed-because-done-by-people system for distributing resources based on the *merit of ideas.*
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u/Nixavee 1 points at 1665789475.000000
Eh. Robin Hanson has a PhD, so I doubt he is insecure about not having enough credentials. Yudkowsky on the other hand, definitely.
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u/Soyweiser 15 points at 1665381844.000000

Market maximizer deology man says that to fix things you dont need more money just more markets.

You either die a zero or turn into a paperclip maximizer. You too can be turned into pure, efficient marketonium.

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u/JohnPaulJonesSoda 8 points at 1665407222.000000

Guy who doesn’t bother doing much research about what already exists or what has been tried before doesn’t see any value in teaching or learning what already exists - what a shock!

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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -6 points at 1665429942.000000

“Most of us” = 2 Twitter polls

Do you disagree that most people think the purpose of academia is to add to humanity’s collective knowledge? His evidence is weak but I don’t think it’s a controversial claim he’s making about c). His solution is controversial, not his identification of a problem the purpose of academia(misphrased myself originally).

Also, science has gotten worse at (C) since 1800. Really, we peaked the year that Volta invented the electric battery.

In the sense that science has gotten worse at rewarding direct success, that also seems fairly unambiguous.

I don’t see what would go wrong about adding markets to scientific progress. Maybe if there was some sort of graft added, like the government limiting who’s allowed to make new discoveries because a scientist’s union wants to keep all the market profits for themselves, but otherwise it seems straightforwardly good.

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u/DELETED 18 points at 1665432711.000000
[deleted]
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -8 points at 1665434745.000000
>They require you to actually have money to take part in, and thus only the rich will have any input. That's fundamentally misunderstanding what betting markets do. They're about predicting the future, and the future will eventually resolve. If a bunch of rich people place big money on making people think their preferred outcome will happen, they will lose all that money once the opposite happens. And everyone who is good at predicting the future and thinks the rich people are wrong, would be incentivized to place money against the big people anyways to balance things back to an accurate prediction anyways. Betting markets are not some sort of thing where it's like democracy but instead of 1 vote per person, it's 1 vote per dollar. They are about creating financial incentives to identify the truth. Making people put their money where their mouth is.
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u/DELETED 18 points at 1665435292.000000
[deleted]
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u/EnckesMethod 7 points at 1665480751.000000
At least in academia, it doesn't have the perverse incentives of his proposed system of letting people bet on whether wars will happen and then having the people who bet right the most often run the country.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -4 points at 1665438931.000000
>I don't agree, you do have to have money to bet in a betting market. Billions of people can barely afford food. Yes, billions. You would lock out a billion people from having a say in academics, and even if you do have money, the richer speculators have advantages you don't. I'm assuming the current way that you're implying that poor people influence academics is that they can vote and have a say in the government, and then that government gives grants to scientists they think are worthy. That can still happen, we can have both grants and academic futures. >Or they will make even more money when it does come true, something they achieved by having superior analytics teams that they can hire with all that money they have? Then, we reward the already rich with even more money If only rich people are participating, then it's just moving money from the rich to other rich. What's the issue with one multimillionaire losing a couple millions to another? The poor don't need to ever participate if they do not want to. >it's just unsuitable for a system of job, prestige, and grant allocation especially in a system where there is already an obvious way to identify who is capable of scientific work (that is, can they actually prove that they can do the work.) I think part of Hanson's thesis is that the current system, while still producing some good research, is very far from ideal. If you think the current system is already near optimal at identifying the best and brightest, and incentivizing them to work on the best topics, then there aren't really any arguments to be made about why a betting market would improve things. But I think it's fairly clear things are far from ideal. There are office politics involved in who gets tenure, too much focus on getting exciting new results over confirming old results which led to the replication crisis, prestigious journals gate keeping what results they publish and journal farms mass publishing studies for fees.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1665441509.000000
Do you notice that you get here thinking that with a few pithy sentences you can trounce the idiots over here, only to come disturbingly close to the realisation that they’re not idiots and might know what they’re talking about?
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665442412.000000
I didn’t think I could do it with a few pithy sentences, and I didn’t generally change my mind on the opinion of anyone of you
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 8 points at 1665443136.000000
I said “disturbingly close”, I don’t need you to change your mind to know what I am and what I know, and what you do and don’t is laid out in the open
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u/blakestaceyprime 8 points at 1665448408.000000
It's going to take more than a few pithy sentences to convince me that citing a Twitter poll as evidence of anything is not intrinsically funny. On the spectrum of reliability, that's on par with "my uncle who works at Nintendo" and slightly worse than [the notes written to oneself during a particularly strong ether binge](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/31/turpentine-prevails/).
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 16 points at 1665440720.000000
You seem to think it is impossible to influence a financial market by betting on it. I disagree.
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u/dgerard 11 points at 1665435359.000000
by Christs fat cock, please just. stop.
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u/DELETED 3 points at 1665604323.000000
[deleted]
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u/dgerard 3 points at 1665618105.000000
horrified to think i fell from grace, were you looking at my likes on shitty fic
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u/DELETED 2 points at 1665629935.000000
[deleted]
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u/dgerard 3 points at 1665683756.000000
despicable is all around us
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u/JohnPaulJonesSoda 16 points at 1665453902.000000
> I don't see what would go wrong about adding markets to scientific progress. Two points: First, I'll keep hammering this point on every Robin Hanson article about betting markets, since he seems to ignore it. We've had betting markets for sports for probably thousands of years now, and it's not clear that they've led to any positive developments - but they have led to a _ton_ of negative outcomes, such as giving people inside the field monetary incentives to do things that go against the goals of the enterprise. Second, if rich people want to find promising scientists and give them money to fund their research, they can do that already and in fact that happens all the time! There are tons of private grants and foundations. You could even argue that's essentially what a ton of venture capital is, especially in the medical field. There's no real reason to set up a prediction market for it, unless you're a guy who's been trying to suggest them for every possible problem until one finally sticks.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665454547.000000
>We've had betting markets for sports for probably thousands of years now, and it's not clear that they've led to any positive developments I'm given to understand we now have institutions that are now good at predicting which sports team will win. It's not the fault of betting markets that that's not very useful information.
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u/sephirothrr 12 points at 1665458401.000000
> It's not the fault of betting markets that that's not very useful information. ah, but that's the thing - it is in fact very useful information, if you have the ability to manipulate the outcome, which the existence of betting markets strongly incentivizes
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u/Soyweiser 12 points at 1665473947.000000
Impossible, the act of measuring something cannot change the thing you are measuring, totally unscientific.
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u/Really_McNamington 12 points at 1665458703.000000
>I'm given to understand we now have institutions that are now good at predicting which sports team will win. This is the funniest thing I've read today. Not a sports fan, I take it? If it existed that would be astoundingly useful and lucrative information. There are whole criminal syndicates attempting to corrupt various sporting outcomes so they can make bank betting on known outcomes.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665459630.000000
The institutions are the gambling companies themselves. And they're about as accurate as possible, no? They obviously don't know who will win, but they have good probability who will win, since games are random. Knowing for certain who will win a non-rigged game is like rolling a die and knowing exactly what number will come up. But the institutions are good at accurately assessing how many sides the dice have and the probability the the result will be greater than 4, extending the metaphor.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 12 points at 1665440432.000000
>Do you disagree that most people think the purpose of academia is to add to humanity's collective knowledge? His evidence is weak but I don't think it's a controversial claim he's making about c). His solution is controversial, **not his identification of a problem.** Relevant claim bolded Either you think the uncontroversial thing is that (C) university’s primary purpose is long term knowledge growth, or that currently something has gone wrong with (C). If it’s the former, you’re licensing that by a dubious but somewhat reasonable appeal to general opinion, and if it’s the latter the only thing in the previous verbiage which licences that it is “not controversial” is the part where you say “I don’t think it’s a controversial claim”. I think it’s very dubious to suggest (n=1) that universities have uncontroversially failed to meet (C). Is it uncontroversial that something has gone dreadfully wrong with universities-as-knowledge-producers? I think lots of people think something like that for lots of different mutually exclusive reasons. This does not add up to a lack of controversy.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -2 points at 1665440661.000000
It's the former. I know I don't have strong evidence, but I don't think I need strong evidence to say the point of academia is to expand knowledge. I know it is controversial to say that they have a problem, I missphrased things.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 9 points at 1665440934.000000
So “his identification of a problem [is uncontroversial]” is a separate claim you were making with no support at all.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665442252.000000
Yes.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 7 points at 1665443611.000000
Seems like you don’t have anything substantive to offer, in that case, other than you personally have a vague feeling Hanson’s ideas are good
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665447299.000000
OP was criticizing Hanson for saying C is true without sufficient evidence. I thought that was a dumb criticism because C is pretty uncontroversial, he shouldn’t be required to present strong evidence for an uncontroversial claim.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 6 points at 1665469038.000000
No I understand, that’s what i just said
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u/Soyweiser 10 points at 1665473631.000000
> add to humanity's collective knowledge Careful with generic good sounding phrases like this, just like 'expanding the light of human conciousness' these phrases tend to be too vague to be useful and easily used to cover for abuses. (E: if only the Rationalists warned against applause lights like this, ah nevertheless. Also editing wikis also expands humanities collective knowledge) Unrelated to that along time ago I listened to a manager who went into managing research academia. His job was basically to improve the quality and speed of the research. Only thing he said which worked: Group lunches, where talking about each others research was encouraged. In this way the weaker researcher could easily be given hints on which science to use to improve what they were stuck on by the more experienced researchers. Dont see how the pressure of market competition would help this.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665502320.000000
>Dont see how the pressure of market competition would help this. The market would be in investing in the best researchers. Say there's two new PhD grads, Alice and Bob. An all-knowing God knows that Alice is going to publish dozens of studies and greatly contribute to science, and the earlier she starts getting big grant money the more she'll contribute. Bob meanwhile won't do very much, and if he gets big grant money, he'll contribute a little, but that money would probably have been better given to another researcher. Right now, our ways of trying to identify which of Alice or Bob would contribute more aren't perfect. Look at which one of them had better grades, which contributed to more studies already during their education, which is better at writing grant proposals, etc. But it's not perfect. Maybe Bob writes a very clean, smooth grant proposal and was great at talking researchers into letting him onto their team in grad school, and would wrongly get allocated more funding. The purpose of the market is to add financial incentives to making sure people can identify Alice as the better researcher.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 9 points at 1665516300.000000
This is nonsense hypothetical economics. Another version of your scenario, equally realistic (that is, I made it up on the spot) but much more grounded in theory and empirics, is that investors with big spending power are able to make big bets, failing or successful, on research or researchers they like and in effect outstrip other researcher’s ability to enter the market. This is in effect how a lot of private funding takes place already in academia. Big investors are also able to make large each way bets and profit off the success of either research programme without improving the impact score of the market itself, and in essence spending and making large amounts of money by flooding the market with useless data. You have no structural model for how this works, you have the word “incentives” and a rusted out facsimile of how you think academic funding works at the moment. You have *no idea* what you’re talking about.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665522475.000000
>is that investors with big spending power are able to make big bets, failing or successful, on research or researchers they like and in effect outstrip other researcher’s ability to enter the market And then those investors will lose large amounts of money if they prioritize researchers they like over ones that are successful. That is the point of a betting market. And it'll provide a very large incentive to other investors to find successful researchers, because they'll be able to grab big money. You're talking about big investors rigging the game so they make big money, but all the money is coming from investors, things are zero-sum(or slightly less due to transaction fees); it's not possible for corrupt corporate interests to effectively rig the game to steal money, unless they're stealing it from each other. >Big investors are also able to make large each way bets and profit off the success of either research programme without improving the impact score of the market itself, and in essence spending and making large amounts of money by flooding the market with useless data. The market does of course need to have a good way to evaluate which researchers have gone good work vs which ones make useless data or it won't work. Bryan Hanson suggests future historians. Maybe this idea wouldn't work, but I don't think it's such a bad idea he should be mocked for proposing it in a blog post.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 8 points at 1665525903.000000
I take it you’re unfamiliar with how investment works in e.g. Silicon Valley. Science and technology do not operate according to strict laws of rapid Popperian falsification automatically congenial to your imaginary betting market. At the very least you will need to *argue* your case, not speculate that betting markets work the way that you want; at the moment you’re arguing on the level of a kid in a playground game who says their power is infinitely *plus one* actually. To begin with, you have *completely* ignored the point about researchers entering the market. That’s enough to write off your reply entirely. Does this system work out such that corporate interests have their hands completely off the tiller of research as in baccarat or the flip of a coin, or is it more like horse racing? How do you even create a zero-sum game between two avenues of research with parallel or mutually reinforcing feasibility with only one very long-run payoff between them? What happens if the big corporate spikes the chances of a rival researcher in the market and ruins opportunities for any pay-off at all, judging that no clear answer is better than the wrong one? How do you keep games running long enough for a pay-off now that we’ve replaced institutional investment in research programmes with short-term pay-offs for outside investors? Oh right, we’re only setting up these games for long-run pay-offs. Right. That’s *definitely* how this’ll work out, because there’s no way perverse incentives could be involved in *our* model, only the *competing* model has perverse incentives. There’s nothing to mock in having interesting ideas. There is *plenty* to mock in having interesting ideas backed by juvenile argumentation. There is *even more* to mock in people who stand proudly on a hill with their trousers down pointing and laughing at all the people who have gathered to observe this strange behaviour.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665588725.000000
>Science and technology do not operate according to strict laws of rapid Popperian falsification automatically congenial to your imaginary betting market. Who is successful and who isn't doesn't need to be immediately obvious. The betting market is just about making more accurate predictions. Already, a researcher who seems to make good use of a grant is more likely to get another, and a researcher who seems to make poor use is less likely to get another. The betting market would be an attempt to be more precise with those predictions. >To begin with, you have completely ignored the point about researchers entering the market. I other misunderstood your point, or you misunderstood me when I argued why it probably wouldn't be an issue. As I understand your point, you're concerned about a scenario like this: There are two researchers, Alice and Bob. Alice is the better researcher, but Bob sucks up to Amazon and publishes about how Amazon is the best company ever. So Amazon bets big on Bob, so he would get all the grants, and Alice can't get any. If that's not your criticism, you'll need to explain what it is again, because I didn't understand it. Assuming that is your criticism, I don't think it will happen, because people will notice "Hey Amazon is only betting on Bob because he sucks up to them", and they'll bet against Bob so they'll get easy money, and Bob's "market price" will reach whatever the evidence says it should be. If the market isn't sufficiently liquid or if there isn't enough money available to counter Amazon things won't work and there will be problems, but Hanson just wrote a speculative blog post about why it might work, he wasn't getting into all the pros and cons yet. Pointing out flaws is fine, calling him an idiot for speculating on things that might have flaws is wrong. >What happens if the big corporate spikes the chances of a rival researcher in the market and ruins opportunities for any pay-off at all, judging that no clear answer is better than the wrong one? How would they do this? >How do you keep games running long enough for a pay-off now that we’ve replaced institutional investment in research programmes with short-term pay-offs for outside investors? Maybe it would be a problem that it'd be hard to establish longer term research projects if there are lots of investors who want fast results so they can cash out. I think it'd depend on how intelligent the market is, if investors would identify that a long term study could make a researcher very famous in the future, and therefore very profitable to bet on now.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1665591698.000000
I didn’t say Bob has to suck up to Amazon. > I don't think it will happen I don’t care what you think, your opinion is worth nothing to me. > people will notice "Hey Amazon is only betting on Bob because he sucks up to them", and they'll bet against Bob so they'll get easy money, and Bob's "market price" will reach whatever the evidence says it should be. If the market isn't sufficiently liquid or if there isn't enough money available to counter Amazon things won't work and there will be problems, but Hanson just wrote a speculative blog post about why it might work, he wasn't getting into all the pros and cons yet. Stop using the word “will” as a statement of fact, it’s a puerile debasement of the English language and basic reasoning. > How would they do this? What’s your day job? What did you study at university? Do you know anything about capital investment, finance, have you in your life ever been in a casino or bookmakers?
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665591969.000000
>I don’t care what you think, your opinion is worth nothing to me. >Stop using the word “will” as a statement of fact, it’s a puerile debasement of the English language and basic reasoning. You attack me for qualifying a statement by saying that I think it will happen, and you attack me for not qualifying the statement. I don't know what you want. >What’s your day job? What did you study at university? Do you know anything about capital investment, finance, have you in your life ever been in a casino or bookmakers? This is a reddit argument, I don't need credentials. If you only want to argue with credentialed people, stop replying to randos on reddit.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 5 points at 1665592163.000000
I take it you’re still a student or younger then. I want you to think about the simple model you’re uncritically presenting as self-securing, and make it more complex so that it can even *begin* to handle perverse incentives and the real-life structure of investment. Your scenario with Bob and Amazon presents your simple model as automatically secure against perverse incentives. That is a ridiculous assumption, and it demonstrates that the only thing you have to go on coming here and batting for Hanson is that you have a nice, warm feeling about his bad model and you don’t like that people are taking the piss out of it.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665592565.000000
You start with simple models, and work up to more complex models. Hanson presented a simple model, he's working towards a more complex one, and I'm upset that people are attacking him for sharing a simple model on his blog. If he published a book about betting markets and this was the extent of detail he went into, that'd be fair to attack, because a book like that would be a finished proposal. And a finished proposal with holes like ignoring perverse incentives would be fair to attack. But the blog post is more just musings as he works towards creating a complex model. Pointing out flaws is fine, because they'll be things to consider in the complex model. Maybe he'll decide the flaws can't be resolved and won't ever present a complex model in a book or paper. But treating him like a dumbass for not having a perfect model in a short blog post is dumb.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1665592908.000000
No, I’m not letting you take the off-ramp you’re giving Hanson. You can argue that Hanson has somewhere to go that’s more complicated, but *you* can’t turn around now and say that you didn’t explicitly state that you think the model avoids obvious problems *automatically*. What was all that talk about Bob and Amazon except you doing exactly that, and what was it worth if not? You came here with the obvious notion of knocking these idiots down with your half-thoughts because you understand economics and they don’t. Just own your shit. I haven’t even banned you yet so you’re not even whining in modmail at me, demanding to know why your free speech isn’t being protected. In any case Hanson can fraud away all he likes pretending he’s going to get a better model. Hanson *has written* books (I own a copy of his Em book! It goes on my “bad sci-fi” shelf next to late period Heinlenn - to be fair, somebody I cared about a great deal bought me *The Cat Who Walks Through Walls* as a joke, so it has sentimental value) which don’t do better than this. When was his last serious contribution? I’ll continue to take the piss, thanks.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665593345.000000
>What was all that talk about Bob and Amazon except you doing exactly that, and what was it worth if not? The examples were about trying to get on the same page, to try to make sure you understood what I was claiming and to try to make sure you understood what I was claiming. >(I own a copy of his Em book! It goes on my “bad sci-fi” shelf next to late period Heinlenn I haven't read it, but if you disagree with it and want to call him an idiot over that, then that's fair. >When was his last serious contribution? I thought *The Elephant in the Brain* was very good.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1665593439.000000
I will reiterate that I don’t care what you thought about *Elephant in the Brain*
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665593500.000000
I don't know what you wanted as a possible example of a serious contribution then
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1665593534.000000
Incredibly, you managed to answer one question and it was the rhetorical one, well done Obviously *Elephant* is not a serious book
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665593785.000000
I don't know what you want.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1665593867.000000
I told you in detail what I want and what I don’t want, I have no idea why you’re trying to put the ball in my court Is it some kind of weird suck up thing?
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u/Soyweiser 4 points at 1665505188.000000
That line was not a contextless line. Adding financial incentives would actually destroy the mechanism listed above.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665506849.000000
How so?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 5 points at 1665516785.000000
turbocharging incentives to compete necessarily puts a drag on co-operation, unless that co-operation is formalised so that pairs function as a single unit in the model, this in turn means no more open lunches
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 1 points at 1665522540.000000
Doesn't academia already have large amounts of competition, for tenure spots, grants, etc.?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1665526033.000000
This is generally regarded as one of the most disastrous consequences of the marketisation of academia, yes Did you think that people are here to defend the perfection of the present state of things in academia?
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO -1 points at 1665526714.000000
Everyone here is defending the current order in academia and criticizing a proposed idea to improve things. If you guys have other suggestions, I can take a turn poking holes in your ideas.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 7 points at 1665527810.000000
Nobody is defending the current order in academia except insofar as Hanson fails to understand its merits, everybody is attacking Hanson’s terrible idea
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 5 points at 1665528456.000000
> If you guys have other suggestions, I can take a turn poking holes in your ideas. I suggest siloing off large areas of research in the humanities and STEM from market competition and direct or indirect government oversight, with strict regulation of any private involvement in publishing including breaking up the publishing giants. That’s a start anyway, one which happens to look remarkably like the pre-1800 days Hanson is so fond of, with grant money substituting for the large private incomes which paid for scientific research at the time. I *wonder why* his “prize-giving” model doesn’t mention that aspect of the funding back then.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 0 points at 1665529602.000000
So how would it be decided who gets the grant money that has little oversight to it?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1665557193.000000
I don’t understand the question
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1665558195.000000
To put it another way, your preferred system has no system (except for placing bets on future outcomes of other bets), I don’t know why you’re special pleading that I provide an explanation of the specific mechanics for mine How else would funding be allocated? The proceeds of a block grant are divvied up according to cost and anticipated results (with a fairly broad application of the term “results”) between different research teams and their project proposals
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