Some low-effort thoughts (I am not an economist so I might be embarrassing myself!):
My first inclination is something like “find the average output of the field per unit time, then find the average growth rate of a field, and then calculate the ‘extra’ output you’d get with a higher growth rate.” In other words: (1) what is the field currently doing of value? (2) how much more value would that field produce if they did whatever they’re currently doing faster?
It would be interesting to see someone do a quantitative analysis of the history of progress in some particular field. However, because so much intellectual progress has happened in the last ~300 years by so few people (relatively speaking), my guess is we might not have enough data in many cases.
The more something like the “great man theory” applies to a field (i.e. the more stochastic progress is), the more of a problem you have with this model. [Had an example here, removed it because I no longer think it’s appropriate.]
With regard to that latter question (also your second set-up), I wonder how reliably we could apply heuristics for determining the EV of particular contributions (i.e. how much value do we usually get from papers in field Y with ~X citations?).
Thanks! This is interesting, will spend some time thinking about.
Please don’t worry much about embarrassing yourself! It’s definitely a challenge with forums like this, but it would be pretty unreasonable for anyone to expect that post/comment authors have degrees in all the possibly relevant topics.
Low-effort thoughts can be pretty great, they may be some of the highest value-per-difficulty work.
Some low-effort thoughts (I am not an economist so I might be embarrassing myself!):
My first inclination is something like “find the average output of the field per unit time, then find the average growth rate of a field, and then calculate the ‘extra’ output you’d get with a higher growth rate.” In other words: (1) what is the field currently doing of value? (2) how much more value would that field produce if they did whatever they’re currently doing faster?
It would be interesting to see someone do a quantitative analysis of the history of progress in some particular field. However, because so much intellectual progress has happened in the last ~300 years by so few people (relatively speaking), my guess is we might not have enough data in many cases.
The more something like the “great man theory” applies to a field (i.e. the more stochastic progress is), the more of a problem you have with this model. [Had an example here, removed it because I no longer think it’s appropriate.]
With regard to that latter question (also your second set-up), I wonder how reliably we could apply heuristics for determining the EV of particular contributions (i.e. how much value do we usually get from papers in field Y with ~X citations?).
Thanks! This is interesting, will spend some time thinking about.
Please don’t worry much about embarrassing yourself! It’s definitely a challenge with forums like this, but it would be pretty unreasonable for anyone to expect that post/comment authors have degrees in all the possibly relevant topics.
Low-effort thoughts can be pretty great, they may be some of the highest value-per-difficulty work.