Thanks Seb. I don’t think I have energy to fully respond here, possibly I’ll make a separate post to give this argument its full due.
One quick point relevant to Crux 2:
“I can also think of many examples of groundbreaking basic science that looks defensive and gets published very well (e.g. again sequencing innovations, vaccine tech; or, for a recent example, several papers on biocontainment published in Nature and Science).”
I think there are many-fold differences in impact/dollar between the tech you build if you are trying to actually solve the problem and the type of probably-good-on-net examples you give here.
Other ways of saying parallels of this point:
Things which are publishable in nature or science are just definitively less neglected, because you are competing against everyone who wants a C/N/S publication
The design space of possible interventions is a superset of, and many times larger than the design space of interventions which also can be published in high impact journals
We find power-laws in cost effectiveness lots of other places, and AFAIK have no counter-evidence here. Given this, even a small orthogonal component between what is incentivized by academia and what is actually good will lead to a large difference in expected impact.
Thanks Seb. I don’t think I have energy to fully respond here, possibly I’ll make a separate post to give this argument its full due.
One quick point relevant to Crux 2: “I can also think of many examples of groundbreaking basic science that looks defensive and gets published very well (e.g. again sequencing innovations, vaccine tech; or, for a recent example, several papers on biocontainment published in Nature and Science).”
I think there are many-fold differences in impact/dollar between the tech you build if you are trying to actually solve the problem and the type of probably-good-on-net examples you give here.
Other ways of saying parallels of this point:
Things which are publishable in nature or science are just definitively less neglected, because you are competing against everyone who wants a C/N/S publication
The design space of possible interventions is a superset of, and many times larger than the design space of interventions which also can be published in high impact journals
We find power-laws in cost effectiveness lots of other places, and AFAIK have no counter-evidence here. Given this, even a small orthogonal component between what is incentivized by academia and what is actually good will lead to a large difference in expected impact.