I agree with others here that it’s not clear whether undifferentiated scientific progress is good or bad at the current margin.
However, assuming scientific progress is good, I’m also not convinced that breaking up elite colleges will increase scientific progress. Some counterpoints:
Having the smartest people in the same room might increase net scientific progress
Giving them resources is probably good
(less certain) there might be increasing returns to scale, like maybe having 100 supersmart people in the same place is better than 20 places with 5 supersmart people each (since it’s easier for ideas etc to pollenate even beyond your small workgroup, it’s easier to have personality matches, etc).
(much less certain) colleges select on proxies for future power other than smarts. But this also isn’t clearly bad for scientific progress.
It’s probably easier to do science when you are from a more privileged background and have relatively less worries in life
I suppose all your points would be satisfied as long the breaking up of colleges happens in a to me pretty reasonable way e.g. by not forcing the new colleges to stay small and non-elite? I understood the main benefit of this to be to remove the current possibly suboptimal college administrations and to replace them with better management that avoids current problems.
I agree with others here that it’s not clear whether undifferentiated scientific progress is good or bad at the current margin.
However, assuming scientific progress is good, I’m also not convinced that breaking up elite colleges will increase scientific progress. Some counterpoints:
Having the smartest people in the same room might increase net scientific progress
Giving them resources is probably good
(less certain) there might be increasing returns to scale, like maybe having 100 supersmart people in the same place is better than 20 places with 5 supersmart people each (since it’s easier for ideas etc to pollenate even beyond your small workgroup, it’s easier to have personality matches, etc).
(much less certain) colleges select on proxies for future power other than smarts. But this also isn’t clearly bad for scientific progress.
It’s probably easier to do science when you are from a more privileged background and have relatively less worries in life
I suppose all your points would be satisfied as long the breaking up of colleges happens in a to me pretty reasonable way e.g. by not forcing the new colleges to stay small and non-elite? I understood the main benefit of this to be to remove the current possibly suboptimal college administrations and to replace them with better management that avoids current problems.