Executive summary: The success of the Vesuvius Challenge, a million+ dollar contest to read ancient scrolls using advanced technology, validates the key insight of metascience: scientific progress depends more on how research funding is allocated than on the total amount spent.
Key points:
The Vesuvius Challenge induced more progress in 9 months with ~$1 million than traditional funding mechanisms likely would have with much larger amounts.
Specific prize design choices, such as multiple smaller prizes and open collaboration, were crucial for incentivizing rapid progress.
Directly hiring data labelers for a bottleneck task was more effective than a prize for that step, showing flexibility in funding approaches.
“Nerdsniping” (inspiring interest) among researchers and potential funders can be as important as prize money.
The challenge is an example of “privileged group” provision of public goods, where a funder’s strong interest leads them to support work with broad benefits.
Long-term government funding for basic research (like Brent Seales’ work) can enable later rapid progress when paired with other mechanisms like prizes.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The success of the Vesuvius Challenge, a million+ dollar contest to read ancient scrolls using advanced technology, validates the key insight of metascience: scientific progress depends more on how research funding is allocated than on the total amount spent.
Key points:
The Vesuvius Challenge induced more progress in 9 months with ~$1 million than traditional funding mechanisms likely would have with much larger amounts.
Specific prize design choices, such as multiple smaller prizes and open collaboration, were crucial for incentivizing rapid progress.
Directly hiring data labelers for a bottleneck task was more effective than a prize for that step, showing flexibility in funding approaches.
“Nerdsniping” (inspiring interest) among researchers and potential funders can be as important as prize money.
The challenge is an example of “privileged group” provision of public goods, where a funder’s strong interest leads them to support work with broad benefits.
Long-term government funding for basic research (like Brent Seales’ work) can enable later rapid progress when paired with other mechanisms like prizes.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.