Good list! Makes me wonder whether there’s some way to model the expected level of adequacy in a field. Factors we’d have to consider:
How much money is available within the field?
How much prestige is available within the field?
How many people are there in the field?
How much do participants care about the field for non-monetary, non-prestige reasons? That is, how inherently fun is it to work within this field?
How hard is it to work within the field? That is, to what extent do skills other than “having good ideas” matter? (Some scientific fields invest hundreds of hours of grunt work in every paper, while a philosophy paper requires little effort outside of writing.)
How fast does new information enter the field, compared to the amount of information that exists within the field already?
How many competing ideas/groups exist within the field, and how easy is it for a new idea/group to get started?
As a toy example, you could look at the metagame for the Modern format of Magic: The Gathering, which consists of roughly one hundred thousand players (maybe ten thousand of whom are really serious about winning). Rewards for being in the top 1% of the serious group equate to a few thousand dollars in profit per year and a few dozen fans; for the top 0.1%, a few tens of thousands of dollars in profit per year and a few thousand fans, plus a solid chance at a steady job if you want it (producing Magic-related media, working as a designer, etc.).
It’s possible to generate a good burst of fame and profit by creating a new deck that matches up well against current popular decks (the “metagame”).
Information enters the field rapidly, at a pace of a few hundred new cards (into a pool of 11,000) every three months. Building a new deck and thoroughly testing it against the metagame might take a few hundred dollars and a few dozen hours, but the cost is balanced by the fact that playing Magic: The Gathering is a lot of fun. The competitors you need to worry about are people who spend about 50 hours/week playing, and who are as skilled or a little more skilled than you are at the “basics” of the game. Maybe 5% of new decks that are tested this thoroughly turn out to generate any kind of positive return, relative to playing a deck someone else designed already. And so on.
...at the end, we can observe that a new, good Modern deck (one capable of winning a 500-player, $5000 tournament) comes out once every couple of months, and that cards from sets that are more than one year old are almost never at the center of “new, good decks”, relative to newer sets. Magic: The Gathering seems to be an adequate market; any new ideas are absorbed quickly, and few people really get a chance to profit off of them. The evaluation system for cards and decks optimizes more slowly than the evaluation system for stocks, but more quickly than the evaluation system for Major League Baseball players circa 1990.
I’d be interested in viewing examples for other fields, with better data collection, perhaps gathered into some kind of “adequacy” database.
Good list! Makes me wonder whether there’s some way to model the expected level of adequacy in a field. Factors we’d have to consider:
How much money is available within the field?
How much prestige is available within the field?
How many people are there in the field?
How much do participants care about the field for non-monetary, non-prestige reasons? That is, how inherently fun is it to work within this field?
How hard is it to work within the field? That is, to what extent do skills other than “having good ideas” matter? (Some scientific fields invest hundreds of hours of grunt work in every paper, while a philosophy paper requires little effort outside of writing.)
How fast does new information enter the field, compared to the amount of information that exists within the field already?
How many competing ideas/groups exist within the field, and how easy is it for a new idea/group to get started?
As a toy example, you could look at the metagame for the Modern format of Magic: The Gathering, which consists of roughly one hundred thousand players (maybe ten thousand of whom are really serious about winning). Rewards for being in the top 1% of the serious group equate to a few thousand dollars in profit per year and a few dozen fans; for the top 0.1%, a few tens of thousands of dollars in profit per year and a few thousand fans, plus a solid chance at a steady job if you want it (producing Magic-related media, working as a designer, etc.).
It’s possible to generate a good burst of fame and profit by creating a new deck that matches up well against current popular decks (the “metagame”).
Information enters the field rapidly, at a pace of a few hundred new cards (into a pool of 11,000) every three months. Building a new deck and thoroughly testing it against the metagame might take a few hundred dollars and a few dozen hours, but the cost is balanced by the fact that playing Magic: The Gathering is a lot of fun. The competitors you need to worry about are people who spend about 50 hours/week playing, and who are as skilled or a little more skilled than you are at the “basics” of the game. Maybe 5% of new decks that are tested this thoroughly turn out to generate any kind of positive return, relative to playing a deck someone else designed already. And so on.
...at the end, we can observe that a new, good Modern deck (one capable of winning a 500-player, $5000 tournament) comes out once every couple of months, and that cards from sets that are more than one year old are almost never at the center of “new, good decks”, relative to newer sets. Magic: The Gathering seems to be an adequate market; any new ideas are absorbed quickly, and few people really get a chance to profit off of them. The evaluation system for cards and decks optimizes more slowly than the evaluation system for stocks, but more quickly than the evaluation system for Major League Baseball players circa 1990.
I’d be interested in viewing examples for other fields, with better data collection, perhaps gathered into some kind of “adequacy” database.