The famous computer scientist Donald Knuth offered $2.56 for “each error in his published books, whether it be technical, typographical, or historical.” These rewards were highly prized despite their low numerical value.
EAs can consider something similar, offering bounties for identifying mistakes in papers, blog posts, analyses, books, etc that we consider important. Pre-identifying which works are considered important might take some time, but it shouldn’t take too long.
For example, I think some of the errors that I identified in the CE Delft report (which got a lot of publicity and AFAICT was cited pretty frequently in at least a few alternative protein circles until recently) could easily have been uncovered by a student of cultured meat research.
The famous computer scientist Donald Knuth offered $2.56 for “each error in his published books, whether it be technical, typographical, or historical.” These rewards were highly prized despite their low numerical value.
EAs can consider something similar, offering bounties for identifying mistakes in papers, blog posts, analyses, books, etc that we consider important. Pre-identifying which works are considered important might take some time, but it shouldn’t take too long.
For example, I think some of the errors that I identified in the CE Delft report (which got a lot of publicity and AFAICT was cited pretty frequently in at least a few alternative protein circles until recently) could easily have been uncovered by a student of cultured meat research.
Having students be more skeptical and doing things like this can be helpful for both improving general EA epistemics and in training students to be good researchers.