Someone sent me a paper purporting to explain how hedge funds have systematically inflated returns for 30 years in the stock market (I took no issue with the paper). I looked into the author a bit, and interestingly they have a project which is a knowledge exchange–a purported solution to the reproducibility crisis, allowing scientists to directly sell the results of their information discovery. I figured it would be good to post here…as it would be interesting to hear what people think. I’m not sure yet how I feel about it…though it seems like a difficult idea in practice to make work.
Edit: At least one issue seems to be that in general one might say capital is near sighted. I’m not sure that research of a riskier nature that is longer term would fit well within this paradigm. Also, how would something like CERN ever be funded? (Some might argue it shouldn’t have been.)
thanks grant. the website is a delight to surf and ponder upon.
for the issue you raised, i think a lot of research has been conducted on this. check out the history of darpa, especially its funding and related issues.
you might be interested to know that mariana mazzucato claimed that almost every single innovation on the smartphone originates from darpa and similar public-funded programs.
on a lighter note, and serendipitously, i am reading the humorous novel ‘the exterminator’ by bill fitzhugh. darpa is there early in the story, especially in terms of funding and related issues.
Surya, glad you enjoyed looking through it. Wow, I have considered, and arrived at the same conclusion as the article you link to. It boggles my mind that more of the returns from innovation aren’t explicitly recycled into the very process that created it.
With regards to DARPA, I actually have pretty mixed feelings (at best) about this agency. In some sense, one could argue that the internet was inevitable, so if not DARPA then someone else. On the other hand, why should it have been DARPA that funded this? It seems reasonable that the military would be interested in communication in general–so maybe that is the reason. To be honest, I had read ‘Where the Wizards Stay up Late’ maybe a decade ago, and have forgotten probably everything I read–so I can’t say offhand what their intentions were, or if that book even touches on the motivation. What I am getting at is the idea of ‘dual use’ research. Did DARPA for-see that this would someday have the potential (now realized) to be the penultimate spying tool?
As an example, part of my lab currently has DARPA funding for a project (I have no affiliation with this project) under the general auspices of “wound healing”. For a long time, I thought–well some intrepid scientists have infiltrated DARPA and are using its vast bank account for good! After all, what could possibly be objectionable about “wound healing”? But as it stands now, I think that sentiment was naive, and it is the scientists who are potentially unwitting accomplices in the general game of ‘dual use’ research sponsored by the military. If you can heal a wound, can you repurpose that technology for an inverse affect? (The answer is not necessarily a straightforward yes.) There is a large amount of technology that has this dual use characteristic, and I have significant concerns that most scientists are not even remotely aware of this potential–and if research grants keep getting funded, many of them at best won’t care what the ultimate uses of the technology are.
thanks grant. i would answer your reply in details later, but for now, i am in the ‘bruce knuteson information rabbit hole’…
the article below is simpy thought-provoking… i have my own answer to the issues raised, but i would like to copy and paste quotes from it for others’ reflection…
Figuring out a handshake (first published in the Feb 2017 edition of [Physics World])
"How does any of this relate to science? Well, academics are incentivized to publish papers. The rewards are clear and present: publications and citations lead to grants, promotions and scholarly accolades. Penalties for being wrong are often comparatively fuzzy and distant. The scientist reaps rewards if they turn out to be right; they often do not lose much if they eventually turn out to be wrong; and in the meantime that person collects a salary. Even if they know nothing, such a person has an incentive to publish papers, an incentive to convince you they know something, and an incentive to genuinely convince themselves they know something. The last of these provides useful protection against any future charges of fraud.
This is all you need to know to confidently predict an ongoing replication crisis in academic science that calls into question “wealth” you mistakenly think you have: useful, accurate knowledge about how nature works. Halting the crisis requires a fundamental change to the underlying incentive. Any other purported fix is a joke. Regulation – in the form of peer review, transparency requirements and so on – can push the problem around, but it cannot possibly fix an incentive system with such a deep structural flaw"
“An overcomplicated system has expanded in the resulting vacuum: dissemination through journals; quality control through peer review; funding by taxpayers rather than directly by consumers; assessment of value by citation counts. This system cumbersomely and ineffectively compensates for an extraordinary historical oversight: nobody, apparently, had ever bothered to figure out some sort of handshake allowing A to sell information to Q.”
the broader theme to the first paragraph is “socialization of cost, privatization of profit”… this is not only occurring for innovation, but also for the bailout/stimulus in 2008 and now 2020…
a good criticism and solution for discussion can be found here…
humans are both selfish and magnanimous, good and evil, happy and sad, etc…
in essence, we possess all the qualities that makes us human, even though they may manifest at different times, even within the same individual…
extended to a collection of humans, say a nation state, this notion should logically hold true, though we must beware of falling into the fallacy of composition…
what i’m trying to say is, at the moment, an understanding of how money works in the present system has been utilized to a GREAT effect by the united states and china…
these two countries are by themselves large, both in terms of natural and human resources, hence the GREAT effect… other countries may understand money, such as singapore and japan, but because they have comparatively little natural and human resources, their effect is not as great, as we can obviously see presently…
the u.s and chinese understanding of money led to their lead in science and technology… with darpa, nasa, etc.; see google link above…
if we care to look for it, china is also leading in many sectors of science and technology… ai, for example…
now, if the money can be used for evil, it can also be used for good… as humans, who creates the nation state, which in turn create money, can be either and/or both…
unfortunately, the u.s has a long history of using its understanding of money for evil…
i haven’t researched china enough to make a conclusion, but it seem to lead in the direction of the u.s… that is using money to invent science and technology to behave like an empire…
so other large countries, such as india and indonesia, need to counter the u.s or china… to do this, they need to understand money properly… to know that money is no object… to know that only real resources and organizational capability are the limiting factors…
but perhaps no state would be able to do this… or generalized, power corrupts…
now, an understanding of the fight between the moderns and the post-moderns in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and technology would help to illuminate matters…
more than a decade ago, just as i was about to graduate university, i took refuge from this fight in ‘islamic science’… example article which inspired me below:
but, hanging out with those ‘islamic science’ folks make me realize that without an understanding of the state (i.e: power), they are bound to be nowhere…
so i guess, it’s a personal journey… i now busy myself with advocating for a policy of ‘job guarantee and universal basic income’…
my intention is to prevent the powerless from total massacre, when those in power, including science and technology elites, are at odds with each other… an example of is hiroshima and nagasaki…
or borrowing from malay proverb, “when elephants fight, the deers should not be trampled in the middle”…
sadly, only a small number of scientists understand the need for a systemic change… among them is alex lancaster, if only a piece of the puzzle…
Surya, you have raised a number of good points in your responses–there is a lot to think about here! I will need some time to digest and think about it all
I do think about the state in all of this, and in general it is the ultimate arbiter of the uses of the science it develops. Without many more political scientists–i.e. scientists engaged in politics it seems we can expect more of the same.
Economics in particular can be one of the thorniest sciences to untangle, as it is a mix of empirics, theory, and human factors–and as you point out certainly has this ‘dual use’ character. Some have even stated the case that modern economics itself (Chapter 5. ‘Fuel Economy’, Carbon Democracy) is in some ways an outgrowth of some of these ‘imperial’ endeavors (oil production in the middle east). At any rate, it all makes for fascinating study and reading
Bruce Knuteson’s work on science markets is very interesting. It reminds me of Robin Hanson’s work about prediction markets, described here and discussed in detail on his blog.
