Spent today reading in the science-of-science, scientometrics, & related literatures. Struck, as always, that scientific understanding is way upstream of everything they measure. Sometimes that makes sense - maybe you want to focus on economic impact. But it's a huge limitation
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Evaluating by counting citations, number of papers etc seems a bit like evaluating basketball teams by adding up the heights of the players. It's not completely irrelevant, but it's also rather beside the point...
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I wish the problem had a good, broadly accepted name. "Economic impact" is a useful term, and there needs to be an analogue. "Understanding impact" or "Discovery impact"? Neither seems quite right; there's some icky underlying presumption.
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Might be due to the fact that understanding is pretty darned non-fungible.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
projects like the wikipedia give me some hope that you can do stuff like start to weight concepts near the roots of semantic trees, but it's not near to enough of the fraction of human knowledge, and it may have distortions of one's own. still... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy …pic.twitter.com/mPCDBadZTr
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people like Dean Simonton use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiometry … -- it's really not perfect, but it is remarkable some of the things it can uncover
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