Nice summary. OTOH, underlying problem is that the shape of good scientific work (high risk, long-term orientation) doesn’t fit the shape of individual careers in any currently plausible institutional framework. No full near-term solution is possible. https://twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/998307085791064064 …
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Replying to @Meaningness
Sufficiently large institutions should have no problem with a portfolio of such "investments" as long as they can distinguish legitimate high risk / high reward work from work that is simply doomed to fail from the beginning.
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Replying to @harryh
The latter is the problem. Accountable institutions have to evaluate people “objectively” instead of on the basis of “JSB thinks she’s a smart weirdo”. It’s the attempt at objective fairness that creates a Goodhart’s Law dynamic, which is why 95% of science is wasted effort.
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Replying to @Meaningness @harryh
"Brilliant scientist recognizes another brilliant scientist" probably has higher true positive performance than any other metric, but a) it doesn't scale at all b) it's incredibly punitive to people who are not in the 'right' social networks
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It can also go horribly wrong if the people that end up in the selection committees turn it into a system of patronage for their own protege (see a huge percentage of Italian academia, with the so called 'Baroni': https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2017/09/25/universita-concorsi-truccati-se-fai-ricorso-ti-giochi-la-carriera-la-logica-di-scambio-dei-professori-indagati/3876949/ …).
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Yes. Under either system, you get dysfunctional politics—of different sorts in the two cases. As I said, there’s no full solution in any currently imaginable institutional framework.
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