Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I suspect this varies a lot by field? But you shouldn’t expect bad ideas to last long under conditions where the more that rests on them, the greater the *literal* bounty on a correction. And you should expect them to live long where there’s no bounty, only a guillotine

As much as I enjoy academia bashing, there are bounties there too. They might not take the form of cash but there are people who'd work tirelessly to be recognised for correcting a particular misconception. And there are other bounties too.

I agree, but I think (a) they don’t operate as efficiently as a literal market, which is what VC is, and (b) they vary widely by field, which essentially accounts for what we call “rigor” (less confident on that point)

I don't think rigour is the most important - it's caring about what the truth is that matters. If a community cares about that then people can advance in it by devoting their efforts to that. If instead a community cares about something else things tend to degenerate.

"If a community cares about that then people can advance in it by devoting their efforts to that." → But that community still needs to know what genuine truth-seeking looks like, which is easier when there is some actual gold to mine...you either come home with gold, or not.

(For me, this manifests as a strong felt difference between e.g. "he was a great scientist, whose genius was only recognized after his death" and "he was a great businessman, whose genius was only recognized after his death.")

I really like this comparison but wouldn't it be more accurate to compare such a scientist with a businessman who builds a company that makes no profits during his lifetime but then after his death becomes massively profitable and lasts for generations?

The question is: it just a coincidence that this scenario occurs infrequently enough to seem very weird, or does it suggest something about the nature of business?