Re:The mathematics of science’s broken reward system
by hx87 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @10:24AM
(#12978199)
> Who gets to be a scientist, and who gets to become a person with a lot of useless knowledge and an incurable sense of failure.
And who goes into finance, software engineering, or some other tangentially related field where the skillset is very useful.
Re:The mathematics of science’s broken reward system
by infinity0 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @09:39AM
(#12977777)
It could be read either way - it doesn't talk too much about differences between metrics, and groups them as near-equivalent. Anyway the exact intention of the author/article is not so important. My point is to say that one way that you could (and I'm sure some will) interpret it, is not good.
Certainly we need to look at our social reward/incentive systems from an adversarial point of view, in science, economics, politics and elsewhere. Game theory is useful for that, and it can help us develop systems that are less-easily susceptible to the flaws that the article mentions.
A problem is that any such metric is only ever going to be a proxy for some assumed real value, and such a proxy is always going to be controversial, particularly if it's used to control access to funding.
Which I think at the end of the day is the big issue here. All this soul-searching is just a big attempt to decide what we spend money on. Who gets to be a scientist, and who gets to become a person with a lot of useless knowledge and an incurable sense of failure.