NicholasGruen

• NicholasGruen 19 Dec 2023 14:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Ac­cel­er­at­ing sci­ence through evolv­able institutions

  Thanks Jason, I don’t think you’ve understood what I was trying to get at.

• NicholasGruen 16 Dec 2023 9:05 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ac­cel­er­at­ing sci­ence through evolv­able institutions

  I’d add that Polanyi worried about the question of the integrity of the fabric of scientific knowledge. That is, he asked what was the ultimate source of a geologist’s or a layperson’s confidence that the state of the art knowledge in say — x-ray crystallography — had integrity. His concern was that, in science there was nothing analogous to the function of arbitrating prices in markets and between markets to ‘keep people honest’ in their valuations.

  His answer was what he called his ’theory of overlapping neighbourhoods”. It was “held by a multitude of individuals” connected in a fiduciary network, “each of whom endorses the other’s opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods”. Polanyi would have appreciated businessman Charlie Munger’s claim that “the highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust”.

  We can apply an analogous process of relying more on those with a good record of shorter term prediction in making longer term predictions.

  Section 6 of this report discusses the way in which one might ‘bootstrap’ longer-term vision by using shorter term forecasting performance as one criterion for determining longer-term forecasting prowess — together with deliberation on determining shorter run expectations that can be used to test the progress of longer term projects.

  Though I don’t think he’s cited (his contribution is in noting the need for such a thing rather than identifying it — because that is pretty obvious), this builds on Polanyi’s overlapping neighbourhoods idea.

• NicholasGruen 16 Dec 2023 8:34 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ac­cel­er­at­ing sci­ence through evolv­able institutions

  Thanks for the post Jason. Most or all the mechanisms proposed tend to assume that people are self-interested rather than a mix of self-and-other interest. They play to Hobbesian not Aristotelian stereotypes of the way we are. The scientist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi would argue that many of these functions have powerful ethical dimensions and I’d argue that the structures we’ve put in place, in appealing to self-interest tend to crowd out more ethical motivations. Bureaucracies breed careerism. So I’d want to introduce more randomisation and other kinds of mechanisms to minimise the extent to which the accountability mechanisms we set up don’t just produce more accountability theatre. There are also ways of selecting for merit that don’t involve people performing for their superiors in an organisation. Thus the republic of Venice used the mechanism of the Brevia by which a sub-group of the 2,000+ strong population with political power were chosen by lottery. They then convened behind closed doors and then had a secret ballot. The idea was to insulate the merit selection process from favours to power. It seems to have worked a charm helping Venice to be the only city state in Italy that got through the 500 years from the beginning of the 13th century without any successful coups or civil wars.