Tyler Cowen: How would you improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science — Western science?
David Deutsch: … I think the present system of funding scientific research is terribly perverse and has caused a stagnation in many areas. The present system of careers is perverse in a parallel way and causes people to do the wrong kind of research and causes people who want to do the right kind of research to leave research.
If I can answer in a single word, the way I would improve it is diversity. There should be diversity of funding criteria. There should be diversity of funding sources. There should be diversity of criteria for choosing research projects, and there should be diversity of criteria for choosing people for promotion and for being funded.
… Any kind of standardization is the opposite of diversity. Just like I say you should have disobedience lessons in schools, so you should have unstandardizing objectives for science education and for how you run scientific research. Any kind of standardization is the opposite of diversity.
That was from a Conversation with Tyler episode, David Deutsch on Multiple Worlds and Our Place in Them.
Some people would say that this diversity of funding criteria and unstandardizing of evaluation may work for scientific progress, as David Deutsch was referring to, but not to the vast majority of R&D efforts such as those in the Department of Defense. Once you start applying technologies to satisfy real world requirements, there needs to be defined processes. The project’s outcomes and funding need to be considered in total compared to all other projects in order to ascertain priorities and affordability.
I think that’s empirically falsifiable. If standard tests worked for new product development, then the largest companies from the 1950s would have accelerated their advantage and would remain the tech leaders today. This was JK Galbriath’s view, as well as Alfred Chandler and even Joseph Schumpeter. However, most of the firms people would name as the tech leaders today (FAANG) are relative newcomers.
DoD is more like an economy than a single business. It must have diversity in its modernization programs or it creates terrible risks that will only be apparent when a conflict starts. Yet the impulse for standardization is strong in program management “best practices” and oversight. While DoD has inherently non-market characteristics, it can also learn from market principles of individual action, skin-in-the-game, and competition.
Jason Crawford made similar arguments about the importance of using a diversity of funding mechanisms (here and here).
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