Thanks for the very thoughtful comments; lots to chew on. As I hope was clear, I’m just an interested outside observer, and have not spent very long thinking about these issues, and don’t know much of the literature. (My blog post ended up as a cross post here because I posted it to facebook, and asked if anyone could point me to more serious literature thinking about this problem, and a commenter suggested that I should crosspost here for feedback)
I agree that linear feedback is more plausible if we think of research breakthroughs as producing multiplicative gains, a simple point that I hadn’t thought about.
Hi all,
Thanks for the very thoughtful comments; lots to chew on. As I hope was clear, I’m just an interested outside observer, and have not spent very long thinking about these issues, and don’t know much of the literature. (My blog post ended up as a cross post here because I posted it to facebook, and asked if anyone could point me to more serious literature thinking about this problem, and a commenter suggested that I should crosspost here for feedback)
I agree that linear feedback is more plausible if we think of research breakthroughs as producing multiplicative gains, a simple point that I hadn’t thought about.