Good find. I didn’t see that post (it came out a day after I published this, coincidentally). I’m surprised it came out so recently but imagine he probably had similar ideas, and likely wrote them down, much earlier. I definitely recommend it for more details on the science aspect.
From the post:
“For each scientific paper, there is a (perhaps small) chance that it will be randomly chosen for evaluation in, say, 30 years. If it is chosen, then at that time many diverse science evaluation historians (SEH) will study the history of that paper and its influence on future science, and will rank it relative to its contemporaries. To choose this should-have-been prestige-rank, they will consider how important was its topic, how true and novel were its claims, how solid and novel were its arguments, how influential it actually was, and how influential it would have been had it received more attention.
....
Using these assets, markets can be created wherein anyone can trade in the prestige of a paper conditional on that paper being later evaluated. Yes traders have to wait a long time for a final payoff. But they can sell their assets to someone else in the meantime, and we do regularly trade 30 year bonds today. Some care will have to be taken to make sure the base asset that is bet is stable, but this seems quite feasible.”
On estimating expected value, I’m reminded by some of Hanson’s work where he suggests predicting later evaluation (recent example: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/11/how-to-fund-prestige-science.html). I think this is an interesting subcase of the evaluating subprocess. It also fits nicely with this post by PC
Good find. I didn’t see that post (it came out a day after I published this, coincidentally). I’m surprised it came out so recently but imagine he probably had similar ideas, and likely wrote them down, much earlier. I definitely recommend it for more details on the science aspect.
From the post: “For each scientific paper, there is a (perhaps small) chance that it will be randomly chosen for evaluation in, say, 30 years. If it is chosen, then at that time many diverse science evaluation historians (SEH) will study the history of that paper and its influence on future science, and will rank it relative to its contemporaries. To choose this should-have-been prestige-rank, they will consider how important was its topic, how true and novel were its claims, how solid and novel were its arguments, how influential it actually was, and how influential it would have been had it received more attention.
....
Using these assets, markets can be created wherein anyone can trade in the prestige of a paper conditional on that paper being later evaluated. Yes traders have to wait a long time for a final payoff. But they can sell their assets to someone else in the meantime, and we do regularly trade 30 year bonds today. Some care will have to be taken to make sure the base asset that is bet is stable, but this seems quite feasible.”