A small research community of unusually smart/competent/well-informed people can relatively-easily outperform a whole field, by having better internal memetic selection pressures.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true, except insofar as a small research community can be so unusually smart/competent/etc that their median researcher is better than a whole field’s median researcher so they get better selection pressure “for free”. But if an idea’s popularity in a wide field is determined mainly by its appeal to the median researcher, I would naturally expect its popularity in a small community to be determined mainly by its appeal to the median community member.
This claim looks like it’s implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don’t?
This claim looks like it’s implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don’t?
I’m a bit surprised this is the crux for you. Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field’s gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over. (There’s also things you could do in addition to gatekeeping. See Selective, Corrective, Structural: Three Ways of Making Social Systems Work)
(This doesn’t mean smaller research communities automatically have good gatekeeping or other mechanisms, but it doesn’t feel like a very confusing or mysterious problem on how to do better)
Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field’s gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over.
Does the field of social psychology not control the gatekeeping of social psychology? I guess you could argue that it’s controlled by whatever legislative body passes the funding bills, but most of the social psychology incentives seem to be set by social psychologists, so both small and large communities control their gatekeeping themselves and it’s not obvious to me why smaller ones would do better.
At some level of smallness your gatekeeping can be literally one guy who decides whether an entrant is good enough to pass the gate, and I acknowledge that that seems like it could produce better than median selection pressure. But by the time you get big enough that you’re talking about communities collectively controlling the gatekeeping… aren’t we just describing the same system at a population of one thousand vs one hundred thousand?
I could imagine an argument that yes actually, differences of scale matter because larger communities have intrinsically worse dynamics for some reason, but if that’s the angle I would expect to at least hear what the reason is rather than have it be left as self-evident.
An individual Social Psychology lab (or lose collection of labs) can choose who to let in.
Frontier Lab AI companies can decide who to hire, and what sort of standards they want internally (and maybe, in a lose alliance with other Frontier Lab companies).
The Immoral Mazes outlines some reasons that you might think large institutions are dramatically worse than smaller ones (see: Recursive Middle Manager Hell for a shorter intro, although I don’t spell out the part argument about how mazes are sort of “contagious” between large institutions)
But the simpler argument is “the fewer people you have, the easier it is for a few leaders to basically make personal choices based on their goals and values,” rather than selection effects resulting in the largest institutions being better modeled as “following incentives” rather than “pursuing goals on purpose.” (If an organization didn’t follow the incentives, they’d be outcompeted by one that does)
It’s not obvious to me that this is true, except insofar as a small research community can be so unusually smart/competent/etc that their median researcher is better than a whole field’s median researcher so they get better selection pressure “for free”. But if an idea’s popularity in a wide field is determined mainly by its appeal to the median researcher, I would naturally expect its popularity in a small community to be determined mainly by its appeal to the median community member.
This claim looks like it’s implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don’t?
I’m a bit surprised this is the crux for you. Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field’s gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over. (There’s also things you could do in addition to gatekeeping. See Selective, Corrective, Structural: Three Ways of Making Social Systems Work)
(This doesn’t mean smaller research communities automatically have good gatekeeping or other mechanisms, but it doesn’t feel like a very confusing or mysterious problem on how to do better)
Does the field of social psychology not control the gatekeeping of social psychology? I guess you could argue that it’s controlled by whatever legislative body passes the funding bills, but most of the social psychology incentives seem to be set by social psychologists, so both small and large communities control their gatekeeping themselves and it’s not obvious to me why smaller ones would do better.
At some level of smallness your gatekeeping can be literally one guy who decides whether an entrant is good enough to pass the gate, and I acknowledge that that seems like it could produce better than median selection pressure. But by the time you get big enough that you’re talking about communities collectively controlling the gatekeeping… aren’t we just describing the same system at a population of one thousand vs one hundred thousand?
I could imagine an argument that yes actually, differences of scale matter because larger communities have intrinsically worse dynamics for some reason, but if that’s the angle I would expect to at least hear what the reason is rather than have it be left as self-evident.
An individual Social Psychology lab (or lose collection of labs) can choose who to let in.
Frontier Lab AI companies can decide who to hire, and what sort of standards they want internally (and maybe, in a lose alliance with other Frontier Lab companies).
The Immoral Mazes outlines some reasons that you might think large institutions are dramatically worse than smaller ones (see: Recursive Middle Manager Hell for a shorter intro, although I don’t spell out the part argument about how mazes are sort of “contagious” between large institutions)
But the simpler argument is “the fewer people you have, the easier it is for a few leaders to basically make personal choices based on their goals and values,” rather than selection effects resulting in the largest institutions being better modeled as “following incentives” rather than “pursuing goals on purpose.” (If an organization didn’t follow the incentives, they’d be outcompeted by one that does)