Thanks for this post. I’ve seen the term inadequecy before (mostly on your Facebook page, I think) but never had such a clear definition in mind.
There was one small thing that bothered me in this post without detracting from the main argument. In section IV, we provisionally accept the premise “grantmakers are driven by prestige, not expected value of research” for the sake of a toy example. I was happy to accept this for the sake of the example. However, in section V (the omelette example and related commentary about research after the second world war), the text begins to read as though this premise is definitely true in real life. This felt inconsistent and potentially misleading.
(It’s not like anyone in our civilization has put as much effort into rationalizing the academic matching process as, say, OkCupid has put into their software for hooking up dates. It’s not like anyone who did produce this public good would get paid more than they could have made as a Google programmer.)
I appreciated this throwaway example of inadequacy. It gave me a little lightbulb and propelled me forward to read the rest of the post with more interest.
Thanks for this post. I’ve seen the term inadequecy before (mostly on your Facebook page, I think) but never had such a clear definition in mind.
There was one small thing that bothered me in this post without detracting from the main argument. In section IV, we provisionally accept the premise “grantmakers are driven by prestige, not expected value of research” for the sake of a toy example. I was happy to accept this for the sake of the example. However, in section V (the omelette example and related commentary about research after the second world war), the text begins to read as though this premise is definitely true in real life. This felt inconsistent and potentially misleading.
I appreciated this throwaway example of inadequacy. It gave me a little lightbulb and propelled me forward to read the rest of the post with more interest.