In these cases, I do not think such explanations are enough.
Eliezer gives the model of researchers looking for citations plus grant givers looking for prestige, as the explanation for why his SAD treatment wasn’t tested. I don’t buy it. Story doesn’t make sense.
On my model, the lack of exploitability is what allowed the failure to happen, whereas your theory on reasons why people do not try more dakka may be what caused the failure to happen.
If the problem were exploitable in the Eliezer-sense, the market would bulldoze straight through the roadblocks you describe. The fact that the problem is not exploitable allows your roadblocks to have the power they empirically have.
If more light worked, you’d get a lot of citations, for not much cost or effort. If you’re writing a grant, this costs little money and could help many people. It’s less prestigious to up the dosage than be original, but it’s still a big prestige win.
I don’t think this is true, empirically. Being the first person to think of a new treatment with a proof of concept is prestigious. Working out all the details and engineering it into something practical is much less so.
Our models differ in the magnitude of prestige effects, but not sure they disagree that much. So I think that yes, you’d get a lot less prestige for working out the details, but that it’s still a very ‘good deal’ in prestige terms given the size of the opportunity. I also think that there’s a difference between making little tweaks that improve matters versus making a large tweak that makes things much better; the first one has a much bigger low-prestige problem. Basically I think that yes, you take an order-of-magnitude hit to prestige here, but it’s more than made up for by the ease of finding and exploting the problem.
In terms of the market bulldozing through such things, I have much less faith that markets are so reliably good at such things. I think they’re very good, but unreliable without imposing several additional constraints that often don’t hold or only partially hold. Yes, being exploitable in that sense much improves the chance someone will exploit slash fix the issue, but the search process for things to exploit, and the decision process to do so, and thre requirements to do so, and the opportunity cost of doing so, and so forth, make it quite easy for exploitable things to sit there unexploited, or for things that are exploitable once you notice with the right other personal circumstances to go motly unnoticed and therefore unexploited, and for many things that are exploitable somewhat to not get exploited, while other things are what is called ‘overdone trades’ where too many people try to exploit something that is not expolitable enough.
Much of the time, the real cost that makes something unexploitable is the step of noticing the opportunity and taking the time to analyze it, which isn’t an obviously exploitable opportunity for exploration, whereas the actual exploitation process then becomes clearly good. In fact, if exploration of a problem is a marginal decision, you should expect to therefore find exploitable actions from it, just not enough in expectation to justify the opportunity cost of doing that exploration over another.
(Or, markets are always imperfectly competitive and this matters more than we give it credit, even though the perfect markets are often great approximations and using them explains a lot.)
On my model, the lack of exploitability is what allowed the failure to happen, whereas your theory on reasons why people do not try more dakka may be what caused the failure to happen.
If the problem were exploitable in the Eliezer-sense, the market would bulldoze straight through the roadblocks you describe. The fact that the problem is not exploitable allows your roadblocks to have the power they empirically have.
I don’t think this is true, empirically. Being the first person to think of a new treatment with a proof of concept is prestigious. Working out all the details and engineering it into something practical is much less so.
Our models differ in the magnitude of prestige effects, but not sure they disagree that much. So I think that yes, you’d get a lot less prestige for working out the details, but that it’s still a very ‘good deal’ in prestige terms given the size of the opportunity. I also think that there’s a difference between making little tweaks that improve matters versus making a large tweak that makes things much better; the first one has a much bigger low-prestige problem. Basically I think that yes, you take an order-of-magnitude hit to prestige here, but it’s more than made up for by the ease of finding and exploting the problem.
In terms of the market bulldozing through such things, I have much less faith that markets are so reliably good at such things. I think they’re very good, but unreliable without imposing several additional constraints that often don’t hold or only partially hold. Yes, being exploitable in that sense much improves the chance someone will exploit slash fix the issue, but the search process for things to exploit, and the decision process to do so, and thre requirements to do so, and the opportunity cost of doing so, and so forth, make it quite easy for exploitable things to sit there unexploited, or for things that are exploitable once you notice with the right other personal circumstances to go motly unnoticed and therefore unexploited, and for many things that are exploitable somewhat to not get exploited, while other things are what is called ‘overdone trades’ where too many people try to exploit something that is not expolitable enough.
Much of the time, the real cost that makes something unexploitable is the step of noticing the opportunity and taking the time to analyze it, which isn’t an obviously exploitable opportunity for exploration, whereas the actual exploitation process then becomes clearly good. In fact, if exploration of a problem is a marginal decision, you should expect to therefore find exploitable actions from it, just not enough in expectation to justify the opportunity cost of doing that exploration over another.
(Or, markets are always imperfectly competitive and this matters more than we give it credit, even though the perfect markets are often great approximations and using them explains a lot.)