Division of cognitive labour in accordance with researchers' ability

push guaranteed basic income to avoid top talent from having to take a formal job and let those people focus on their research while their basic living expenses are payed.

If you could make a good estimate of young Einsteins, it would be enough to pay the basic income to the selected talented people. And it does not even have to be forever. You could just offer to pay them basic income for 10 years; and when it is 5 years till the end, evaluate them again, and if they still pass your filter, extend the time for another 5 years; possibly repeatedly. (And they can still try academia when your scholarship expires.)

But you should consider that Einstein spend that year with his wife Mileva Marić who was also a physicist at a time where woman where woman had trouble finding acceptance in the scientific community. The two agreed that the Mileva should get the money from the Nobel Prize.

That's an argument either in favour of or against feminism, but I'm not sure which one.

Being original isn't hard. The difficult thing is being original in a productive fashion.

This.

If the difference in success was due to a difference in skill, I'd expect people who have previously been successful scientists to be reliably also successful in other areas, say as entrepreneurs. I don't see that being the case, so I suspect the difference in success is not so much due to a difference in skill.

Only if being a scientist and entrepreneur takes the same skills.

At least researchers tend to display relatively consistent output within a field: http://resources.emartin.net/blog/docs/AgeAchievement.pdf

Generally, the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with around 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of the least productive workers can claim only 15% of the total work, and the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least (Dennis, 1954b, 1955; also see Lotka, 1926; Price, 1963, chap. 2). Now from a purely logical perspective, there are three distinct ways of achieving an impressive lifetime output that enables a creator to dominate an artistic or scientific enterprise. First, the individual may exhibit exceptional precocity, beginning contributions at an uncommonly early age. Second, the individual may attain a notable lifetime total by producing until quite late in life, and thereby display productive longevity. Third, the individual may boast phenomenal output rates throughout a career, without regard to the career's onset and termination. These three components are mathematically distinct and so may have almost any arbitrary correlation whatsoever with each other, whether positive, negative, or zero, without altering their respective contributions to total productivity. In precise terms, it is clear that O = R(L - P), where O is lifetime output, R is the mean rate of output throughout the career, L is the age at which the career ended (longevity), and P is the age at which the career began (precocity). The correlations among these three variables may adopt a wide range of arbitrary values without violating this identity. For example, the difference L - P, which defines the length of a career, may be more or less constant, mandating that lifetime output results largely from the average output rate R, given that those who begin earlier, end earlier, and those who begin later, end later. Or output rates may be more or less constant, forcing the final score to be a function solely of precocity and longevity, either singly or in conjunction. In short, R, L, and P, or output rate, longevity, and precocity, comprise largely orthogonal components of O, the gauge of total contributions.

When we turn to actual empirical data, we can observe two points. First, as might be expected, precocity, longevity, and output rate are each strongly associated with final lifetime output, that is, those who generate the most contributions at the end of a career also tend to have begun their careers at earlier ages, ended their careers at later ages, and produced at extraordinary rates throughout their careers (e.g., Albert, 1975; Blackburn et al., 1978; Bloom, 1963; Clemente, 1973; S. Cole, 1979; Richard A. Davis, 1987; Dennis, 1954a, 1954b; Helson & Crutchfield, 1970; Lehman, 1953a; Over, 1982a, 1982b; Raskin, 1936; Roe, 1965, 1972a, 1972b; Segal, Busse, & Mansfield, 1980; R. J. Simon, 1974; Simonton, 1977c; Zhao & Jiang, 1986). Second, these three components are conspicuously linked with each other: Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit (Blackburn et al., 1978; Dennis, 1954a, 1954b, 1956b; Horner et al., 1986; Lehman, 1953a, 1958; Lyons, 1968; Roe, 1952; Simonton, 1977c; Zuckerman, 1977).

If the difference in success was due to a difference in skill, I'd expect people who have previously been successful scientists to be reliably also successful in other areas, say as entrepreneurs. I don't see that being the case, so I suspect the difference in success is not so much due to a difference in skill.

I'd expect a better test would be to see if successful scientist in one field tends to stay successful when they move to a different field. In my understanding they often do.

The first lab I ever worked in at NHGRI had a saying: "We do the 're' in research".

I can understand how when you are bringing together unified mathematical ideas based on centuries of other people's data, if you have the right insight you can figure some major things out quickly. But when dealing with complicated real-world systems rather than abstract logical structures you have to keep pumping. Sometimes you get lucky or you have the correct thought as to what is interesting and where to keep pushing, sometimes you need to keep pushing and pushing away.

You would also need to appeal to people who aren't scientists or won't do any groundbreaking work. What kept/keeps monastic orders together was praising God, not sustaining the holy work of one individual who was best at praising God for the highest possible Praise.

Mendel probably wasn't supported by his fellow monks because he did research. He was supported by his follow monks because he was their brother and also prayed and worked with them. He just chose to spend some of his time working with beans and writing down the results.

Drawing in a supreme scientific mind might not be very hard. Drawing in all the other people to support that one person is a whole lot harder. You'd need a self-sustaining system, that produces its own food and other necessities. Monastic orders solved this problem by adding "labora" (working) to their mission of "ora" (praying). Every monk helped out to sustain his brothers by brewing beer, working in the garden... If your goal is to provide an environment where a supreme scientist can work undisturbed by earthly concerns, the other "science-monks" would need to take over his garden-duties. And I'm not sure if there is enough incentive for them to join.

an ascetic or fraternal order devoted to naturalism might have some appeal and solve a few of the basic problems.

The basic problem standing in the way of people thinking deep thoughts and doing nothing else is funding, aka money. How will this fraternal order solve the money problem and if it does, what will make it different from a plain-vanilla think tank?

As well, academia is much more focused on individual proof of effort (and 'novelty') than on results. In companies, people work in large teams and specialize to their narrow focus, because making the best product is the primary goal; in academia, people generally do most parts of their work themselves.

This may have been true a hundred years ago, but it hardly seems true of academia right now. Maybe you're thinking of some specific field with these characteristics, and broadly generalizing? I feel I've been to a diverse enough set of conferences to disagree with you significantly.

Agree that blogs are a superior method of scientific progress than publishing in journals.

Also strongly disagree.

EDIT:

Disagree that we need a class of super-scientists thinking great thoughts, and journeymen implementing those thoughts; this is the sort of thing that can organically evolve from the science blogosphere. Consider the Polymath Project.

The Polymath project is exactly an example of some super-mathematicians crowd-sourcing the implementation details of their great ideas....

Agree that blogs are a superior method of scientific progress than publishing in journals.

No way, strongly disagree.

Thanks for the link! Very interesting. I read the post that started the thing off, which was very good. How are they doing? A major problem must be the "who gets the credit thing", or? It seems to me that fear of theft of ideas is a major impediment to progress in science.

I agree that the academica should be more collective and cooperative. People do of course cooperate - e.g. they comment on other people's stuff on seminars, etc. - but often it is done in a quite unsystematic way. Public forums with an adequate incentive structure seems to me to be a good way of getting around this problem.

Regarding differences in capability: in my own field, philosophy, the difference in capability between researchers is just vast. Perhaps other fields are different but I doubt it. If what I am sketching concerning what you term "super-scientists and journyemen" could "evolve organically" from blog/public fora systems I'd be happy. I don't really have a take whether that is realistic at this point (perhaps I will tomorrow...).

Regarding smart people: my point was that it is probably best for science and society if they concentrate on what they do best - create great ideas - and do that on the highest possible pace. The best thing would be if they realized that themselves. Perhaps that's what Yudkowsky and other bloggers have done. Those who haven't, or have but won't act on that (perhaps they're not sufficiently altrustic) needs to be given incentives to do so, if we wish to maximize scientific progress.

I'm open for the possiblity that monetary rewards or titles aren't the best incentives (but that, e.g. peer respect is) but all-in-all I think that we do need to make use of such incentives at present.

I think you implicitly paint a too rosy picture of researchers' psychology. I think that in many cases systems that lack sufficiently strong incentives decrease researchers' productivity because they don't have the same need to publish anymore. Most researchers are tempted by other things than science as well and if they are allowed to get away with it they might prioritize those other things.

So the current system is not quite as flawed as many of its detractors claim. We do need incentives, but they need to be tailored in a better way. Specifically, they need to be tailored so that we cram as much as possible out of our most able researchers.

If what you suggest is true, then research-oriented institutions with permanent employment, like the Institute for Advanced Study and the Perimeter Institute should be comparatively much more productive than the University Departments similar in size, skills and scope. I wonder if someone measured it.

Richard Hamming, who was a prominent and successful scientist -- qualified to judge academic productivity -- famously argued the reverse. His comment was "The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards "

The explanation is that being in contact with undergrads and grad students forces you to work on and think about a lot of small problems -- and that you're more likely to have a big result if you go looking for small ones, rather than trying to work only on very hard problems.

[Via http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html]

wondering why is it that the more senior a researcher becomes, the more (s)he resembles a manager.

It's not the only profession where this is the case. Programming is notorious for having no career progression after your first decade unless you want to get into management and stop or slow programming activity.

I like the Max Plank system a lot. I think the US would benefit by copying it.

it would be more conducive to science to give people the security to think in quiet by guaranteeing them a basic livelihood.

Isn't that precisely what tenure is?

Many thanks for the links! I did read some of Nielsen's stuff yesterday (via a link someone else posted here), which I find very interesting. I'll continue to look into this.

This stuff is very important: as Bostrom points out in this article - http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/science.pdf - you can probably do more for the world if you're a really succesful "meta-scientists" (who improves the methods or institutions of science) than you can do if you're a really succesful "first-order scientist" (e.g. physicist). Given that the present institutions of science are far from ideal, as I see it, there is much room for improvement here.

Science hostels - what a lovely idea! :)

That would make sense if what they teach = what they research. But often they also have to teach some more simple and already known stuff.