alt Hacker NewsIt's probably like venture capital. There are many scientists who test many hypotheses. Many are bad at generating hypotheses or running tests. Some are good at one or the other. Some are good at both and just happen to pick the ones that don't work. Some are good at all.
But you can't tell ahead of time which one is which. Maybe you can shift the distribution but often your pathological cases excluded are precisely the ones you wanted to not exclude (your Karikos get Suhadolniked). So you need to have them all work. It's just an inherent property of the problem.
Like searching an unsorted n list for a number. You kind of need to test all the numbers till you find yours. The search cost is just the cost. You can't uncost it by just picking the right index. That's not a meaningful statement.
there is blog post somewhere i read, i cannot find it at the moment, that discusses the idea of "doctor problems" vs "musician problems". Doctor problems are problems where low quality solutions are deeply bad, so you should avoid them even if it involves producing fewer high quality solutions, while musician problems are ones where high quality solutions are very very worth it, so you should encourgage as many tries as possible so you get the super high quality wins. This seems a useful frame of reference, but not really the Ortega Hypothesis
it seems clear to me that the downside of society having a bad scientist is relatively low, so long as theres a gap between low quality science and politics [0], while the upside is huge.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko