Very interesting idea and historical context. I'm so stuck in the current paradigm that my immediate reaction was "how would we measure citations, contributions, authority"? With continued thought, it doesn't actually seem so challenging and/or different from what we are currently doing. The challenge (as pointed out) is to get people to engage more openly with half-baked ideas as opposed to complete stories. The era of social media shows that people have strong desires to curate an image.
I imagine it has to be differentiated from just an idea that could be posted on social media. I imagine "half-baked" ideas would be the equivalent of a hot take but with some evidence to back it up. Maybe similar to what a letter could have been. You wouldn't go through the trouble of sending a letter unless there was some meat to what you were sending. Like a one page (or less) idea with a preliminary result showing promise (or not) of an idea. I'm thinking something more substantial than back of the envelop but not more than someone could do in their spare time in a week.
I love this! And I would volunteer myself for helping to evaluate and solve specific engineering challenges (half-baked ideas) that others might face with their efforts. I have spent a life time trying to learn how to evaluate the intrinsic value of disruptive new ideas - the net present value including scaling and adoption, competitive landscape, qualitative and public good benefits, etc. It is highly reductionist and neural network-esk. A resent new barrier is that a new technology has to get to market scale and payback before AI super intelligence, whatever and whenever that is, disrupts it. This might only be a few years away in some cases and is filtering out a lot of technologies and scaling methodologies. This is greatly accelerating timelines for everything, time from idea to market scale now needs to be a few years, not a few decades. So yes, we need to greatly accelerate science...
Very interesting idea and historical context. I'm so stuck in the current paradigm that my immediate reaction was "how would we measure citations, contributions, authority"? With continued thought, it doesn't actually seem so challenging and/or different from what we are currently doing. The challenge (as pointed out) is to get people to engage more openly with half-baked ideas as opposed to complete stories. The era of social media shows that people have strong desires to curate an image.
Social media also showed that people engage intensively with hot takes. Is there room for an equivalent in science?
I imagine it has to be differentiated from just an idea that could be posted on social media. I imagine "half-baked" ideas would be the equivalent of a hot take but with some evidence to back it up. Maybe similar to what a letter could have been. You wouldn't go through the trouble of sending a letter unless there was some meat to what you were sending. Like a one page (or less) idea with a preliminary result showing promise (or not) of an idea. I'm thinking something more substantial than back of the envelop but not more than someone could do in their spare time in a week.
I love this! And I would volunteer myself for helping to evaluate and solve specific engineering challenges (half-baked ideas) that others might face with their efforts. I have spent a life time trying to learn how to evaluate the intrinsic value of disruptive new ideas - the net present value including scaling and adoption, competitive landscape, qualitative and public good benefits, etc. It is highly reductionist and neural network-esk. A resent new barrier is that a new technology has to get to market scale and payback before AI super intelligence, whatever and whenever that is, disrupts it. This might only be a few years away in some cases and is filtering out a lot of technologies and scaling methodologies. This is greatly accelerating timelines for everything, time from idea to market scale now needs to be a few years, not a few decades. So yes, we need to greatly accelerate science...