From: hanson@kronos.arc.nasa.gov (Robin Hanson)
Subject: How Can We Make Intellectuals Serve Us? (Was: Whom Do the Intellectuals Serve?)
Organization: NASA/ARC Information Sciences Division
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 22:20:27 GMT

Karl Wee writes:
>I think most "intellectuals", like everybody else, have bread-earning as
>their top priority.  That is, justifying their positions by staying busy,
>getting grants, etc.  To this end most of them engage in what they
>know to be arcane, esoteric and useless (useless in an intellectual as well as
>a practical sense) "research" that look good on paper because those few who
>understand their jargon are doing the same thing!

>Why they (at least the useless part of their work) get funded by society is 
>caused by the indirectness of intentions.  The government, institutions and
>big corporations give money because their constituents (who ultimately
>pay for all this) feel that there should be some such funding "for the
>good of the society."  The govt, institutions and corps know slightly more
>than their constituents as to what work is being done, but they also care
>less about whether the money is spent wisely.

This thread has gone in many directions, but I think it is more
interesting to ask "How Can We Make Intellectuals Serve Us?", where "us"
is the public in the case of state funding, and whomever's paying the
bill otherwise.  I think that everyone is so suspicious that
intellectuals serve someone else because our mechanisms of
accountability for intellectuals are so poor.  We also worry about who
our grocery stores serve, or who our doctors serve, but less so because
we can at least see some crude feedback mechanisms to keep them in our
service.

But you give intellectuals money and they go and play around, and give
you what - whatever they feel like?  Or you vote for legislators who
create agencies headed by administrators who hire underlings who somehow
pick people, or let them pick each other, to give money to so that they
will - what - publish something?  As someone who thinks that what
intellectuals do is very important, often worth funding even with
terrible accountability mechanisms, and thus great waste, I think its
worth looking to see if we can't find better ways of writing our
contracts with them.

One to three centuries ago science funding was based much more on
prizes, which has many virtues in terms of accountability.  It works
well for any specific achievement which you can foresee wanting to have
happen, and for which it should be straightforward to decide who "did
it".  For example, if what we want is to sequence the whole human
genome, we should just offer a price per base-pair sequenced, and see
which privately-funded competitor could do cheapest.

But often what you know you want is to eventually get an answer to a
certain question, even if you can't foresee what specific achievements
will contribute to it.  In this case, you could (if it were legal!)
subsidize a betting market on the question.  Private groups would then
do research in order to compete at predicting the answer to the question
- subsidies would go to whomever moved the market odds in the direction
of its final resting place.  (I have a paper on this general idea if
people want more info.)

Maybe there are other clever ideas out there.  But lets stop griping and
try to think of something constructive we could do.

Robin Hanson  hanson@charon.arc.nasa.gov 
415-604-3361  MS-269-2, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035
510-651-7483  47164 Male Terrace, Fremont, CA  94539-7921