Suppose conventional research institutions and grant committees disappeared, while AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) had abundant funding. Could the scientists and engineers now working at CERN continue operating the Large Hadron Collider […]
When Papers Become Nearly Free to Produce, Evaluation Becomes the Bottleneck
When AI makes scientific manuscripts cheap to generate, the scarce resource becomes the capacity to determine which claims are correct, original, and useful. If submissions grow faster than reliable assessment, evaluation […]
Research Grants vs Scientific Salaries: Should We Fund Projects or People
Research grants finance defined activities; scientific salaries pay researchers for their work. The two overlap because grants often fund salaries. The important policy choice is how much a scientist’s livelihood […]
Why Markets Underfund Basic Research
Markets tend to underfund basic research because the organization paying for a discovery can capture only part of the value it creates. Benefits spread to other companies, researchers, consumers, and […]
What Blockchain Actually Solves in Science—and What It Doesn’t
Blockchain can help science maintain shared records, trace payments, and execute agreed funding rules. It cannot, by itself, establish whether research is true, determine who deserves credit, or make funding […]
Why the Scientific Paper May Be the Wrong Unit for Funding
The scientific paper may be the wrong unit for funding because the boundaries of a publication rarely match the boundaries of a scientific contribution. One paper can contain several discoveries; […]
The Science Funding Goodhart’s Law Problem: Can AIIM Preserve Fairness
Science funding faces a persistent problem: when rewards depend on an indicator of scientific value, researchers gain an incentive to improve that indicator—even when doing so adds little scientific value. […]
Scientific Dependency Graphs: Who Actually Enabled a Discovery
A scientific discovery can depend on a theorem, a dataset, an instrument, a software library, and years of maintenance by people absent from the final paper’s author list. Scientific dependency […]
Contribution vs Causation: The Hard Problem Behind Merit-Based Funding
Merit-based funding faces a fundamental problem: identifying someone’s contribution is different from establishing how much benefit that person caused. A researcher may produce a valuable theorem, dataset, or software tool […]
The Strongest Arguments Against AIIM
The strongest arguments against AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) concern whether it can measure scientific value reliably, resist manipulation, and turn fair recognition into additional research. These objections challenge the connection between […]