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by helixc
1767 days ago
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I believe, this is how scaling works, and exactly the price we pay to afford the top-notch. In any given field, company, pro sport team, there are top 10% labs/groups/players that matters the most. However, to make the 10% emerge, there has to be a pyramid where the rest 90% is responsible for forming a stable infrastructure. Then it comes down to how well we can design the pyramid. Our result should be evaluated not by how thin we cut down the infrastructure, but how easy we make top-players emerge. On another note, I have seen small no-name labs published impactful scientific results, and then went back to stealth mode again. It's super cool. Science labs, unlike a business entity, should not be measured by recurrent revenue and growth. |
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So, usually when people say this about sturgeon's law type stuff, it's because we genuinely don't know how to determine what's crap and what's not overall. For example, if we're talking about 90% of academic papers are crap, ok, it's true, but we pay the cost because we don't apriori which 10% will be the good ones.
The issue is that in academics, we actually have a pretty good idea which programs produce the best and most impactful work. Now it doesn't seem like a cost we have to pay, but rather a conscious decision not to cut out the crap (or to keep funding the crap).
I think the ideal outcome is that the culture and resources of all programs are approximately the same, and each produces 90% crap, and 10% good stuff.