[sharklazer]

This required grant money to study? I’m not sure what the payoff is here. Or maybe it was simply that... a payoff.

If the article is going to claim that social networks have a huge influence on the mechanics of the game of naming, they should at least seek to explain how. All I got from the text was “We tried it and it just worked”.

[jarenmf]

This offer a more elaborate analysis in the original paper [1] which seems much more interesting than the article. And BTW, they mention they did not receive any funding :)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13385

[sharklazer]

Fair enough. I made an assumption, most stuff gets funded by grants directly or indirectly.

On the paper note. Thanks for the link, couldn’t seem to find it... I was genuinely curious about how network theory changed the results, more than “made them better”

[imgabe]

Not all research is going to pay off and it’s never going to be obvious ahead of time which research will lead to important discoveries.

I think if you’re funding research correctly you should be giving grant money to things that end up being a silly waste of time in retrospect.

Not that this was, necessarily, but in general giving grants to research that ends up being useless shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. It’s part of the cost of searching for new knowledge. Sometimes you’ll go down a dead end, but you still have to check there.

[WalterBright]

Feel free to donate your money to frivolous research.

[imgabe]

I will!

[WalterBright]

Good! Since I also do frivolous research, I'll be expecting a check from you at any moment!

[imgabe]

Send me your research proposal. I have to make sure you're not trying to cure cancer or anything that isn't sufficiently frivolous.

[WalterBright]

My proposal intends to answer the burning question: "do people like ice cream?" Send money now!

[pmdulaney]

Upvote for humor!