[mike_hearn]

> And yet, it is still the best we got for also producing highly reliable and correct information.

It's not. Markets are good at that. They're actually competitive. Academia is good at producing enormous volumes of documents that claim to be information, and may or may not be if you test them. It's "competitive" in a weird way where people don't compete over what's actually true but over who can convince central planning committees to give them money, which is very different.

[Eisenstein]

Why is 'competition' your marker for ability to 'obtain reliable and correct information'? Wouldn't cooperation be necessary along with competition? Entities that only compete with other produce no standards and share no knowledge. The market (with limitations for externalities and to prevent fraud) is good at distribution of limited resources in the most efficient way possible. Why is it being shoehorned into being the solution to production of reliable an correct information?

[mike_hearn]

They're both necessary, you're right. A more precise statement would be something like "competition between groups of cooperators".

You can't separate the production of correct information from the production of goods and services. They're inherently intertwined, the attempt to separate them is how we ended up with such a polluted scientific literature. Having formed a hypothesis as to what is true, you have to test that out in a robust way where you can't easily cheat and you can't easily cheat yourself, even when "yourself" refers to the vast institutional structures that employ you. In other words you need a system that stops you cheating even if that's what would please your boss, your vice chancellor and ultimately the President.

We only seem to have one such system and that's markets. If you cheat then the product or service you provide will be based on beliefs that are false and - eventually - customers will abandon you because the thing you're selling doesn't solve their problem. This is effectively a referendum of the customers. There is no such feedback loop in academia. There are attempts to approximate or emulate it with things like peer review, but they're all shadows of the real thing.

Meanwhile you can encourage cooperation even between competing entities in lots of ways, and it often emerges naturally even in the absence of any specific social policy. Open source collaboration is one obvious example in the tech sector, patents are a more formalized system.