[vkou]

You'll still need to convince the purseholders to pay you, and they'll want some objective metric to measure your output, and whatever metric they pick will be gamed.

[DANmode]

The point of my comment was,

in much earlier institutions of knowledge and excellence,

the only transparent metric was whether or not they approved you.

[vkou]

That ossifies intellectual monocultures, though. (Or, heaven forbid, if someone has a financial conflict of interest in the private sphere...)

[DANmode]

The current solution doesn’t resist capture by capital either,

and indeed we’re already left with all of the things claimed - the worst of both worlds, really.

[fc417fc802]

But this is already how the purse holders operate. A big group of experts get together and vote on which grant proposals within a given category to fund.

I think it comes down to how the system is structured and how many players there are. The more difficult it is for a small cult to capture control of the funding (or access to instrumentation or awarding of degrees or whatever) for a given area the less likely you are to end up with a monoculture.

Assuming the majority of the funding continues to come from governments then you have a centralized point of leverage that can shape the system. So it should be possible to impose constraints that result in a system that actively prevents monocultures from developing.