3 ms·

Hello again, we met in Amsterdam many years ago at a Bitcoin conference afterparty and I like your comment. I do wonder if the research could be sharded. If mos

• mike_hearn 6y ago
  Unfortunately the issues are at every level. It's an incentives problem. Nobody at any level actually needs the results to be correct, only that other people believe they are correct, where "other people" really means "politicians and wider society" not other researchers or granting bodies (they have money to dispense and don't care). This is a fundamental problem of course - how do you evaluate what's really useful and worth it? That's what markets are for, but research is an area where governments feel justified in intervening. Whereas for e.g. food production they understand they don't need to and shouldn't. My sense is that computer science is less afflicted because it's closer to industrial application, and there's a lot more movement between universities and industry. It's not worth trashing your reputation in industry by publishing obviously deceptive research because that could harm your future salary prospects, whereas if you're in a field with no commercial interest, publishing bad papers is fine because the ultimate consumers i.e. policy makers, journalists, voters, won't ever notice. They aren't reading the papers.