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I wonder whether the best way to go about these massive software projects is actually completely different to hiring some business on a massive budget. It migh

I wonder whether the best way to go about these massive software projects is actually completely different to hiring some business on a massive budget. It might be an interesting idea to instead take your massive budget, divide it into 10 pieces, and hire 10 independent teams to implement it. Just pick out of whichever ones are actually finished on time.

nxpnsv 3y ago
Smart, but will it still work if one of the teams fail? And if you control for interdependencies, are the still independent teams?
- lordnacho 3y ago
  That's what I mean, you literally hire 10 different teams and tell them "hey make me a health insurance matching website".
  - nxpnsv 3y ago
    Incredibly wasteful, but probably less wasteful than what they already are doing :D
    - philipov 3y ago
      Waste is entirely a matter of perspective. Calling it waste implies there's a practical solution that's better, when it may be completely unreasonable to posit such a hypothetical. This approach is essentially an evolutionary strategy, and I would think twice about accusing nature of waste.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
IIRC LHC has two separate experiments doing largely equivalent physics, complete with separate teams, buildings and instruments, precisely as a cost-saving measure. (They tried axing one of them at some point, and the budget for the other very quickly increased twofold and then some more. Of course cross-checking is also a concern, now that the US can’t build accelerators anymore.) On the other hand, I don’t see how you could pull this off in an adversarial environment incentive-wise. If everybody gets paid, a winning strategy during the contract is to not really try; if only the winner gets paid, a winning strategy when choosing the contract is to avoid everything that looks even slightly risky. Supposedly there’s a whole not-a-Nobel-prize-winning theory of auctions—I wonder if it has something to say here.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  > If everybody gets paid, a winning strategy during the contract is to not really try; if only the winner gets paid, You pay everyone to participate and you give a bonus to the winner. People who don't make a reasonable effort won't get selected to participate next time.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    This reminds me of the argument for allocating research funds using prizes more so than grants, which I have found quite compelling.
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      What argument is this? Can you explain more?
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Phew, I found some breadcrumbs on this, I was afraid it was lost in the ether of stuff I've read and thought "huh, that's interesting and compelling" and then forgot the source of. So here's an article[0] Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox in 2014 about prizes to incentivize pharmaceutical research, rather than patents. I don't think this is where I first read about this (because I wasn't reading Vox in 2014), but I think either he or Ezra Klein talking about it on a podcast may be where I first came across it. Here's the summary of the idea from there: > A large cash prize creates an incentive to innovate just as much as a patent does, but offers several important advantages. It's very possible that this is really only relevant to scientific endeavors that pop out patents, rather than anything that is currently grant-funded. But I generally like this idea of big incentives to find an answer to something, rather than micro-managing the funding allocated to different proposed avenues of research toward an answer. I hate that all the PIs I know spend over half their time writing proposals, when they could just be researching. Here are a couple deeper links to economists writing about it (from that article)[1][2]. [0]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5788630/4-radical-ideas-for-promoting-more-affordable-health-care https://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5788630/4-radical-ideas-for-pro... [1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/medical-patents-must-die.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/me... [2]: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-patents https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-pat...

nxpnsv 3y ago

Smart, but will it still work if one of the teams fail? And if you control for interdependencies, are the still independent teams?

lordnacho 3y ago
That's what I mean, you literally hire 10 different teams and tell them "hey make me a health insurance matching website".
- nxpnsv 3y ago
  Incredibly wasteful, but probably less wasteful than what they already are doing :D
  - philipov 3y ago
    Waste is entirely a matter of perspective. Calling it waste implies there's a practical solution that's better, when it may be completely unreasonable to posit such a hypothetical. This approach is essentially an evolutionary strategy, and I would think twice about accusing nature of waste.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

IIRC LHC has two separate experiments doing largely equivalent physics, complete with separate teams, buildings and instruments, precisely as a cost-saving measure. (They tried axing one of them at some point, and the budget for the other very quickly increased twofold and then some more. Of course cross-checking is also a concern, now that the US can’t build accelerators anymore.) On the other hand, I don’t see how you could pull this off in an adversarial environment incentive-wise. If everybody gets paid, a winning strategy during the contract is to not really try; if only the winner gets paid, a winning strategy when choosing the contract is to avoid everything that looks even slightly risky. Supposedly there’s a whole not-a-Nobel-prize-winning theory of auctions—I wonder if it has something to say here.

lordnacho 3y ago
> If everybody gets paid, a winning strategy during the contract is to not really try; if only the winner gets paid, You pay everyone to participate and you give a bonus to the winner. People who don't make a reasonable effort won't get selected to participate next time.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This reminds me of the argument for allocating research funds using prizes more so than grants, which I have found quite compelling.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    What argument is this? Can you explain more?
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Phew, I found some breadcrumbs on this, I was afraid it was lost in the ether of stuff I've read and thought "huh, that's interesting and compelling" and then forgot the source of. So here's an article[0] Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox in 2014 about prizes to incentivize pharmaceutical research, rather than patents. I don't think this is where I first read about this (because I wasn't reading Vox in 2014), but I think either he or Ezra Klein talking about it on a podcast may be where I first came across it. Here's the summary of the idea from there: > A large cash prize creates an incentive to innovate just as much as a patent does, but offers several important advantages. It's very possible that this is really only relevant to scientific endeavors that pop out patents, rather than anything that is currently grant-funded. But I generally like this idea of big incentives to find an answer to something, rather than micro-managing the funding allocated to different proposed avenues of research toward an answer. I hate that all the PIs I know spend over half their time writing proposals, when they could just be researching. Here are a couple deeper links to economists writing about it (from that article)[1][2]. [0]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5788630/4-radical-ideas-for-promoting-more-affordable-health-care https://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5788630/4-radical-ideas-for-pro... [1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/medical-patents-must-die.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/me... [2]: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-patents https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-pat...