Let’s say that my agenda is “I am studying the Principal-Agent problem and contracts, because I want to address the issues caused by misaligned incentives between humans”.
And suppose I come up with an idea for how to set up contracts better—I prove a theorem which says that if a contract looks such and so, the Nash equilibrium is Pareto-improving over whatever was the baseline. (Or I make some other contribution to the general topic.)
But how do I know whether this contribution actually helps? Should I, like, try to implement something based on it, see if it catches on, and measure how much it helps? As stated, I don’t have any easy-to-use feedback loop for checking any of this. I might derive the perfect solution on paper, only to later learn that the key problem was somewhere else.
But suppose I instead had the following list of things that my agenda is meant to help with[1]: (1) I sometimes hire cleaners, but they never do the hard-to-reach parts of my apartment. (2) My sister sometimes borrows my car, but she never fills up the gas afterwards. (3) I want a higher salary at my academic job. (4) I have a company, and I want to hire a contractor to would handle marketing on my behalf.
Then this list would give me a way to get quick & intuitive feedback on whether my proposed solution will work. For example, I would immediately see that my contract idea is an overkill for (1-2), it won’t work for (3) because the university contracts are set in stone and I don’t have leverage to change them, and maybe it might work for (4).
(And I am suggesting we need something like this for SPIs.)
Hm. I will try an exaggerated non-SPI example:
Let’s say that my agenda is “I am studying the Principal-Agent problem and contracts, because I want to address the issues caused by misaligned incentives between humans”.
And suppose I come up with an idea for how to set up contracts better—I prove a theorem which says that if a contract looks such and so, the Nash equilibrium is Pareto-improving over whatever was the baseline. (Or I make some other contribution to the general topic.)
But how do I know whether this contribution actually helps? Should I, like, try to implement something based on it, see if it catches on, and measure how much it helps? As stated, I don’t have any easy-to-use feedback loop for checking any of this. I might derive the perfect solution on paper, only to later learn that the key problem was somewhere else.
But suppose I instead had the following list of things that my agenda is meant to help with [1] : (1) I sometimes hire cleaners, but they never do the hard-to-reach parts of my apartment. (2) My sister sometimes borrows my car, but she never fills up the gas afterwards. (3) I want a higher salary at my academic job. (4) I have a company, and I want to hire a contractor to would handle marketing on my behalf.
Then this list would give me a way to get quick & intuitive feedback on whether my proposed solution will work. For example, I would immediately see that my contract idea is an overkill for (1-2), it won’t work for (3) because the university contracts are set in stone and I don’t have leverage to change them, and maybe it might work for (4).
(And I am suggesting we need something like this for SPIs.)
For the record, all of these are made up.