I’ll try to paraphrase you (as well as extrapolating a bit) to see if I get what you’re saying:
Say you want some research done. The most straightforward way to do so is to just hire a researcher. This “freeform” approach affords a lot of flexibility in how you delegate, evaluate, communicate, reward and aggregate the research. You can build up subtle, shared intuitions with your researchers, and invest a lot of effort in your ability to communicate nuanced and difficult instructions. You can also pick highly independent researchers who are able to make many decisions for themselves in terms of what to research, and how to research it.
By using “amplification” schemes and other mechanisms, you’re placing significant restrictions on your ability to do all of those things. Hence you better get some great returns to compensate.
But looking through various ways you might get these benefits, they all seem at best… fine.
Hence the worry is that despite all the bells-and-whistles, there’s actually no magic happening. This is just like hiring a researcher, but a bit worse. This is only “amplification” in a trivial sense.
As a corollary, if your research needs seem to be met by a handful in-house researchers, this method wouldn’t be very helpful to you.
In particular, I didn’t feel like your comment engaged with A) the scalability of the approach, compared to the freeform approach, and B) that it might be used as a “game” for young researchers to build skills and reputation, which seems way harder to do with the freeform approach.
I’ll try to paraphrase you (as well as extrapolating a bit) to see if I get what you’re saying:
1) Does this capture your views?
2) I’m curious what you think of the sections: “Mitigating capacity bottlenecks” and “A way for intellectual talent to build and demonstrate their skills”?
In particular, I didn’t feel like your comment engaged with A) the scalability of the approach, compared to the freeform approach, and B) that it might be used as a “game” for young researchers to build skills and reputation, which seems way harder to do with the freeform approach.