I suspect being good at finding better scientists is very close to having a complete theory of scientific advancement and being able to automate the research itself.
The extreme form of that idea is If we could evaluate the quality of scientists, then we could fully computerize research. Since we cannot fully computerize research, we therefore have no ability to evaluate the quality of scientists.
The most valuable thing to do would be to observe what’s going on right now, and the possibilities we haven’t tried (or have abandoned). Insofar as we have credence in the “we know nothing” hypothesis, we should blindly dump money on random scientists. Our credence should never be zero, so this implies that some nonzero amount of random money-dumping is optimal.
I think this is true if you’re looking for near-perfect scientists but if you’re assessing current science to decide who to invest in there are lots of things you can do to get better at performing such assessments (e.g. here).
I suspect being good at finding better scientists is very close to having a complete theory of scientific advancement and being able to automate the research itself.
The extreme form of that idea is If we could evaluate the quality of scientists, then we could fully computerize research. Since we cannot fully computerize research, we therefore have no ability to evaluate the quality of scientists.
The most valuable thing to do would be to observe what’s going on right now, and the possibilities we haven’t tried (or have abandoned). Insofar as we have credence in the “we know nothing” hypothesis, we should blindly dump money on random scientists. Our credence should never be zero, so this implies that some nonzero amount of random money-dumping is optimal.
I think this is true if you’re looking for near-perfect scientists but if you’re assessing current science to decide who to invest in there are lots of things you can do to get better at performing such assessments (e.g. here).