Comment by pwlm
What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like?
How would an online world that is optimized for humans, not algorithms, look like?
Should content creators get paid?
What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like?
How would an online world that is optimized for humans, not algorithms, look like?
Should content creators get paid?
> Should content creators get paid?
Everybody "creates content" (like me when I take a picture of beautiful sunset).
There is no such thing as "quality". There is quality for me and quality for you. That is part of the problem, we can't just relate to some external, predefined scale. We (the sum of people) are the approximate, chaotic, inefficient scale.
Be my guest to propose a "perfect system", but - just in case there is no such system - we should make sure each of us "rewards" what we find of quality (being people or content creators), and hope it will prevail. Seemed to have worked so far.
Crazily, I think the easiest way is to remove any and all incentives, awards, finite funding, and allegedly merit-based positions. Allow anyone who wants to research to research. Natural recognition of peers seems to be the only way to my thinking. Of course this relies on a post-scarcity society so short of actually achieving communism we'll likely never see it happen.
You don't need postscarcity to do that. I was born in communist Czechoslovakia (my father was an academic). Government allocated jobs for academics and researchers, and they pretty much had tenure. So you could coast by being unproductive, or get by using your connections to the party members (the real currency in CSSR).
After 1989, most academics complained the system is not merit-based and practical (applied) enough. So we changed it to grants and publications metrics (modeled after the West). For a while, it worked.. until people found too much overbearing bureaucracy and some learned how to game the system again.
I would say, both systems have failure modes of a similar magnitude, although the first one is probably less hoops and less stress on each individual. (During communism, academia - if you could get there, especially technical sciences - was an oasis of freedom.)
> What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like?
Hiring and tenure review based on a candidate’s selected 5 best papers.
Already standard practice at a few enlightened places, I think. (of course this also probably increases the review workload for top venues)
To a lesser extent, bean-counting metrics like citations and h-index are an attempt to quantify non-volume-based metrics. (for non-academics, h-index is the largest N such that your N-th most cited paper has >= N citations)
Note that most approaches like this have evolved to counter “salami-slicing”, where you divide your work into “minimum publishable units”. LLMs are a different threat - from my selfish point of view, one of the biggest risks is that it takes less time to write a bogus paper with an LLM than it does for a single reviewer to review it. That threatens to upend the entire peer reviewing process.