I like the idea, but I am pessimistic. The more experienced I get (aka getting older), the more I see administrative bloating as the cancer of institutions---a somewhat equally inescapable fate. Installing a safety reporting administration may do what it set out to do, initially. But at some point, promotions may be handed out to those with most reports, perhaps perverting the initial intent.
In another thread I read that the EASA and FAA used to send Airbus/EASA engineers to Boeing (and maybe vice versa) who could raise all sorts of hell if mistakes were found. Such a setup seems perhaps harder to "game". I do not know this for a fact, I recall it from reading another debate, so take it as hearsay.
The abstract indicates that there was no control group without treatment, but two groups given two different mushroom combos. As such, the "baseline" clearance is not revealed by this work.
I noticed the same thing, FWIW (and I believe it's a valid concern), but section II.B. says "One control group (20 patients) received LS (Laetiporus sulphureus) (400 mg/d; two capsules) for 2 months."
I think they were concerned that various tree bark needed to grow the fungus could itself influence the outcome and wanted to "control" for any effects of the bark. Part IV says "LS grown on the same barks as TV or GL was chosen as a control since no anti-HPV property has yet been reported with this mycelium and because the influence of barks should be excluded."
Perhaps there are more studies out there with different "controls" that would add to this research to help rule out any influence from unknown properties of Laetiporus sulphureus.
As others have said, the usage of similar words is no convincing evidence for homogenized ideas. I would like to add that the publication referred to in the article notes that there are many more proposals now than there were in the past.
This can naturally lead to lower average "distances" between proposals. In a simplistic example, lets assume 100 proposals existed in the "good old times" and they were different at random. Let's further assume in the "bad new days" people use those old ideas, change/improve upon them just slightly ("add noise"), but some old ideas are less often picked up than others. Say for example the least attractive old proposal is picked up twice, whereas the most attractive old idea is picked up and changed in 100 new proposals. Then, there is a lower average distance between proposals, all the while the total range of ideas has increased.
Because it's Friday and I am waiting for my oven to finish cooking my food, I wrote a small simulation. It's probably full of mistakes and I may have made terrible mistakes in my assumptions, but I thought it's fun:
It's interesting how your histogram and candle chart shows that, while the mean has shifted, there's a sliver of samples with greater cosine distance than anything previously recorded in the dataset. So I guess while the system has become more inclusive of boilerplate language, it's also become more inclusive of far-out novelties. I'd be interested in reading those abstracts.
>As others have said, the usage of similar words is no convincing evidence for homogenized ideas
I disagree. Words are used to convey ideas, so if the space of words is shrinking, one should assume that the space of ideas is shrinking. It's possible for this not to be the case, but if word-space is shrinking then the burden of proof should be on those who claim that idea-space is not shrinking.
Maybe we could use embeddings / nlp analysis to determine whether idea-space is shrinking. Or just get a bunch of people to read abstracts from different time-periods and rate how similar they are to one another in their semantic content.
Words are like letters making up ideas, not ideas themselves. Having more than 26 letters wouldn't make us more expressive, and having fewer (like many extant languages)... wouldn't make us any less.
I think that's possible, but in your model, the lower average distance has indeed decreased. Yeah, the total range (or maybe the convex hull of the idea space) is bigger, but it's not obvious that the range is what we should think about. If the top 100 proposals are small variations on the "most attractive" old idea, then a lot hangs on whether that idea is really good or not - which in turn suggests that the proposals are probably not providing enough diversity.
Yes, that was indeed the point I was trying to convey! In an even sillier example, assume word vectors X, then calculate "proposal by proposal" similarities (i.e. inverse distances). Then duplicated X and concatenate [X,X], recalculate "proposal by proposal" distances (now for twice as many proposals)---those distances must now be less on average because each proposal has at least one "zero distance" neighbor. HOWEVER, why would you assert that the overall "idea space" has been reduced?
Here's one metric by which, in your first model, the overall idea space has been reduced: the distribution of models has become more concentrated. That's because 100 proposals are tiny variations around 1 basic one. The same holds in your second model: with word vectors X, if I pick (say) two ideas to fund at random, they will never be the same idea, while with (X, X), that will sometimes happen.
They, in poor form, report the "average" without explicitly specifying if they are referring to the mean or the median. Your perception would be shared by the majority of people if it's the mean they are presenting (which is most likely the case) because of the extreme income distribution. Overall, I am not a fan of the data presentation here.
Indeed. Yet, this graph shows the distribution of averages. See the x-axis. I didn't want to be so blunt, but due to its shoddy presentation, I cannot trust what this page is showing.
Why even ask for a grant proposal? Require some evidence that the applicant is serious, and then let luck decide. You might be suggesting this already (but your last sentence read to me as if you're thinking of vetting proposals). Obviously not all funding should be allocated like this, but maybe a small fraction. Perhaps only to those without any grant support at the time. I think it could be a good hedging strategy for society.
