Exploring Nerd Sniping, Public Goods Provision, and Long-Term Research Funding

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge, published by Maxwell Tabarrok on March 30, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
The
Vesuvius Challenge is a million+ dollar contest to read 2,000 year old text from charcoal-papyri using particle accelerators and machine learning. The scrolls come from the ancient villa town of Herculaneum, nearby Pompeii, which was similarly buried and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The prize fund comes from tech entrepreneurs and investors
Nat Friedman,
Daniel Gross, and several other donors.
In the 9 months after the prize was announced, thousands of researchers and students worked on the problem, decades-long technical challenges were solved, and the amount of recovered text increased from one or two splotchy characters to 15 columns of clear text with more than 2000 characters.
The success of the Vesuvius Challenge validates the motivating insight of metascience: It's not about how much we spend, it's about how we spend it.
Most debate over science funding concerns a topline dollar amount. Should we
double the budget of the NIH? Do we spend too much on
Alzheimer's and too little on
mRNA? Are we winning the
R&D spending race with China? All of these questions implicitly assume a constant exchange rate between spending on science and scientific progress.
The Vesuvius Challenge is an illustration of exactly the opposite. The prize pool for this challenge was a little more than a million dollars. Nat Friedman and friends probably spent more on top of that hiring organizers, building the website etc. But still this is pretty small in the context academic grants. A million dollars donated to the NSF or NIH would have been forgotten if it was noticed at all. Even a direct grant to
Brent Seales, the computer science professor whose research laid the ground work for reading the scrolls, probably wouldn't have induced a tenth as much progress as the prize pool did, at least not within 9 months.
It would have been easy to spend ten times as much on this problem and get ten times less progress out the other end. The money invested in this research was of course necessary but the spending was not sufficient, it needed to be paired with the right mechanism to work.
The success of the challenge hinged on design choices at a level of detail beyond just a grants vs prizes dichotomy. Collaboration between contestants was essential for the development of the prize-winning software. The
discord server for the challenge was (and is) full of open-sourced tools and discoveries that helped everyone get closer to reading the scrolls. A single, large grand prize is enticing but it's also exclusive. Only one submission can win so the competition becomes more zero-sum and keeping secrets is more rewarding. Even if this larger prize had the same expected value to each contestant, it would not have created as much progress because more research would be duplicated as less is shared.
Nat Friedman and friends addressed this problem by creating several smaller progress prizes to reward open-source solutions to specific problems along the path to reading the scrolls or just open ended prize pools for useful community contributions. They also added second-place and runner-up prizes. These prizes funded the creation of data labeling tools that everyone used to train their models and visualizations that helped everyone understand the structure of the scrolls.
They also helped fund the contestant's time and money investments in their submissions.
Luke Farritor, one of the grand prize winners, used winnings from the First Letters prize to buy the computers that trained his prize winning model. A larger grand prize can theoretically provide the same incentive, but it's a lot harder to buy computers with expected value!
Nat and his team also decided to completely swit...