Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge - by Maxwell Tabarrok
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.
