[FRIAM] academia as a market of ideas

[jon zingale]

So, yeah, I think I agree with Glen that there is something amiss about
claiming a *market of ideas*, but I am unconvinced that the notion misses
completely. There is something like *instantaneous arbitrage* that happens
across the space of ideas, a Laplacian that acts across disciplines,
smoothing out and diffusing the wrinkles, and minimizing the collection
of all technics that reside within the class that we might call the *state
of the art*.

As an example of itself, consider the conceptual technologies employed
by this paper on arbitrage[⊽]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03264. Ideas
that originally found purchase in physical theory are lifted to speak
about spaces most generally before finding new ground (and new
interpretation) in a theory of differential value. The *state of the art* in
physics meets the same in economics[Δ]. Arguably, tourism is to blame.

On the other hand, while there is something unignorable to say about
which ideas are valued more or less highly by academics, and most
importantly, by the editors of journals[Æ], I feel that this pigeonhole
leads the analogy astray. Instead, imagining that ideas once found are
*free to all* and that the behavior with regards *low hanging fruit* is
the interesting part of the analogy, an economy of ideas might be one
where once differences can be exploited in one place they quickly find
value throughout a network of resemblances.

It is around this *state of the art* class of technics that one can
imagine the space of ideas to be organized, that is, problems in one
field are near problems in another if a need for the same or similar
technics applies to both. Advances, then, in one produce a difference
to exploit between the two. While this isn't 'price' explicitly, the
space of ideas is haunted by something akin. Is it fair to say that
there exists a kind of proto-economy around the world of ideas?

[⊽] FWIW, I am tickled pink by constructions like, "...whose curvature
measures...the 'instantaneous arbitrage capability' generated by the
market itself. The cashflow bundle is the vector bundle associated to
this stochastic principal fibre bundle for the natural choice of the
vector space fibre".

[Δ] As a third example, this afternoon I was thinking about an almost
identical construction for reasoning about identity tracing in a world
with time travel. Loosely, I am imagining that the simplexes formed by
traveling to the past and waiting again for the present produces a
difference in an 'individual that remains' not unlike curvature.

[Æ] Let me not leave out the repositories of privatized knowledge that
aim to simulate economic notions like scarcity, supply-and-demand,
and the rest.



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