[FRIAM] academia as a market of ideas

[Steve Smith]

I contend that such a market (any market really, but this one more
acutely I think) must have room for a rich commons to be healthy.

From:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/commons-beyond-market-vs-state-dilemma/

    /The commons try to situate themselves outside the subject-object
    reductionism that would lead to their commodification. The commons
    cannot be commodified (because they cannot be transferred, or
    alienated), and they cannot be the object of individualised
    possession. And so they express a qualitative logic, not a
    quantitative one. We do not ‘have’ a common good, we ‘form part of’
    the common good, in that we form part of an ecosystem, of a system
    of relations in an urban or rural environment; the subject is part
    of the object. Common goods are inseparably united, and they unite
    people as well as communities and the ecosystem itself.
    /

Perhaps the biggest flaw in this formulation we are flirting with here
is that of "ideas as property"?

> 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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>
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