Terence Tao: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s an question, not to maybe speak even more generally about it. When you have this pool of people, is there a way to organize the contributions by level of expertise of the people, of the contributors? Now, okay, I’m asking a lot of pothead questions here, but I’m imagining a bunch of humans, and maybe in the future, some AIs, can there be an ELO rating type of situation? Can there be an Elo-rating type of situation where a gamification of this. The beauty of these lean projects is that automatically you get all this data, so everything’s being uploaded for this GitHub. GitHub tracks who contributed what. So you could generate statistics at any later point in time. You can say, “Oh, this person contributed this many lines of code” or whatever. These are very crude metrics. I would definitely not want this to become part of your tenure review or something. But I mean, I think already in enterprise computing, people do use some of these metrics as part of the assessment of performance of an employee. Again, this is the direction which is a bit scary for academics to go down. We don’t like metrics so much. And yet academics use metrics. They just use old ones, number of papers.…

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