The competition for attention and the evolution of science

Whenever the amount of information produced exceeds the amount of attention available to consume it, a competition for attention is born. The competition is increasingly fierce in science where the exponential growth of information has forced its producers, consumers and gatekeepers to become increasingly selective in what they attend to and what they ignore. Paradoxically, as the criteria of selection among authors, editors and readers of scientific journal articles co-evolve, they show signs of becoming increasingly unscientific. The present article suggests how the paradox can be addressed with computer simulation, and what its implications for the future of science might be

Quanty: An online game for eliciting the wisdom of the crowd

Abstract Quanty is an online game that anonymously pairs players to estimate distances, weights, sizes, frequencies and such from photographs. The degree to which players agree determines the number of points they receive. We hypothesized that this game would generate more accurate aggregated estimates than would singular estimates by exploiting the wisdom of the crowd. Ninety-six participants (50 in group 1 using the metric system, and 46 in group 2 using the non-metric system) estimated height, weight, and distance of various objects; aggregated estimates of each group were more likely to approach accurate answers than were individual estimates, especially when the aggregates were calculated using medians and median absolute deviations. Also, the majority of participants thought that the game was as fun as the popular game Te