2017-06-05

buying and selling correct information

Well of course Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) had lots of comments on the paper, so Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) and I spent the day working on them. So close now!

I had lunch with Bruce Knuteson (Kn-X). We talked about many things but including the knowledge exchange that Kn-X runs: The idea is to make it possible to buy and sell correct information, even from untrusted or anonymous sources. The idea is that the purchase only goes through if the information turns out to be true (or true-equivalent, like useful). It has lots of implications for news, but also for science, in principle. He asked me how we get knowledge from others in astronomy? My answer: Twitter (tm)!

Late in the day, Dan Foreman-Mackey (UW) and I had a long discussion about many topics, but especially possible events or workshops we might run next academic year at the Flatiron Institute. One is about likelihood-free or ABC or implicit inference. Many people in CCA and CCB are interested in these subjects, and Foreman-Mackey is thinking about expanding in this direction. Another is about extreme-precision radial velocity measurements, where models of confusing stellar motions and better methods in the pipelines might both have big impacts. Another is about photometry methods for the TESS satellite, which launches next year. We also discussed the issue that it is important, when we organize any workshop, to make it possible to discover all the talent out there that we don't already know about: That talent we don't know about will increase workshop diversity, and increase the amount we ourselves learn.

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