The problem, viewed from a empirical point of view is the throttling down of the number of experiments resulting from the hypotheses. And this suggests that the problem has little or nothing to do with ‘voting systems’ however constructed, but rather with the underlying economics of the grant funding of this adventure that limits the number of syntheses to eight per lab round.
It just seems that experiment, writ large, might have a larger failure rate, precluded perhaps in this case by economics, than the results thus far derived. So I guess I’d say if you had limited dough, don’t change a thing, but also be wary when making claims about the value of crowd sourcing. As much as we love to participate.
If I had to choose between your suggestion and the status quo, I would choose yours. I’m not saying yours is the ultimate solution. I’m saying the status quo is VERY bad. But you can’t make EteRNA feel like a part-time, unpaid job. People will lose interest if you do. Maybe EteRNA needs to get a sociology or psychology major on the staff to regain the bleeding edge. The chat number seems to be declining again. I use that number, along with membership, to monitor the interest level.
If I had to choose between your suggestion and the status quo, I would choose yours. I’m not saying yours is the ultimate solution. I’m saying the status quo is VERY bad. But you can’t make EteRNA feel like a part-time, unpaid job. People will lose interest if you do. Maybe EteRNA needs to get a sociology or psychology major on the staff to regain the bleeding edge. The chat number seems to be declining again. I use that number, along with membership, to monitor the interest level.
I think the voting system should be conducted the same way with people voting on there favorite designs with some changes to the voting screen. For the current round have the Designer, Title, and Votes fields empty so voters can’t pick designs based on a popularity contest. Also, if a player lists his or her name in the Description field the design is no longer allowed to be synthesized. Once the voting is complete then those fields can be displayed for further analysis by the other players.
To me it’s non-sense to make the decision based on voting. Since this is science (not politics), the decision has to be made by some algorithm.
What should be the criteria?
First question that has to be asked is whether all the candidates have the same chance to succeed. If yes - random pick, maybe with addition of member ELO in the context.
Member ELO should be updated after some of his sample has passed the lab test and got some scoring.
If there are some relevant data that could be taken into consideration, they should be applied in the selection algortihm as well. For example, if it is known that lower energy means more chances to have a stable RNA at the end, that should be accounted in the algorithm.
Make the algorithm transparent, allocate like 50% to randomisation and 50% to some clear criteria and go with it.
The main thing I don’t understand about the whole voting thing is the 3 round process, that doesn’t wait to take into account the results of the previous round/s before proceeding with the next. There are so many designs now, do we really need 9 from everyone with no real reason to change from the beginning ones? Maybe we need to go with fewer designs each, like one each, or let higher point scores or previous lab success buy more designs, maybe. Right now, many of the designs for the current lab look pretty similar to the ones from before. If we had fewer designs each, would we work harder on individual ones? As a newbie who has little chance of actually getting anything synthesized, is it worth it to spend a lot of time and thought on a design, since I get the ‘thanks for coming’ points for any design? Is it worth it to spend a lot of time trying to figure out if some obscure design looks better than one with a lot of votes, since as far as I can tell I can only get extra voting points for something that gets synthesized? I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about the labs as they are now. I came in at the end of Sept and things were going along very quickly and I thought this was how the labs always went. The way they are now is pretty boring.
