I am very uncomfortable with anyone paying people to vote, let alone in a particular way.
I am very uncomfortable with any random crowd determining what is 'worthy' science and what is not. Worthiness is purely subjective and a useless criteria.
We need some very clearly delineated guidelines agreed in advance by the community about what can and cannot be whitelisted and why. The criteria need to be objective enough that > 90% of cases require no debate and only a few corner cases need to be voted upon.
Shall we tie moo-wrapper to a chair and throw it into the water? If it sinks and moo drowns, we'll know it was innocent. If it floats, we know moo is a witch and we can burn it instead. This practice has worked in the past, so I'm confident it will work in this case too.
By my personal criteria, moo should be delisted, but not via a witch hunt. I am happy for there to be inefficiencies in our whitelist while we have inefficiencies in our processes.
Here are my criteria:
- the project produces output that is useful input to a scientific, historical or cultural process;
- riddle solving projects must contribute to progressing hard math fields of inquiry or serve some historical/cultural research purpose, e.g. enigma
- unless a project is commercially sponsored, i.e. paid for crunching, all whitelisted projects must be non-commercial and/or pure research
Hear, hear !!
"SCIENTIA HUMANA LIBERTAS"
Courtesy of @joshoeah