CONCEPT
The Economy of Research
Peirce's theory of the rational allocation of investigative resources — the principle that not all questions are equally worth investigating, and that rational inquiry requires judgment about where to direct scarce effort.
Peirce developed the economy of research in the 1870s as a practical contribution to the philosophy of inquiry. The central insight is that the rational inquirer maximizes the ratio of expected importance to expected cost, investing most heavily in lines of inquiry where the potential return is high and the investment required is manageable. The theory depends on three variables: the importance of the question, the probability of success, and the cost of investigation. Each variable has been transformed by AI — costs have dropped, success probabilities have shifted, and the importance calculus has been scrambled by the machine's capacity to make previously inaccessible questions tractable. The result is not a simpler allocation problem but a more difficult one, demanding new cognitive capacities the Peirce volume calls architectonic judgment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
AI has dramatically reduced the cost of many investigative operations. Literature review, data analysis, hypothesis generation, preliminary modeling — all have