Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.

Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and economically literate policies, and prosperity followed. Seeing this, the citizens of nearby kingdoms revolted against their leaders, and organized to join the kingdom of this great king.

While the kingdom's ability to defend itself against external threats grew with each person who joined the land, the kingdom's ability to defend itself against internal threats did not. One fateful evening, the king bit into a bologna sandwich poisoned by a rival noble. That noble quickly proceeded to behead his political enemies in the name of the dead king. The flag bearing the wise king's portrait known as "the great unifier" still flies in the fortified cities where his successor rules with an iron fist.

Once upon a time there was a great scientific mind. She developed a new theoretical framework that made large advances on the hardest scientific questions of the day. Seeing the promise of her work, new graduate students, professors, and corporate R&D teams flocked into the field, hungry to tackle new open problems and make their mark on the world. Within ten years, a vibrant new academic field had formed, with herself among its most respected members.

While the field's ability to make progress on the hard problems increased with each new researcher who joined the field, the field's ability to defend itself against the institutional incentives of the broader academic ecosystem did not. Low-quality researchers, seeing lucrative new opportunities for publication, began producing flashy results on the easier problems adjacent to her field with low attention to scientific rigor. Seeing their success, others began to join them, attracted to the social and financial rewards. Being conflict averse and not seeing it as her job to prosecute these people, a growing fraction of the field became careerists.

Twenty years later, her scientific field had become so diluted by uninteresting or irrelevant work that the great original problems remained unsolved, mired in bureaucracy, respectability politics, and academic warfare. Most of the scientists who joined early, attracted by the promise of great progress, stopped being scientists altogether and moved to industry. Almost...

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