I'm really, really happy you're going forward with this!
That said, I have just one question to this experiment - how it's going to handle media exposure?
What I worry about is that the interaction with the greater world through mass media will blow the entire thing up and make it useless. I expect at least:
- prices going up for rent and some stuff in areas where owners know population is on BI
- people getting increasingly targeted by scams
- deliberate attempts to mess up with the experiment
Come to think of it, the first two could be solved by random enough sampling of candidates over a large enough population. But I'm sure others here could come up with several other potential failure modes that the huge attention and "uncommonness" of the situation could bring.
Part of me thinks that such experiments should be done in secrecy and revealed only after they're finished, but that's not how science is usually done, for obvious reasons.
This. So much this. Very few people seem to understand that rent is based on what the location gives you access to. Thus, most well-intentioned schemes to help the poor end up not working.
It is possible to avoid these traps, but only by first understanding how rents are set.
That said, I have just one question to this experiment - how it's going to handle media exposure?
What I worry about is that the interaction with the greater world through mass media will blow the entire thing up and make it useless. I expect at least:
- prices going up for rent and some stuff in areas where owners know population is on BI
- people getting increasingly targeted by scams
- deliberate attempts to mess up with the experiment
Come to think of it, the first two could be solved by random enough sampling of candidates over a large enough population. But I'm sure others here could come up with several other potential failure modes that the huge attention and "uncommonness" of the situation could bring.
Part of me thinks that such experiments should be done in secrecy and revealed only after they're finished, but that's not how science is usually done, for obvious reasons.