Michael Nielsen – Reinventing Discovery (2011)
Een makkelijk leesbaar boek waarin de auteur uitlegt hoe de wetenschap baat zou kunnen en moeten hebben van de nieuwe mogelijkheden tot samenwerking. Maar ruim 10 jaar later lijkt er nog (te) weinig voortgang geboekt. Wie weet volgt het de ketchup-theorie (van Ruud van Nistelrooij).
Online tools amplify collective intelligence: they can bring the attention of the right expert to the right problem at the right time (designed serendipity).
When we attempt to solve a hard creative problem on our own, most of our ideas go nowhere. But in a good creative collaboration, some of our ideas – ideas we couldn’t have taken any further on our own – stimulate other people to come up with daughter ideas of their own. Those, in turn, stimulate other people to come up with still more ideas. And so on.
There are two reasons why online collaboration works well, where a committee would not. First, committees are often made up people who’ve been dragooned to sit in them, while collaborations are filled with enthusiastic volunteers. Second, while a committee can be greatly slowed down by a few obstructive members, online collaboration can often ignore those people.
Today, a great programmer isn’t just someone who can quickly solve a problem from scratch, but someone who is also a master of the information commons.
Historically, observation and analysis have been yoked together; the person who did the experiment was also the person who analyzed the data, but this is changing.
The compelling, addictive qualities all good computer games have: a task that’s challenging but not impossible, instant feedback on how well you’re doing, and the sense that you’re always just one step away from improvement.
It’s a symbiosis: the professionals develop the systematic understanding that underlies the mechanics of the game, and the amateurs then supply the dedicated artistry required to take best advantage of that systematic understanding.
Someone who believes ‘everyone should do this’, e.g., open science or switching sides of the road, doesn’t necessarily also believe ‘I should do this, even if no one else does’.