This quotation from a failed Nature collaborative project from Nielsen’s website leaped out to me:
“A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments. ”
Many of the folks here have pet projects where they imagine easy pickings out there and they wonder why nobody is much interested in pursuing them and free software and open source software look like good analogs for making progress on a wide number of subjects. How to make this happen is a great question and I can only encourage Nielsen but I do not put a high probability on finding any simple solutions. Sharing is hard to do without trust, and trust is hard to build across the ether.
I will share with you my own pet idea that could potentially be researched in such a manner to great benefit for humans if not great profit for Silicon Valley entrepeneurs. Garlic. There are a plethora of anecdotes that eating a bunch of garlic is great for your health. Doing a rigorous study that is worthy of submission to New England Journal of Medicine or similar costs a lot of money and there is a lot more money in atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants and other chemicals which a company can patent; the incentives for medical and biology and biochemistry researchers are completely lined up to ignore garlic. There have been a couple of studies (the current wikipedia article on garlic looks pretty good to me) but dependable science looks to me like it may well never get here, short of something like Nielsen advocates: thousands of collaborative networked individuals all pitching in a little piece.
This makes me sad on the one hand. When I eat a couple of cloves of garlic there is an obvious and significant effect. It is as if my muscles and my blood are mildly drunk while my brain and reflexes remain completely sober. I want some more certain knowledge about what is going on here and I am not hopeful that I will ever find it. On the other hand there is an opportunity here, and many other similar opportunities in a wild variety of areas, just like Nielsen is writing and talking about. In theory I agree with him totally. What will come of his vision and those of similarly minded folk remains to be seen.
This quotation from a failed Nature collaborative project from Nielsen’s website leaped out to me:
Many of the folks here have pet projects where they imagine easy pickings out there and they wonder why nobody is much interested in pursuing them and free software and open source software look like good analogs for making progress on a wide number of subjects. How to make this happen is a great question and I can only encourage Nielsen but I do not put a high probability on finding any simple solutions. Sharing is hard to do without trust, and trust is hard to build across the ether.
I will share with you my own pet idea that could potentially be researched in such a manner to great benefit for humans if not great profit for Silicon Valley entrepeneurs. Garlic. There are a plethora of anecdotes that eating a bunch of garlic is great for your health. Doing a rigorous study that is worthy of submission to New England Journal of Medicine or similar costs a lot of money and there is a lot more money in atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants and other chemicals which a company can patent; the incentives for medical and biology and biochemistry researchers are completely lined up to ignore garlic. There have been a couple of studies (the current wikipedia article on garlic looks pretty good to me) but dependable science looks to me like it may well never get here, short of something like Nielsen advocates: thousands of collaborative networked individuals all pitching in a little piece.
This makes me sad on the one hand. When I eat a couple of cloves of garlic there is an obvious and significant effect. It is as if my muscles and my blood are mildly drunk while my brain and reflexes remain completely sober. I want some more certain knowledge about what is going on here and I am not hopeful that I will ever find it. On the other hand there is an opportunity here, and many other similar opportunities in a wild variety of areas, just like Nielsen is writing and talking about. In theory I agree with him totally. What will come of his vision and those of similarly minded folk remains to be seen.