I think it is in certain circles seen as low-status, which is a shame, really. It’s an interesting point you bring up, not the least since it connects to the issue of how deeply social an enterprise science should be. Even though the number of authors of scientific papers have gone up, etc, science is still not a deeply collaborative effort. People don’t publish data that would be useful for people to get hold of, they fudge their inferences to suit their interests, they defend unresonable hypotheses simply because they themselves came up with them, etc.
This happens to a large part because scientists aren’t sufficiently incentivized to be more collaborative. The question is how to do that. I think that one way could be this.
1) Let a community of researchers discuss a certain question openly.
2) Once the group, or a sub-group of it, has reached a consensus on what the correct solution to the question is, you assign someone to write the whole stuff up.
3) A community of peers assign credits to the people contributing in the discussion (and, possibly, to the guy who writes up).
I’m aware that this is not without problems (e.g. how are you going to allocate the credits with people feeling unfairly treated). Nevertheless I think it’s an idea worth exploring.
Thanks! Someone tipped me about that before in fact, but I had half forgotten about it.
However, I think this could be done outside of mathematics, too. Also, I think that one could debate how people are to be given credit for their work on the collaborative project. Polymath don’t give explicit credit to individual contributors, but in my system, you would. The details of this are very important, since you need to give time-pressed researchers incentives to participate in a system like this.
Time-pressured researchers do things like reviewing papers of journals without someone paying them to do so. Being a reviewer is having power over a peer. It’s a kind of social status.
I don’t think researchers review papers because they want to have power over their peers. I think they do it because it is a community norm and beneficial to their community. This is similar to why people avoid littering. Status games may still enter into it because how often someone litters or reviews papers affects their reputation.
I think it is in certain circles seen as low-status, which is a shame, really. It’s an interesting point you bring up, not the least since it connects to the issue of how deeply social an enterprise science should be. Even though the number of authors of scientific papers have gone up, etc, science is still not a deeply collaborative effort. People don’t publish data that would be useful for people to get hold of, they fudge their inferences to suit their interests, they defend unresonable hypotheses simply because they themselves came up with them, etc.
This happens to a large part because scientists aren’t sufficiently incentivized to be more collaborative. The question is how to do that. I think that one way could be this.
1) Let a community of researchers discuss a certain question openly.
2) Once the group, or a sub-group of it, has reached a consensus on what the correct solution to the question is, you assign someone to write the whole stuff up.
3) A community of peers assign credits to the people contributing in the discussion (and, possibly, to the guy who writes up).
I’m aware that this is not without problems (e.g. how are you going to allocate the credits with people feeling unfairly treated). Nevertheless I think it’s an idea worth exploring.
This does sometimes happen. A recent very impressive example was the collective effort to improve the bound on gaps between primes.
Thanks! Someone tipped me about that before in fact, but I had half forgotten about it.
However, I think this could be done outside of mathematics, too. Also, I think that one could debate how people are to be given credit for their work on the collaborative project. Polymath don’t give explicit credit to individual contributors, but in my system, you would. The details of this are very important, since you need to give time-pressed researchers incentives to participate in a system like this.
Time-pressured researchers do things like reviewing papers of journals without someone paying them to do so. Being a reviewer is having power over a peer. It’s a kind of social status.
I don’t think researchers review papers because they want to have power over their peers. I think they do it because it is a community norm and beneficial to their community. This is similar to why people avoid littering. Status games may still enter into it because how often someone litters or reviews papers affects their reputation.