I am presently employed as a researcher at a major university. Do you know what I’ve worked on in the last year? Do you think anyone on the Internet does?
If a scientist (read: professor or grad student at a university in almost all cases) wanted to keep a finding secret, they could trivially do so.
I am presently employed as a researcher at a major university. Do you know what I’ve worked on in the last year? Do you think anyone on the Internet does?
No, among other reasons because I don’t know who you are and because I don’t give a damn. But it took me less than an hour to find out what the LW basilisk was about.
If a scientist (read: professor or grad student at a university in almost all cases) wanted to keep a finding secret, they could trivially do so.
Well, if you don’t tell anyone else and don’t publish it anywhere, you could trivially keep anything secret. But then, why would anyone bother to research such stuff in the first place? (Other than personal benefit, I mean.)
Well, if you don’t tell anyone else and don’t publish it anywhere, you could trivially keep anything secret. But then, why would anyone bother to research such stuff in the first place? (Other than personal benefit, I mean.)
This is the scenario I’m talking about.
Presumably, if you found yourself in a field where you constantly couldn’t publish things because of your consequentialist ethics, you’d switch fields (or ethics).
I think the more relevant point than “can I figure out what you’ve worked on in the last year” is “can other people in your field independently rediscover whatever you did fairly soon?”
Unless you’ve discovered giant shoulders that nobody else is standing on, you probably can’t cover up discoveries for very long.
I am presently employed as a researcher at a major university. Do you know what I’ve worked on in the last year? Do you think anyone on the Internet does?
Well, I don’t know who you are. You could just as well be Debbie Kralik from Flinders University or Juan Perez from the University of Buenos Aires—this is a pseudonymous forum so there’s no way to tell what you’ve worked on, even if you were to claim you were some particular person.
I could give you a link to my website, or the website of any of my colleagues, but you still wouldn’t know what they’re working on at any given time.
In my particular group, the whole group knows in general what everyone’s current project is, but only small subgroups know the particulars of each project, and individual people within a focus might work on something individually for a long while.
So, in my experience, it’d be pretty trivial for me to entirely discard some set of findings I disliked (and this happens a lot for accepted reasons, like “I can’t publish this”), and the Internet doesn’t really change that.
I am presently employed as a researcher at a major university. Do you know what I’ve worked on in the last year? Do you think anyone on the Internet does?
If a scientist (read: professor or grad student at a university in almost all cases) wanted to keep a finding secret, they could trivially do so.
No, among other reasons because I don’t know who you are and because I don’t give a damn. But it took me less than an hour to find out what the LW basilisk was about.
Well, if you don’t tell anyone else and don’t publish it anywhere, you could trivially keep anything secret. But then, why would anyone bother to research such stuff in the first place? (Other than personal benefit, I mean.)
This is the scenario I’m talking about.
Presumably, if you found yourself in a field where you constantly couldn’t publish things because of your consequentialist ethics, you’d switch fields (or ethics).
I think the more relevant point than “can I figure out what you’ve worked on in the last year” is “can other people in your field independently rediscover whatever you did fairly soon?”
Unless you’ve discovered giant shoulders that nobody else is standing on, you probably can’t cover up discoveries for very long.
Well, I don’t know who you are. You could just as well be Debbie Kralik from Flinders University or Juan Perez from the University of Buenos Aires—this is a pseudonymous forum so there’s no way to tell what you’ve worked on, even if you were to claim you were some particular person.
I could give you a link to my website, or the website of any of my colleagues, but you still wouldn’t know what they’re working on at any given time.
In my particular group, the whole group knows in general what everyone’s current project is, but only small subgroups know the particulars of each project, and individual people within a focus might work on something individually for a long while.
So, in my experience, it’d be pretty trivial for me to entirely discard some set of findings I disliked (and this happens a lot for accepted reasons, like “I can’t publish this”), and the Internet doesn’t really change that.
Yeah. That doesn’t even count real secret-squirrel stuff.