

What If Scientists Didn’t Compete? - tokenadult
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/what-if-scientists-didnt-compete/

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frossie
The implication that scientists compete due to their egos is not totally
accurate. Yes, some do have egos, but like the programming world many are just
geeky types who want to find out the answers and are happy to co-operate if
that helps.

What forces them to compete is the money. When your entire research program is
based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you
and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are
rewarding the people who are the most competitive.

I agree with the point of the article that sometimes better science would get
done with more openness and co-operation (I have seen numerous examples of
that in my field), but absent an infinite supply of money I don't see how it
can be done. I'd love to know though!

~~~
azanar
_When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your
funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create
competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most
competitive._

This seems ridiculously inefficient. The belief that two people spending money
and effort to keep at odds with one another is beneficial and furthers
advancement more rapidly than collaboration seems broken. With all of that
waste, I can't understand how anyone at the funding agency can say they are
getting the most return on investment following this strategy. A more
collaborative model would give them the dual benefit of not having all of this
in-fighting waste, while at the same time benefiting from the super-linear
growth in results by having two people bang heads together. I sense a sacred
cow here.

As for how it can be done, what about allowing funding agencies to grant money
to something akin to a research project trusts or foundations; something that
spans multiple individuals and even multiple institutions, so the lines don't
have to be drawn so sharply on who can participate and who can't. Something
like the foundation model several OSS projects have adopted, perhaps.

~~~
pfedor
There are many examples of competition between in the OSS world. Desktop
environments, database engines, programming languages, text editors.

The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the
program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other
guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name,
sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features
to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it
usually is.

And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding.
You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as
competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition
in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared
to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or
else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.

~~~
frossie
But the reason the number of tenured positions is very small _IS_ because of
funding.

Everything comes down to money.

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jleyank
In the old times, young faculty members who collaborated rather than did
original work didn't get tenure and so left "in failure". Graduate students
can't collaborate as that's not the purpose of the exercise (as others here
have written). Post-docs CAN collaborate, but they're trying to make a name
for themselves which is somewhat anti-collaboration.

This leaves the tenured profs, but they're off chasing money to fund their
groups. Not a great system, which is why I left it.

~~~
timr
I'd refine that second statement: it's not usually in a graduate student's
_best interest_ to collaborate on a project, but the student's PI typically
has a competing interest (and a longer time horizon), and so collaborations
still happen. The smart PI just _manages_ the risk by assigning collaborative
projects to his students -- he gets to reap the rewards of the rare good
collaborations, whereas the bad collaborations merely crush the unfortunate
grad student to whom they are assigned... _and nothing of value is lost._

Part of the game of grad school is recognizing and fending off the
"collaborators" who will do nothing but slow you down and/or take credit for
your work, while still remaining open to that rare collaboration that can make
your career -- the two most successful graduate students I know basically
walked into career-defining projects as a result of collaborations that were
handed to them in their first year.

Of course, you can be torpedoed by a bad collaboration at any stage of your
career, so this isn't a dilemma unique to graduate students. Collaborations
are useful only so long as you're getting more than you're putting in.

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amichail
Academia tries to give you some freedom as if you were managing your own
company. But unlike a standard company, you seek funding by submitting
proposals to your competition (!).

And unlike a standard company, you have grad students instead of employees who
may do what you want and then again may just ignore you.

To top it off, you have to teach as well.

Given all this, do you really think scientists would be open to have whatever
remaining freedom they have taken away through greater collaboration?

~~~
tokenadult
The empirical finding here is that scientists can sometimes be persuaded to
cooperate. How general that could be across how many disciplines, and whether
the interesting institutional constraints you mention could be modified to
increase cooperation, remains to be seen.

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nialllarkin
The author impresses upon us that the scientific community is competitive. And
that collaboration is rare. These are contradictory ideas.

In competitive environments, collaboration is far from unusual.

In competive environments, it is usual for collaboration to break out between
competing individuals. This is especially true in the most cut-throat
competitive environments.

In a truly competitive environment, survival depends on the individual gaining
a competitive edge. The most effective way for the individual to capture a
gain is by joining forces with competitors for mutual gain.

In a truly competitive environment its: collaborate or perish.

In conclusion, the scientific community is not nearly as competitive as the
author is inclined to believe.

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lutorm
While I have nothing against collaboration, there is a place for "competition"
if you by competition mean "independently confirmed results".

In the specific case I'm most familiar with, there are several research groups
making software that does the same thing (n-body simulations, hydrodynamics,
radiation transfer) and it _is_ a massive duplicated effort. However, I don't
think it's necessarily wasted. In my mind, having everyone collaborate on one
code would vastly increase the risk of results being incorrect due to bugs or
simply unjustified approximations. When several independent groups perform the
same calculation, with different pieces of software using different
approximation methods, you can have more faith in that the result is correct.

It's the fact that the academic "system" values being the _first_ to publish a
result that pushes everyone towards a competition at all costs approach, but
that's only one of the things about incentives for scientists that can be
criticized.

I spent my PhD thesis writing a piece of software that I then released under
the GPL. It's possible I could get more papers by close-sourcing it and only
working with people that would collaborate with me, but I made the calculated
gamble that giving the community a free tool in the end would boost my
recognition faster due to a wider adoption and more citations.

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roc
Perhaps we just need to put strings on public funding so that study/experiment
data is made publicly available (after a short period of exclusivity).

It wouldn't be too different from the Patent system. In that, in exchange for
a limited-time monopoly, you agree to publish the details of your invention to
further the state of the art.

It might also help scientists learn from each others mistakes, as it would
also catalog -failed- projects. Something journals don't do and which
doubtlessly results in redundant efforts.

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bcl
It sounds to me like they need to adopt an open source model of operation.
That may not be possible with the current funding system so someone would need
to figure out a better way to distribute funding.

Wouldn't it be better for them to be sharing information and results with each
other? They would be able to catch mistakes sooner (ie. before publication)
and build on and verify each other's work more quickly.

Imagine what it would have been like if the 'cold fusion' fiasco had ben share
between more scientists sooner?

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lutorm
Actually, the article is mislabeled, I think. It seems to not so much argue
against competition, but rather for the public dissemination of data. Writing
papers but withholding the data so that no-one can reproduce your results is
very different from simply trying to be the first to complete a study but then
publish all data so it's available to others.

In my mind, writing papers but withholding the data that your results are
based on is a highly dubious practice.

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jwb119
for a scientist, he doesn't make a very scientific argument:

>His experiment in cooperation with four other laboratories, he said, yielded
“a very compelling body of data validated by many labs,” and has inspired the
researchers to go on freely sharing with one another.”<

Would competition have produced a _more compelling body of data? Very likely
if you ask me.

~~~
scott_s
I doubt it. Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort.
Novelty is usually required for work to be published, and if you're scooped,
there's two options: drop the project, or find some way to differentiate
yourself from prior work. In theory, the difference you come up with should
make your publication still a worthwhile addition, but in practice, I don't
think it usually is.

~~~
asciilifeform
> Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort.

Competing _anything_ involves massive duplication of effort and wasted talent.
One day people will realize this.

[http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...](http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_02_13/caredit.a0900021)

 _"Tournament markets... discard huge amounts of very high-quality talent,
training, and skill. In the mythic version, science rewards effort and
ability... In the real world, casting off large numbers of extremely capable
people is simply how a tournament market works."_

For as long as everyone believes that the only alternative to cutthroat
competition is sclerotic dictatorship, much human effort will continue to be
thrown away in this manner. I give you Be, its patents bought up by patent
trolls to prevent its technologies from ever being used:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS>

I give you Symbolics Genera, languishing in obscurity forever because of our
society's obsession with property rights.

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param
Not sure I agree with this approach. I would rather have the waste of
competition than 20 mediocre scientists coming together and putting out
dubious research simply to protect reputations. Failure of an individual is
much easier to stomach and forget.

~~~
tokenadult
_I would rather have the waste of competition than 20 mediocre scientists
coming together and putting out dubious research simply to protect
reputations._

I would rather have neither waste nor dubious research. In the case reported
in the submitted article, there is (considering the journal that has agreed to
publish the research) an important research finding that had not been achieved
under the former system of dueling research labs. In this case, it appears
that getting the various labs to collaborate both reduced wastage of research
resources and improved the quality of the research result. I have no idea how
generalizable this happy result might be in other fields of science.

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Tichy
Doesn't science already work like a gift economy, at least in parts?

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tybris
If they didn't compete there wouldn't be any evolution.

