is scientific research compromised or improved by competition? (595 hits)
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Submitted by shandythedog (View user info) at 2008-02-15 17:36:19 EST
do the egghead scientists beavering away in their research labs share much info, or do they keep it all SECRET SECRET SECRET so that they can be the ones to get the patent and make all the money?
in other words, are there teams of egghead scientist working away in feverish competition trying to solve the same problems?
if so, if they cooperated and worked together would they solve their problems faster, and make more discoveries?
or do the benefits of competition outweigh the benefits of cooperation?
User Reviews
Submitted by Falafel (user info) at 2008-02-18 21:41:52 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Info should be shared. If there was a collaborative effort, I guarantee you, AIDS would be gone and have a vaccine by now, but people are only interested in making money off the cure, being the first to come up with something that actually reverses the effects and kills off the virus.
Submitted by Danger_Ranger (user info) at 2008-02-18 18:48:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
now I'm giggling because reading back cockring I for some reason imagined that's how an asian would say coughing. "Shrandry! stop your cocking."
Submitted by Danger_Ranger (user info) at 2008-02-18 18:44:41 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm still giggling at 'beavering'. is that like a cockring?
Submitted by PepsiCoke (user info) at 2008-02-18 18:29:19 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Sort of. Cooperation is definitely a big theme. I'm surprised that you've never read those books. The first book seems like it could've inspired your Journey to the Land of Cloth Heads.
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-18 15:08:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by PepsiCoke (user info) at 2008-02-18 01:55:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Competition is one way of encouraging "progress". It doesn't mean it is the only way, and it's certainly not the ideal way to get things done. It's powerfully constructive and powerfully destructive. The only hope is for humans to gradually develop aversion to greed. As greed fades away, it will have to be replaced by passions for discerning truth and understanding the world, etc, and competition will no longer be a necessary fuel. It will take very many generations to happen if it ever happens at all.
That is the only hope for humanity. If we keep relying on competition as a spark for progress, then I think we will battle ourselves to catastrophe or extinction.
Do you read a lot of William Burroughs? The Cities of the Red Night trilogy?
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nope? is it about humnity being destroyed by competition?
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2008-02-18 09:26:57 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
stfu promptly
Submitted by Hookhand (user info) at 2008-02-18 02:04:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
If there is no monetary incentive to publish findings, no one would do research. There is money in the private sector.
Submitted by PepsiCoke (user info) at 2008-02-18 01:55:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Competition is one way of encouraging "progress". It doesn't mean it is the only way, and it's certainly not the ideal way to get things done. It's powerfully constructive and powerfully destructive. The only hope is for humans to gradually develop aversion to greed. As greed fades away, it will have to be replaced by passions for discerning truth and understanding the world, etc, and competition will no longer be a necessary fuel. It will take very many generations to happen if it ever happens at all.
That is the only hope for humanity. If we keep relying on competition as a spark for progress, then I think we will battle ourselves to catastrophe or extinction.
Do you read a lot of William Burroughs? The Cities of the Red Night trilogy?
Submitted by Yams (user info) at 2008-02-18 00:34:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2008-02-17 19:10:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Yams (user info) at 2008-02-15 23:30:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Competition is OK. Patents are bad. You are old.
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Young people today are MORONS, and you are their leader. Idiot.
You cannot justify your comment about patents, so STFU.
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And you can't even justify living you fat piece of shit, so what the fuck do I care what you think? I don't have to justify anything because people smarter than I am and smarter than you can ever hope to be already have. You're so ignorant it almost hurts to tell you as much. People like you piss me off to no end.
Submitted by Linus (user info) at 2008-02-17 23:51:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-17 18:02:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
raep?
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Retarded meme from a far off land.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2008-02-17 19:10:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Yams (user info) at 2008-02-15 23:30:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Competition is OK. Patents are bad. You are old.
============
Young people today are MORONS, and you are their leader. Idiot.
You cannot justify your comment about patents, so STFU.
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-17 18:02:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
raep?
Submitted by Linus (user info) at 2008-02-17 10:01:00 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
RAEP
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-16 18:16:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
"I could make a simple suppository pill to cure buttcancer if you let me hire one or two of Jones' top assistants away from the competition".
hahaha
i hope he would use those exact words
Submitted by Coyote (user info) at 2008-02-16 17:26:29 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
or, in a more general sense, do great minds with great expertise in a particular area get partitioned from each other much? ie, smith and jones are both the leading geniuses on cancer of the arsehole, but smith is working for pfizer and jones is working for dutchebager, so they aren't allowed to communicate or brainstorm.
-=-=-=-
Medical research in the corporate world is a while different ballgame, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how things tend to work there. My suspicion in the above scenario is that Smith goes to his bosses and says "I could make a simple suppository pill to cure buttcancer if you let me hire one or two of Jones' top assistants away from the competition".
Personally, a lot of the time it's only the threat of competition that motivates me to actually get something done, instead of spending a lot of time thinking about stuff, planning, revising, doodling on the backs of envelopes, and reading uber.
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-16 16:28:41 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:30:05 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I think it really depends on what kind of scientists you are talking about. Research PhDs at universities, they certainly cooperate the fuck out of just about everything. If one guy does something novel, he publishes it, and 10 other guys in the field replicate his study/invention/whatever.
That's the nature of science; documented reproducability. You make an experiment that does something neat-o, and you keep track of all your steps very neatly, then write it down and give it to others to confirm what you've found.
On the other hand, in industry, you don't have that between companies. You still have the same documented reproducability in-house, and in some cases with regards to the FDA or some other regulating body, but you would never see information being shared with competitors.
On one hand, this is bad because it encourages native bias by members of the same team. On the other hand, it's good. Because when you look at the industry as a whole, you have a whole bunch of teams, each with separate, different, unique biases, all striving to attack the same problem. One of those will work.
This essentially optimizes the situation. The product/drug/invention that works the best, and can get to the market fastest, gets to the market fastest. This isn't to say that it's the best possible result; if another competitor comes along later and beats them in whatever quantifiable area they care about, then that guy now wins. the first guy won for a while, then the second guy won.
Bottom line is, there's an ideal balance between competition and cooperation. I think in our western society, we do a pretty good job of achieving that balance. We have cooperating scientists at Universities, we have competiting scientists in industry, and in any given field, they may all be searching for the same holy grail.
First one to find it wins.
-Tim
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thanks, that's quite helpful - i hadn't thought of it in terms of teams finding completely different approaches/solutions to particular problems.
but i still wonder if there are many situations where independent teams are basically following the same approach to solve a problem, and one team may have solved certain parts but is stumped on others, and the other team is vice verca, and if they shared info they would reach a solution quicker.
or, in a more general sense, do great minds with great expertise in a particular area get partitioned from each other much? ie, smith and jones are both the leading geniuses on cancer of the arsehole, but smith is working for pfizer and jones is working for dutchebager, so they aren't allowed to communicate or brainstorm.
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2008-02-16 09:13:36 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I believe they generally work together, in the sense that they usually publish their findings in scientific journals, which allow other scientists to work further on their research.
If, however, they work for a corporate lab (Pfizer, Bayer, etc.) they are often made to sign an agreement in which they are not allowed to publish their findings, as they are being paid to produce a patented product, and in essence, the findings and research of said scientist are the property of that particular company, in the same way as most musical artists don't own the rights to their own songs.
Submitted by Anansie (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:44:15 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Er, I meant to answer this question: "in other words, are there teams of egghead scientist working away in feverish competition trying to solve the same problems?"
Submitted by Anansie (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:40:37 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
One of my professors has people rejecting her graduate students from research projects simply because they studied with her, so I'd say yes.
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:30:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
now if you'll excuse me, i have to go retreat to my basement lab and work on my secret projects so i can patent them and get the fuck out of the rat race.
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:30:05 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I think it really depends on what kind of scientists you are talking about. Research PhDs at universities, they certainly cooperate the fuck out of just about everything. If one guy does something novel, he publishes it, and 10 other guys in the field replicate his study/invention/whatever.
That's the nature of science; documented reproducability. You make an experiment that does something neat-o, and you keep track of all your steps very neatly, then write it down and give it to others to confirm what you've found.
On the other hand, in industry, you don't have that between companies. You still have the same documented reproducability in-house, and in some cases with regards to the FDA or some other regulating body, but you would never see information being shared with competitors.
On one hand, this is bad because it encourages native bias by members of the same team. On the other hand, it's good. Because when you look at the industry as a whole, you have a whole bunch of teams, each with separate, different, unique biases, all striving to attack the same problem. One of those will work.
This essentially optimizes the situation. The product/drug/invention that works the best, and can get to the market fastest, gets to the market fastest. This isn't to say that it's the best possible result; if another competitor comes along later and beats them in whatever quantifiable area they care about, then that guy now wins. the first guy won for a while, then the second guy won.
Bottom line is, there's an ideal balance between competition and cooperation. I think in our western society, we do a pretty good job of achieving that balance. We have cooperating scientists at Universities, we have competiting scientists in industry, and in any given field, they may all be searching for the same holy grail.
First one to find it wins.
-Tim
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2008-02-16 08:03:54 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
True enough, Bart, in your context. However, I was referring to Shandy's example of two teams independently seeking a cancer cure more than two business selling soda. Hence the 'shared Nobel Prize'. Granted, whichever team cures cancer will undoubtedly make that cure available through a business but I doubt that the team's primary motivation in curing cancer is to make a fat pile of cash.
Submitted by ilikesteak (user info) at 2008-02-16 00:02:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Why the hell would I want to help cure cancer if I don't get the money and the credit?
This shit costs money, and someone has to cash in, so why not the people who did the actual work.
It's not like they're doing vastly different things here. It's all near the same.
You know we found "a cure for cancer" but the survival rates were too low in the animal and culture tests to consider using it on humans. It was closer to zero than one in survival percentages. The good news was, the corpses were cancer free. Things have to go through about twelve years testing before they can be put on any market in America, and that's after years of pre-FDA testing. Since that's where all the money is, that's where it's going first, so we're fucked for a while, even if they do find a more working one.
Submitted by Yams (user info) at 2008-02-15 23:30:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Competition is OK. Patents are bad. You are old.
Submitted by Ltap (user info) at 2008-02-15 23:14:38 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
I have absolutely no idea. The internet has probably helped a lot of research projects. In the 1700s there was lots of scientific competitiveness, mainly between the english and french, yet that probably didn't help much as most of the real geniuses such as Newton and Halley operated pretty much alone with minimal collaboration with other people.
Submitted by bart (user info) at 2008-02-15 22:33:58 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2008-02-15 16:42:47 CST (#)
Ranking: 0
Competition improves productivity. That's why there're shared Nobel Prizes. And Patent attorneys.
Next question?
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Technological advancement improves productivity far more than competition does. Competition is needed to diversify the technological gene pool so that more options are available to producers, but ultimately production is purely self driven.
Simple illustrative example:
Which causes a higher increase in productivity?
a. Coke vs. Pepsi
b. The Internet
Submitted by bart (user info) at 2008-02-15 22:29:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Science by definition is cooperative not competitive. It depends on accurate information and documented reproducibility.
Business corrupts the scientific process. Science would corrupt the business process, but it's rare that people get corrupted by ideals and give up their profits.
Both are necessary although a balance is required to prevent the whole system from imploding.
Submitted by STIXS (user info) at 2008-02-15 18:54:00 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
The scientific community usually tries to stand together - like when the 1918 influenza virus was regenerated to test susceptibility and mutation and Bush tried to ban it from being published in case the info fell into the 'wrong hands' - the whole community stood together and gave a loud 'Fuck You,' since the technology to do that is widely available anyway.
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2008-02-15 18:12:40 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Also: one per day, noob.
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 18:06:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
ah.. australia disappoints me with her in your face capitalism
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:59:36 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
splendid news hairycoo, i will register you on our list of party members.
only 472 to go, and we will be up and running for the next federal election.
once my fear of public speaking has been conquered, victory is assured.
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:55:22 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
low expectations give pleasant surprises
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:53:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
wow Uber has secondly updates these days..
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:53:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
the money is not is the cure..
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:52:17 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I have a passport that has long expired... was actually a but strange at xmas applying for a visa to get in..
so yes is the answer
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:48:13 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
well, i am not a scientist unfortunately, but i was just wondering if sometimes the following situations occured:
one egghead team: we are so close to the cure for cancer, we have worked out steps a, b, c, d, and f. if only we could figure out e!!! we would be rich!!!
another egghead team: we are so close to the cure for cancer, we have worked out steps a, b, d, e, and f. if only we could figure out c!!! we would be rich!!!
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:42:47 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Competition improves productivity. That's why there're shared Nobel Prizes. And Patent attorneys.
Next question?
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:42:29 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
are you an australian citizen, hairycoo?
Submitted by hairycoo (user info) at 2008-02-15 17:41:05 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
only disappointment to come with this type of thinking