Everything Is Bullshit: The greatest scams on Earth revealed by Priceonomics

Author:Priceonomics
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Priceonomics
Published: 2014-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

A Scientific Process for the 21st Century

Although scientists are the cutting edge, there are many examples of missed opportunities to make the scientific process more efficient through technology.

In our conversation with Banyan, a startup whose core mission is open science, CEO Toni Gemayel revealed just how much low hanging fruit is out there. “We want to go after peer review,” he says. “Lots of people still print their papers and [physically] give them to professors for review or put them in Word documents that have no software compatibility.” Banyan recently launched a public beta version of its product — tools that allow researchers to share, collaborate on, and publish research. “The basis of the company,” Gemayel explains, “is that scientists will go open source if given simple, beneficial tools.”

Physicist turned open science advocate Michael Nielsen is an eloquent voice on what new tools could facilitate an open culture of sharing and collaboration. One existing tool that he advocates is arXiv, which allows physicists to share “preprints” of early drafts. This facilitates feedback on ongoing work and disseminates findings faster. Another practice he advocates — publishing all data and source code used in research projects alongside papers — has long been endorsed by scientists and could be accomplished within the journal framework.

In his essay “The Future of Science,” Nielsen also imagines new tools that don’t yet exist. A system of wikis, for example, that allow scientists to maintain perfectly up to date “super-textbooks” on their field for reference by fellow researchers. Or an efficient system for scientists to benefit from the expertise of scientists in other fields when their research “gives rise to problems in areas” in which they are not experts. After all, even Einstein needed help from mathematicians working on new forms of geometry to build his General Theory of Relativity.

But none of these ideas are likely to take off on a mass scale until scientists have clear incentives to contribute to them. Since publication history is all too often the sole metric by which a scientist’s work is judged, researchers who primarily assemble data sets for others to use or maintain a public wiki of meta-knowledge will not progress in their careers.

Addressing this issue, Gemayel references the open spirit amongst coders working on open-source software. “There’s no reward system right now for open science,” he says. “Scientists’ careers don’t benefit from it. But in software, everyone wants to see your GitHub account.” Talented coders who could make good money freelancing often pour hours of unpaid work into open-source software, which is free to use and adapt for any purpose.

On one hand, many people do so to work on interesting problems and as part of an ethos of contributing to its development. Thousands of companies and services would simply not exist without the development of open-source software. But coders also benefit personally from open-source work because the rest of the field recognizes its value. Employers look at applicants’ open-source work via their GitHub accounts (by publicly showing their software

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