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> What’s more, marketable discoveries will be group affairs, with collaborative licensing deals -- no matter who led the research. I've been talking to a colle

> What’s more, marketable discoveries will be group affairs, with collaborative licensing deals -- no matter who led the research. I've been talking to a colleague this week, who casually observed to me that I will be dinged in my annual reviews if I'm not perceived to be "a team player". People don't understand that only the most trivial jobs are done "collaboratively". When you're digging a ditch, you need a team. When you're making an intellectual effort, you need to encourage individual effort or you'll just get a herd of researchers rehashing known results. That's the major problem with "team science", and Parker is doubling down on this.

kiba 10y ago
We need more replication and reproducability than new theorizing. There's no point in doing that if your science is built on very shaky foundations.
nerdponx 10y ago
It's both. You need intense individual focus, but you also need to get those individuals in a room together so they can bounce ideas off each other, synchronize their work, and hash out issues they weren't able to solve on their own.
- preordained 10y ago
  It's definitely both. Via personally experience, a bunch of people in a room hashing out ideas real time--the more difficult the problem, the more this has to be counter-balanced by intense personal study to mature a concept enough to bring it to the group.
Retric 10y ago
You have that backwards. Only the most trivial research is done by a single person. Sure, at an individual level competence is important, but having 50 people all doing their own things is not useful.
pipio21 10y ago
On the contrary, only trivial jobs could be done by individuals. A single person could do very little alone against a really hard problem. Teams really help immensely. The original definition of corporation was "a group of people that joins together to do something", like making a bridge, or sailing half of the world when those activities were risky, dangerous and hard. There was a time in which sailing meant 2 of each 3 ships were sink by storms, or pirates. Romans will kill you if the bridge you build was weak. But the team members must be great individually and complement each other. For example the group that invented the transistor, aerospacial rockets or the integrated circuit, or the microprocessor were a heck of a team. In the US individualism means the individual mindset is favored over anything else. In the rest of the world it is the other way. For example in Japan going alone is suicidal, "The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down". I would say the best system is some of both systems. When Steve Jobs was ousted of Apple his number one priority with Next was having success so he could maintain the best people of his team. And it was not a secret, he will tell you.
7373737373 10y ago
You cannot build a skyscraper without high level collaboration.
omalleyt 10y ago
I would make the distinction between intellectual tasks involving synthesis vs. analysis. Analysis (observation, experimentation, hypothesis testing) can be chunked down and distributed to team members. Synthesis (hypothesis creation) by definition cannot. Ideal structure in my mind is the most capable person should be in ultimate charge of Synthesis, and analysis should flow downstream and be distributed to team members
- EGreg 10y ago
  Many people could be in charge of synthesis, come up with their own ideas, and use Holacracy to get them tested http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/ http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/
silvestrov 10y ago
And even when working in a team, the team members are very often heterogenous. E.g. a surgery team with a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a few nurses who are specialized for surgery, etc. Such a team would never work if every member had the same say in the decisions. Ditto with airplanes and ships where you always have one person with the final say.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
If you're able to do a job all by yourself, you need to start doing bigger jobs.
Confusion 10y ago
Every great technological achievement has been a team effort. The Manhattan Project is a shining example of how you can compress into a few years what otherwise takes decades because scientists and technologists are not making a team effort. None of them alone could have done it or would have made significant progress. If you had left Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Feynman, Bethe, Szilard, Einstein, Wigner, von Neumann and at least two dozen others alone at separate universities around the states, there would not have been an atomic bomb. They needed each other to bounce ideas off, to feed each other related partial results, to correct mistakes. If you're making an intellectual effort and none of your colleagues have relevant input on (intermediate) results, then either your colleagues are extremely mediocre or you are blind to their contributions. In either case: you could probably produce better results with input from others.

kiba 10y ago

We need more replication and reproducability than new theorizing. There's no point in doing that if your science is built on very shaky foundations.

nerdponx 10y ago

It's both. You need intense individual focus, but you also need to get those individuals in a room together so they can bounce ideas off each other, synchronize their work, and hash out issues they weren't able to solve on their own.

preordained 10y ago
It's definitely both. Via personally experience, a bunch of people in a room hashing out ideas real time--the more difficult the problem, the more this has to be counter-balanced by intense personal study to mature a concept enough to bring it to the group.

Retric 10y ago

You have that backwards. Only the most trivial research is done by a single person. Sure, at an individual level competence is important, but having 50 people all doing their own things is not useful.

pipio21 10y ago

On the contrary, only trivial jobs could be done by individuals. A single person could do very little alone against a really hard problem. Teams really help immensely. The original definition of corporation was "a group of people that joins together to do something", like making a bridge, or sailing half of the world when those activities were risky, dangerous and hard. There was a time in which sailing meant 2 of each 3 ships were sink by storms, or pirates. Romans will kill you if the bridge you build was weak. But the team members must be great individually and complement each other. For example the group that invented the transistor, aerospacial rockets or the integrated circuit, or the microprocessor were a heck of a team. In the US individualism means the individual mindset is favored over anything else. In the rest of the world it is the other way. For example in Japan going alone is suicidal, "The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down". I would say the best system is some of both systems. When Steve Jobs was ousted of Apple his number one priority with Next was having success so he could maintain the best people of his team. And it was not a secret, he will tell you.

7373737373 10y ago

You cannot build a skyscraper without high level collaboration.

omalleyt 10y ago

I would make the distinction between intellectual tasks involving synthesis vs. analysis. Analysis (observation, experimentation, hypothesis testing) can be chunked down and distributed to team members. Synthesis (hypothesis creation) by definition cannot. Ideal structure in my mind is the most capable person should be in ultimate charge of Synthesis, and analysis should flow downstream and be distributed to team members

EGreg 10y ago
Many people could be in charge of synthesis, come up with their own ideas, and use Holacracy to get them tested http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/ http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/

silvestrov 10y ago

And even when working in a team, the team members are very often heterogenous. E.g. a surgery team with a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a few nurses who are specialized for surgery, etc. Such a team would never work if every member had the same say in the decisions. Ditto with airplanes and ships where you always have one person with the final say.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

If you're able to do a job all by yourself, you need to start doing bigger jobs.

Confusion 10y ago

Every great technological achievement has been a team effort. The Manhattan Project is a shining example of how you can compress into a few years what otherwise takes decades because scientists and technologists are not making a team effort. None of them alone could have done it or would have made significant progress. If you had left Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Feynman, Bethe, Szilard, Einstein, Wigner, von Neumann and at least two dozen others alone at separate universities around the states, there would not have been an atomic bomb. They needed each other to bounce ideas off, to feed each other related partial results, to correct mistakes. If you're making an intellectual effort and none of your colleagues have relevant input on (intermediate) results, then either your colleagues are extremely mediocre or you are blind to their contributions. In either case: you could probably produce better results with input from others.