3 ms·
> You need large diverse teams to tackle interesting problems This ‘corporate’ view of science is just not true, kind of like adding “man-hours” to software p
by bra-ket 6y ago
> You need large diverse teams to tackle interesting problems
This ‘corporate’ view of science is just not true, kind of like adding “man-hours” to software projects doesn’t necessarily account for better software, speeds up or enables those projects.
Large diverse teams just produce more mediocre research, if recent experience with massive “deep learning” industry is of any indication, or fail completely like that “blue brain” project with multi billion funding and thousands of participants.
Bigger is not always better and it has never been necessary for good science.
- mattkrause 6y agoThe Human Brain Project is an extreme case. On the other hand, there are pretty hard limits to the sorts of projects that our standard model of a single full-time person[0] can do, even with some part-time collaborators (i.e., middle authors). This is especially true for projects that involve a combination of very different approaches: bioinformatics, HTS, in vivo validation, etc. I've noticed more and more papers with multiple (sometimes 5!) co-first authors, but that's a kludge around the fact that we can't figure out how to allocate credit to teams. [0] And, almost invariably, a trainee