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The problem here is documentation. Consider: a field, from research to development to supporters and advocates is a series of concentric circles. The innermost
by reasonattlm 15y ago
The problem here is documentation.
Consider: a field, from research to development to supporters and advocates is a series of concentric circles. The innermost is the smallest and most knowledgeable: cutting edge and long-standing researchers. The mid-circles are commercial developers. The outermost circle is largest and least knowledgeable: end users, advocates, etc.
The purpose of documentation in this model is to inform and educate the next circle out. The definition of documentation in this model is the process by which the next circle out is informed and educated.
Now the mid-circles are pretty good at documentation, but the inner circles, the researchers, are very, very bad at it. Institutionally bad. So bad, that the whole function of documentation to bridge the moat that has grown between researchers and developers is taken over by other groups where it is done vaguely well. Now in applied physics and mathematics, especially related to computation, you don't see much of that moat. Discoveries echo the world pretty rapidly: there are open communities and open publishing forums, and the interesting stuff is picked up pretty quickly - anyone out there who might want to develop in those areas has ample opportunity to learn about it and make the decision to participate. Think about memristors and quantum computing as good examples.
This is far from the case for the life sciences: the gulf there is huge and yawning, and there is no comparable open community large enough to close it (DIYbio and open biotech movements are still too small). That's one of the reasons I started Open Cures:
https://www.opencures.org https://www.opencures.org
As I think there is a great deal to be done here to make biotech and the life sciences look much more like physics in their documentation - and here I mean documentation in the sense above, the propagation of information and learning from the circles of research to the circles of development.
- eykanal 15y agoWhat a terrible way to describe it! > Now the mid-circles are pretty good at documentation, but the inner circles, the researchers, are very, very bad at it. Institutionally bad. So bad, that the whole function of documentation to bridge the moat that has grown between researchers and developers is taken over by other groups where it is done vaguely well. Has it occurred to you that the problem is not that the groups are bad at it, but that you are too ill-informed to understand it? Sure, some are bad at "documentation" as you call it, but some (arguably more) are excellent. As a scientist, my job is to do research and advance the field. I will explain it as necessary to the very best of my ability to whoever cares. Please don't tell me that "I'm very, very bad at documenting" just because (1) you never asked me and (2) I haven't just done it by default, out of the goodness of my heart. Read my publications, read my (free) abstracts, read the summaries of my work available in numerous paid journals if you're that interested. But please don't insult me.
- reasonattlm 15y agoYour response, I think, well illustrates my point. If your output is abstracts, reviews, and papers then you are not documenting as I have narrowly defined it above - you are working on materials for your own circle.
- eykanal 15y ago(Doggone HN noprocrast settings...) I think I'm realizing that the problem here is one of responsibility. To use your terminology, you are claiming that it is the responsibility of the researcher to document everything he (or she, whatever) does for every "circle", and I'm claiming to the contrary. To that end, let me describe the firehose that is today's science publication. It's been two weeks since I last read through my science RSS feeds, which contain selected publications from about ten journals. In that time, there are around 1000 entries. That's just a small selection of the field... there are many more journals I'm choosing to ignore simply so that my sips from the firehose aren't completely overwhelming. I will suggest that having every researcher document every finding for every circle is a tremendous waste of time, as the vast majority of that "documentation" would never be read, as no one in the outer circles has interest in it, even if it was written in an accessible manner. In that mindset, I don't think it's the responsibility of the researcher to document his work for the public. Furthermore, given the huge amount of research put out each week (like my RSS feed above shows), just surveying all of it regularly to find what's interesting to the "outer circles" and then writing up in appropriate terminology is close to a full-time job. I know that in neuroscience, the field I'm currently working, we have the Society for Neuroscience (http://www.sfn.org/ http://www.sfn.org/) which puts in a lot of work to make the general findings accessible to the public. They do a yeoman's job, I think, and if you browse their site you'll find a lot of very recent science written for the "outer circles", as you call them. If you're interested in a field, find that field's SfN and check out what they wrote; don't look to the experts themselves for regular updates.
- Goladus 15y agoFYI in biology I hear the term "Translational Research" to refer to this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translational_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translational_research "Translating" scientific discoveries into information that will be practical for doctors with actual patients. Also, another layer of communication involves textbooks and classes.