Re: Cancer and evolution

From: Tim Tyler (tim_at_tt1lock.org)
Date: 11/12/04 

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 22:27:46 +0000 (UTC)

Maurice Barnhill <mvb@udel.edu> wrote or quoted:
> Tim Tyler wrote:
> > Wirt Atmar <wirtatmar@aol.com> wrote or quoted P. Smith as writing:

> >>Similarly but obversely, if a theory is never published, it is given
> >>little or no weight. Talk and usenet groups are cheap. They simply
> >>don't count, although self-publishing sometimes does work. Charles
> >>Darwin and Stephen Wolfram both chose to self-publish their own work,
> >>but that creates, as it should, a much higher hurdle to clear for
> >>general acceptance.
> >
> > I'm not sure in what sense usenet "doesn't count".
>
> There is no point in going through the effort of writing up your
> ideas understandably unless you want to convince someone that the
> idea is correct or at least clever. Who do you want to convince?
> The logical ultimate target is the people who have thought most
> carefully about the general area of knowledge your idea
> addresses. These people are in current times mostly (although
> not entirely) professionals, and professionals are very, very
> unlikely to pay attention to anything not in the refereed
> literature.

In my experience, this is completely untrue. I can think of
numerous highly talented individuals in their fields who have
participated in usenet in their time.

The internet has some advantages. In particular, it is more
up-to-date, contains more information - and is significantly
easier to search than any other publishing medium.

Also it is interactive in real time. If you have a question, you
can ask it and get an answer back in a reasonable space of time.

With peer reviewed journals there's often a turn around of months -
making such interaction impractical.

I don't think professionals as a class are blind to these advantages -
and I don't think its correct to say that they fail to take advantage
of them.

Even before the internet, much interaction between scientists was
*not* in the peer reviewed literature. Check the letters of
Charles Darwin - for example.

> If nothing else, they don't have time to read
> everything and the refereeing processes weeds out most of the
> nonsense while losing very little of the valuable stuff. Very
> rarely some valuable stuff is lost, but the amount of work
> required to find it elsewhere when it doesn't reach the standard
> literature is impossible to undertake.

Fortunately, filtering out irrelevant chaff can be done passably well
dynamically by computer programs - which can track references to the
document in question.

No doubt there will remain a market for "closed" publishing -
and pay-per-view documents filtered by humans - for some time -
but basically, I expect the internet to rip the guts out of
the business - and expect that most of the remaining material
fitting this description will wind up being funded by
advertising - not sales of the information itself.

It will become increasingly difficult to sell mere
information - because of the ease with which it
can be copied and redistributed free of charge. 

-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim@tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.

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