A great line in a recent Law and Order. Lenny Briscoe, played by Jerry Orbach, is interrogating a suspect. The suspect tells a story and reaches a point where no one believes him, not even the suspect himself. Lenny says: "Now there's five minutes of my life that's lost forever."

3:11:34 PM  #  

K. Eric Drexler, in the lucid 1987 article Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge, illustrates familiar patterns of communication problems in science through the history of the rise and fall of the (fictitious) square-wheel research program. Most of these issues arise because subcommunities either communicate poorly with one another or distrust one another:

• Bad ideas adopted through ignorance of refutations - Transportation researchers, concerned with bumpy wheels, pursue work on the square wheel. They reason that it is superior to higher polygons, since it has fewer bumps; further, since its fewer corners probe the height of the ground at fewer points, it is less sensitive to typical bumps on a road. Bearing researchers are familiar with arguments that the decisive issue is bump magnitude rather than number, but the transportation research community remains ignorant of them. Work on the square wheel goes forward under a major defense contract, and major intellectual effort is misinvested.
• Bad ideas maintained despite outsider's refutations [...]
• New thinking twisted by misinformation [...]
• New ideas generated but not pursued [...]
• Good ideas neglected through ignorance [...]
• Good ideas neglected because refutations are suspected [...]
• New thinking undermined by ignorance [...]
• Old ideas redundantly pursued out of ignorance [...]
• Effort consumed by research and publication - All of the above ways of squandering intellectual effort could be avoided, given thorough-enough searches of a complete-enough literature. But in reality, the costs of search (which may be fruitless) are high enough that it often makes more sense to risk wasting effort on bad or redundant work. 

Alas, these problems are all too relevant even now that we have more than enough telecommunication and information technology available to largely suppress them. What's missing is the proper culture to exploit that technology. One of yesterday's posts proposed simple ways of fostering inter-group communication.

10:09:23 AM  #