Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [118]
p 24 It’s because Zacary Brown has such an enormous comparative advantage that he and ASSET can work together for mutual benefit: “comparative advantage” is a technical term from economics, and I’m using the term in that sense. Elsewhere, when I speak of people applying their expertise in the “best” possible way (or similar language), I mean best in the sense of maximizing comparative advantage, not maximizing absolute advantage.
p 24: The critical character of human attention as a scarce resource in an information-rich world was pointed out in a prescient article by Herbert Simon [197]. A striking speculative work on the economics of attention is the article by Michael Goldhaber [75]. See also [151].
p 27: Regarding the term “designed serendipity,” Jon Udell used the term “manufactured serendipity” to describe a similar concept in [228]. I’ve used “designed serendipity” instead because it emphasizes the way serendipity can be achieved as the result of deliberate design choices. The idea of designed serendipity seems to have originated in the open source software movement, and was succinctly captured in Eric Raymond’s [178] observation that when debugging open source software, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Raymond dubbed this observation Linus’s Law, after the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds. We can generalize Linus’s Law to other forms of problem solving: “Given enough eyeballs, all problems are easy.” It’s not literally true, but it does capture something of the essence of designed serendipity.
p 27 “Grossmann, you must help me or else I’ll go crazy!”: the Einstein-Grossmann story is told in full in [169].
p 30: The discussion of conversational critical mass is inspired in part by chapter 3 of [189].
p 30 Polymath participants often “found [themselves] having thoughts that [they] would not have had without some chance remark of another contributor”: [80].
p 31: On the value of cognitive diversity,eat, for example, the work of Scott Page [168] and Friedrich von Hayek [93].
p 32: The phrase “architecture of attention” is inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s elegant phrase “architecture of participation” [162]. O’Reilly uses his term “to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution.” We’re interested in systems designed for creative problem solving, and in such systems it is the allocation of expert attention that is most crucial.
p 34: The number of employees on Avatar is from [65].
p 36: The 1983 discovery of the Z boson is described in [4].
p 37 “who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?”: see Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers [190].
p 37 What makes prices useful is that . . . they aggregate an enormous amount of hidden knowledge: [93].
p 38: The “dumb question” was posed by Polymath participant Ryan O’Donnell: [159].
p 39: On the point that online tools are subsuming and extending both conventional markets and conventional organizations: a related point has been made by the theorist Yochai Benkler in his article “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm [12].” Benkler has a different focus, being concerned not so much with the solution of creative problems as with the production of goods. He proposes that online collaboration has enabled a third form of production, beyond markets and conventional organizations, which he calls “peer production.” I believe this is too narrow a point of view, both for creative problem solving and for the production of goods. Online tools can be used to subsume both markets and conventional organizations as special cases, and also enable many new forms of production and creative problem solving. Thus it’s not that we now have a third form of production.