Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [18]
The distinction between dynamic and static division of labor also illuminates the difference between online collaborations and conventional large-scale scientific collaboration. Consider, for example, the collaboration of 138 particle physicists whose work led to the 1983 discovery of the Z boson, a new fundamental particle of nature, at Europe’s CERN particle accelerator. Unlike Kasparov versus the World or the Polymath Project, each of the people in the CERN collaboration was hired to fill a set role. The roles ranged over many carefully chosen specialties, from engineers whose job was to cool down the particle beam, to statisticians whose job was to make sense of the complex experimental results. Such specialized collaborations can accomplish remarkable things, but with their relatively fixed roles and static division of labor they leave a great deal of microexpertise latent, and show little flexibility in their purpose. Their inflexibility means that while they can do extremely important science, it’s not a model that can easily be adapted to the more fluid ends characteristic of much of the most creative scientific work.
How Online Collaboration Goes Beyond the Market
One of humanity’s most powerful tools for amplifying collective intelligence is the market system, and we can learn much about online collaboration by comparing it to the market. Of course, the market is so familiar that it’s tempting to take it for granted, and to focus only on examples where it amplifies collective stupidity, such as the crashes of 2008 and 1929. But most of the time the market really does amplify our collective intelligence. In his book The Company of Strangers, the British economist Paul Seabright tells how two years after the breakup of the Soviet Union he met with a senior Russian official who was visiting the UK to learn about the free market. “Please understand that we are keen to move towards a market system,” the Russian official said, “But we need to understand the fundamental details of how such a system works. Tell me, for example: who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?”
The familiar but still astonishing answer to this question is that in a market economy, everyone is in charge. As the market price of bread goes up and down, it informs our collective behavior: whether to plant a new wheat field, or leave it fallow; whether to open that new bakery you’ve been thinking about opening on the corner; or simply whether to buy two or three loaves of bread this week. The prices are signals to help coordinate the actions of suppliers and consumers: as demand for a good goes up, so does the price, motivating new suppliers to enter the market. The result is a marvelous dance of actions that puts food on our tables, cars in our garages, and smartphones in our pockets. Familiarity makes us take this for granted, but the dance is really a miraculous mass collaboration, mediated so smoothly by the market that it’s only noticed when absent.
What makes prices useful is that, as emphasized by the economist Friedrich von Hayek, they aggregate an enormous amount of hidden knowledge—knowledge that would otherwise not be apparent to all the people interested in the production or consumption of goods. By using prices to aggregate this knowledge and inform further actions, the market produces outcomes superior to even the brightest and best informed individuals. It enables a dynamic division of labor: if flooding wipes out the wheat crop in much of the United States, then the price will rise, and other suppliers of wheat will respond by working hard to increase the supply.
Markets and the price system thus have many of the properties we’ve identified in online collaboration. In contrast to conventional offline organizations, they use both a dynamic division of labor and designed serendipity.