"Hey dudes, I have this super awesome idea, and it's totally going to change everything. Yes! It actually makes everything you're saying now totally irrelevant! But you can't see it for... I don't know, 22 years? I hope that's cool. But trust me, all your bases for argumentation are belong to us!"
Yeah, I don't know. I'd rather read undercooked ideas and talk about them than wait until the author considers it complete and definitive. I think pressure to publish gives that incentive to add your voice to the discussion, even if you haven't yet had time to consider all the implications of what you want to say. Silence, however productive that silence was, doesn't achieve anything until some noise is being made about it.
I mean, I'm still in grad school so I face relatively little pressure. Ask me in a decade once my soul's been crushed under the need-to-publish wheel, and I'll likely give you a different response.
I find it a bit troubling to prioritize knowledge in that fashion.
I mean, those dozens of little studies have their uses. Certainly, there's cruft in circulation, but just because an academic is turning out a paper or a chapter every time they sneeze doesn't mean those papers are useless, particularly not if you assess it as a whole body of work rather than as individual chunks.
Someone has to do the legwork, after all. Those little studies often snowball.
If we had football chants in academia, then "There's only one Charlie Darwin...there's only one Char-lie Dar-Win," might be quite a hit.
The point, I think, is that although time has moved on, "new knowledge" isn't necessarily hampered by the change of pace we've witnessed over a hundred and fifty years. (The endless re-evaluation of "old" knowledge, sans fresh input or thinking, is a very different kettle of fish, however. It'd be quite fun to come up with a new term or genus for the species which keeps on cranking that stuff out just to pay the bills...)
I just don't see what the possible point is of comparing a research culture when only a tiny minority of the richest white men were able to get even a secondary education, never mind a tertiary education, with a research culture which is accessible to so much wider a population, and which is concurrently so much more competitive. They're two such different environments that I don't really see the point.
Many scientists understood Darwin's theory instantaneously. Others were inhibited more by religious convention and the resulting unpopularity of the theory than intellect.
Extrapolating from Darwin to science in general isn't fair. His history is so unique in so many ways, you just can't compare it to today's scientific working situation. Darwin was independently wealthy, and was under no pressure to publish until Alfred Wallace showed up with a similar theory.
Incidentally, I've worked in two places where there was little pressure to publish. Guess what? Hardly anyone published.
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Yeah, I don't know. I'd rather read undercooked ideas and talk about them than wait until the author considers it complete and definitive. I think pressure to publish gives that incentive to add your voice to the discussion, even if you haven't yet had time to consider all the implications of what you want to say. Silence, however productive that silence was, doesn't achieve anything until some noise is being made about it.
I mean, I'm still in grad school so I face relatively little pressure. Ask me in a decade once my soul's been crushed under the need-to-publish wheel, and I'll likely give you a different response.
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I mean, those dozens of little studies have their uses. Certainly, there's cruft in circulation, but just because an academic is turning out a paper or a chapter every time they sneeze doesn't mean those papers are useless, particularly not if you assess it as a whole body of work rather than as individual chunks.
Someone has to do the legwork, after all. Those little studies often snowball.
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The point, I think, is that although time has moved on, "new knowledge" isn't necessarily hampered by the change of pace we've witnessed over a hundred and fifty years. (The endless re-evaluation of "old" knowledge, sans fresh input or thinking, is a very different kettle of fish, however. It'd be quite fun to come up with a new term or genus for the species which keeps on cranking that stuff out just to pay the bills...)
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Darwin's 'Origin' sold out two printings within weeks, and printed a total of six editions over ten years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_species
Extrapolating from Darwin to science in general isn't fair. His history is so unique in so many ways, you just can't compare it to today's scientific working situation. Darwin was independently wealthy, and was under no pressure to publish until Alfred Wallace showed up with a similar theory.
Incidentally, I've worked in two places where there was little pressure to publish. Guess what? Hardly anyone published.
Dangerous Bill
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