The other day, Will and I were discussing the vast number of scientific papers already published and what little room there will be for our own contributions. In our despair, we forgot a crucial part of life, that quality will always outlast quantity; in a strict capitalistic sense, while there might be imitators, the ideas of good products will always be bought and sold. Take for instance the iPhone app store. At its conception, the few apps that existed served very specific purposes and developers were able to charge a fair but profitable price for their services. Once the app store began to get diluted with apps such as "Goal2Action" and "Looptastic Gold", the power of the market once again shifted to consumers to find and support quality apps. So in regards to science, how far can I take my favorite metaphor? Who are our consumers?
The scientific community plays a large role in judging the quality of our work, but in a deeper philosophical sense, Time plays the final judge in determining quality. Because as scientists, what we're really striving for is to discover truth. Pontius Pilate once asked "What is truth?" and the answer is maintained by methods that are still unreachable to us. Therefore the discovery of truth will always remain the final barometer for our work. Scientific discoveries such has Mendel's postulations on genetics or Galileo's astronomical work (haha) has stood the test of time. Even Darwin's evolutionary thought has accrued evidence to defend itself. And while our contributions might not be as large, if they reflect truth, they should withstand both the scrutiny of our peers and also the interrogation of Time.
And that is what we should be aiming for, to understand truth, as opposed to trying to publish for the sake of our career. Ambition is not necessarily evil, but it should not be the forefront of our motivations. Too often in science we see work being done because it is required for a grant, as opposed to a more "pure" motivation of just wanting to know for the advancement of knowledge. Such work de-values the body of science because the act of merely spinning your wheels gains you no distance. And the community itself is to blame for adopting an environment that is a microcosm of the capitalistic world at large, a model that struggles to succeed because the end goal is always selfish achievement.
So while it can be discouraging to see the volumes and volumes of scientific literature, I find peace that not all of it is noteworthy, not all of it is significant, and not all of it is true. And I remain hopeful that as I continue to seek truth, I will find it.
chalk up this post to a naive youthful dream
ReplyDeleteThis is going to be a point of schizophrenia for this blog. Truth is important, but it's not important for its own sake. It's only important because it is useful to us as individuals and to humankind more broadly. In the end, truth is never assessed on its own. Darwinism isn't still here because it's true, it's still here because it's usefully true. String theory, you'll notice, may be dead on correct, but it's mostly tabled for now because it makes no useful predictions.
ReplyDeleteHm, I think this is more of an argument of semantics. Truth is important because it is true (circular, I know), which furthers our understanding of the world around us. Darwinism itself isn't useful, but because it could be truth, it explains how the natural world came about.
ReplyDeleteAlright let's not get carried away with semantics, but Evolution as a theory is more than historical. I would argue against the relevance of explanatory and historical science except inasmuch as they help us model and predict future events.
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