Caveat Lector

A curious set of posts from Alex Halavais (here) and Liz Lawley (here) remind me yet one more time why I must bless fate for steering me out of academia.

I mean, these are two people with their heads on pretty straight. And yet the system has warped them such that they both get a twinge when somebody else comes out with a perfectly good idea, just because they didn’t come out with it first.

Silly me. I thought the ideas were the important stuff, not so much who had them; certainly not who had them first.

This doesn’t happen to the same extent in, say, the LazyWeb. Somebody else wrote the code I wanted to write first? Well, cool, that means I can go write some other code. It’s not a dis on my code-writing ability; it doesn’t take away from me at all. It’d be just plain weird to go into a corner and sulk about it.

I’ve read the stuff on reputation systems in open-source, yeah, and I’ve seen some of the fights over it. I think the analogy only goes so far, though, and the chief difference is that in the ideal case, everyone who contributes to a piece of open-source software gets credited, whereas academia sticks to the thoroughly stupid and bizarre notion that only one person can really have come up with any given idea. (Even multiply-authored papers have a first or primary author!)

Deeply sick and sad system. I’m so glad I’m out of it for good I couldn’t begin to tell you.

I mean, imagine a grant system in which when two similar proposals are received, the grantor calls both authors and says “Hey, you guys are on to something. Why don’t you work together on it?” instead of stamping a big red OK on one and a big red NO on the other. Wouldn’t that just rock?

On the bright side, the end of Alex’s post indicates he’s willing and able to go on searching for the next bright idea, no hurt feelings. Good for him. It’s hard to buck the system.