Richard Price

Many of my religious friends point out the value of their religion in creating a sense of community in their neighborhoods. Churches, mosques, and other religious buildings are places where people can connect in non-professional contexts and support each other. Families can connect with each other and bond. 

My religious friends also point out the value of religion in inspiring people to contemplate what kind of person they want to be. Churches provide a place where people are encouraged on a regular basis to consider their place in the world: what kind of life they would like to lead, and how they would like to treat other people. 

It feels that we are increasingly moving into a secular age. The historical evidence that religions present for their factual claims about where the world came from look less and less credible as we become more and more accustomed to rigorously proved scientific claims. 

As secularism rises, I wonder if something needs to be created that provides the community-building role and the moral inspiration role that local churches and religious communities have historically played. 

One idea is that families, couples and individuals could get together periodically in neighborhood groups and discuss inspiring examples of exceptional human beings and their achievements. These stories would encourage people in the groups to think about what kind of person they want to be. 

The stories could be about outstanding human beings such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King - what they achieved, the struggles they overcame, and what made them tick. Perhaps there could be tales of neighborhood heros too - local people who have done inspiring things. 

These stories would be case studies in human greatness. One would learn Gandhi’s and Mandela’s masterful control of their tempers in the face of injustice, and the thickness of their skins in handling what was thrown at them.

One could study the kindness and wisdom of people like Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, Mohammed and Buddha without dwelling on the supernatural claims that swirled around those individuals. One would learn about the softness of Mrs Jones in the next door village who looked after a child who got lost in the supermarket. 

Instead of being worshipful, these studies would be open to the complicated nature of the human condition, and the flaws that all of those human beings had. No-one is perfect and these stories could aim to provide a balanced picture of human nature: presenting both the flaws and the aspects of greatness.

Often case studies are best discussed in groups. It’s interesting to see what others make of a story. One learns more about the story and more about one’s friends. If there were local groups discussing these stories, families might turn up and join in, and a sense of community may emerge.

Churches have an array of incentives for people to show up to events - community-building, and also the promise of eternal salvation. These kinds of secular gatherings would have to make do with the community-building bit and tales of human inspiration. That may be enough - who knows. 

Without wanting to push the analogy with churches too far, it may even be that Sunday mornings or evenings are a particularly good time for contemplative discussion in a community setting. The week is a hectic time, and Saturday is a nice day for unwinding. By Sunday one may have recharged enough to be able to be reflective. 

One can imagine these tales of human inspiration coming in a number of forms, and emerging from a number of sources. Some of them could be videos and posts on the internet that have surfaced and are worth discussing. Others may be stories that are generated explicitly for discussion at these kinds of groups. There may be demand for a variety of companies and institutions to source these stories and provide them in a compelling way. 

It would be interesting to know if there are communities where people are already doing this - trying to take the best of what churches have historically provided, and deliver those experiences in a non-religious way. If anyone knows of any, I’d be interested to find out if they are working, and what people think about them. Let me know in the comments or drop me an email at richard [at] academia.edu. 

When Facebook first launched I remember that one of the cool things about it was that it added some easy structure to a piece of social interaction that had been cumbersome before: following up with someone after you had met them. 

Before Facebook you would take the person’s email address and have to draft an email to them as a way of cementing the initial meeting. Then Facebook launched and all one had to do was click ‘add friend’. It meant that it was much easier to follow up with interesting people that one had met. 

Right now on Facebook there is button-like interaction, such as people liking your photo, and unstructured interactions like messaging and commenting. It may be that more of our social interactions are moving from the unstructured realm to the structured realm of buttons. 

After I hang out with a friend for dinner I often want to reach out to them the next day to say ‘thanks, great to see you yesterday’, but it feels awkward to put that in an email. Email expects a slightly longer and deeper kind of communication. I wonder whether there is a button that could help one follow up with friends after hanging out with them.

More generally often one thinks of someone during the course of the day, and usually the context doesn’t warrant sending them an email. Email is too weighty for the kind of lightweight thoughts of people one has as one goes about one’s day. I’ve sometimes wondered whether there could be a lightweight form of communication like ‘I thought of you today when doing X’.

This post originally appeared as a guest post in TechCrunch here. 

Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a second time to read it.

The heart of the problem lies in the reputation system, which encourages scientists to put their work behind paywalls. The way out of this mess is to build new reputation metrics. The changes to reputation metrics in science that are underway are reflective of how reputation is measured online: Twitter has followers and retweets; GitHub has followers and forks; StackOverflow has reputation; Facebook has likes and comments; YouTube has view counts.

An ecosystem of startups is working on building these new reputation metrics in science, including my startup Academia.edu, as well as Mendeley and ResearchGate (other important players in the space are PLoS and Google Scholar). All three platforms have passed 2 million users and are growing fast. In three to four years, all the world’s scientists will be on one or all of these platforms.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS IN SCIENCE

Scientists need to build their reputations, and the primary reputation metric in science is being published in prestigious journals, such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. When scientists apply for a grant or a job, they know that there are 200 other people applying for the same grant, and that the grant committee scans resumes looking for such journal titles.

Journal publishers use their ownership of the reputation system to their advantage. When a scientist is looking to be published, they require a scientist to transfer the copyright of their paper. In this transaction, the scientists who wrote the paper are not paid and receive no royalties from the revenues from the paywalls. The peer reviewers who review the paper for the journal are not paid, nor are the taxpayers who have provided between $20K and $160K for the funding of the research behind the paper.

Because of its ownership of the reputation system in science, the journal industry is able to acquire the copyright to the world’s peer-reviewed scientific output for free. It then charges the public who funded the research — and the scientific community who authored and peer-reviewed it — $8 billion a year to access it. Effectively, the scientific community provides the product to the journal industry (the papers and the peer reviews), and then has to pay, along with the public, to get it back.

The tragedy of the commons is that individually rational decisions, namely scientists handing over the copyright of their papers to collect reputation metrics, lead to an outcome that is bad for the public at large. Because of paywalls, the majority of the world ends up being unable to access the scientific literature that it has funded.

NEW REPUTATION METRICS

To break out of the tragedy of the commons, new reputation metrics, developed by a number of startups, are emerging that incentivize scientists to share their research openly, rather than incentivizing them to put their research behind a paywall. Scientists are adopting them to better stand out from the crowd when applying for jobs.

Examples of these new reputation metrics include inbound citation counts, readership metrics and follower counts.

Inbound citation metrics. A few years ago, Google Scholar started displaying inbound citation counts for papers – counts of how often a given paper was cited by other papers. Scientists have started to see these inbound citation counts as a way to demonstrate the impact of their work, and are increasingly including them in their job and grant applications. In some fields, such as physics, scientists are more proud of their inbound citation counts than they are of the journal titles on their resume.

Readership metrics. Academia.edu, Mendeley and ResearchGate are helping scientists to understand readership metrics around their research. These sites tell academics how many people are reading their work, as well as some demographic data about those readers. Increasingly these readership metrics are helping to influence hiring decisions by tenure committees.

Follower counts. Scientists are increasingly wanting direct, unmediated relationships with their audiences. Twitter, Facebook and other sites have put content creators directly in touch with their audiences. Scientists are saying ‘I want that direct relationship with my audience too!’ The personal brands of scientists are starting to eclipse those of journals, and follower counts help a scientist understand the growth of their personal brand.

In the pre-web era, scientists used to print out papers and read them in their labs in non-trackable ways. Increasingly scientists are reading and sharing papers online. The reputation metrics described above are derived from this online activity. Two others that will emerge include:

1. Commenting metrics: As scientists increasingly comment on papers online, metrics will emerge to reflect the most discussed papers.
2. Recommendation metrics: As scientists increasingly share paper recommendations online, metrics will emerge to reflect the most shared/recommended papers.

To distinguish between mere popularity and genuine impact, these metrics will take into account the reputation of the scientists doing the commenting/recommending. The metrics will be recursive in the way that Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the quality of the linking site and not just the quantity of them.

SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS WILL DISAPPEAR

As I mentioned, the journal title has historically accounted for close to 100 percent of a scientist’s public reputation. That figure is probably now at 90 percent, with 10 percent for the new reputation metrics mentioned above. As new reputation metrics emerge, the journal title will decline in relative significance. Soon we will get to a point where the journal title contributes less than 10 percent of a scientist’s reputation, and the bulk of the scientist’s reputation metrics are coming from other sources.

At this point scientists will see that the costs of publishing a paper via a journal outweigh the benefits, and they will stop publishing papers in journals. The costs of publishing a paper via a journal are significant, both in impact and money. Journals take a long time to publish research. There is an average time lag of 12 months between submitting a paper to a journal, and the journal publishing it. This is 12 months of lost impact for the scientist.

Journals mostly put papers behind paywalls, which further limits the audience and impact of the paper. Some journals now make the paper accessible to readers for free, but the author typically has to pay $1,000-$3,000 to remove the paywall around their research.

Increasingly it will be seen as perverse to submit a paper to a journal and wait 12 months for comments from two scientists, instead of sharing it on a platform like Academia.edu and getting comments from hundreds of scientists in two weeks.

The first journals to disappear will be the ones whose titles offer the least reputation boost – the second- and third-tier journals. Shortly afterwards, Nature, Science and the top-tier journals will disappear.

Scientists will be sharing their work on multiple platforms, and their reputations will be based on a constellation of metrics. And as journals lose their significance, the dream of open access will be realized: a villager in India will have the same access to the world’s scientific literature as a professor at Harvard.

HOW REPUTATION METRICS WILL CHANGE SCIENCE

In addition to incentivizing scientists to share their work openly, new reputation metrics will also play a role in changing science in a number of ways:

Better peer review. Right now the peer-review system takes 12 months to complete, and surfaces the opinions of only two scientists – scientists who may be biased, uninformed about the subject matter, or just in a bad mood when writing the review.

Reputation metrics will bring about a system where opinions are surfaced from the entire scientific community, and in real time. A mathematician who sees an incorrect theorem in a paper they are reading will be racing to get their refutation out by 6 p.m. in order to collect the glory and the reputation metrics that will follow from that insight.

Instant distribution. Reputation metrics will incentivize scientists to share their work instantly, rather than let their work be held back in 12-month publication time lags.

Data sets and other content formats. Historically, papers are shared because the journal title has been the only reputation metric, and journals only publish papers. Journals don’t publish data sets, code, videos, and other aspects of a scientist’s output. Seventy-five percent of the world’s scientific data isn’t shared because the incentives aren’t there for scientists to share it. New reputation metrics will provide those incentives.

BUSINESS MODELS

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others don’t charge users to share or consume content. The costs of the platforms are low enough for them to be able to monetize via ancillary services such as advertising.

We are moving towards a science where scientists and the general public will not be paying to share and consume research. The business models that will emerge in science will be as diverse as the ones on the web at large. There will be advertising businesses; freemium models; and enterprise sales models.

$1 trillion a year is spent on R&D, and as scientific activity moves online and becomes trackable, it is going to be possible to build tools that help that R&D capital be better spent more efficiently.

Every innovation in medicine and technology in the world has its roots in a science paper, and speeding up science will change the rate of innovation. The startups looking to help facilitate this, such as those mentioned above and Science Exchange, Figshare, Microryza, Quartzy, Altmetric and ImpactStory, are engineering-driven and need engineers and designers to aid in the effort. If you are interested in joining, there is a list of startups looking to accelerate science here.

The Kindle is wonderful in many ways:

• instant access to books. You can think of a book, and, as long as there is a Kindle version, be reading it in a few seconds. No waiting for a couple of days for the book to arrive via Amazon. 
• no clutter. You own less physical clutter if your books are on a Kindle, which is terrific when you are traveling, or moving house, or are just short of space in your house. 

There are a couple of drawbacks for me. A minor one is that the Kindle is bad for reference books, where you want to flick back and forth from one page to another. The Kindle is good for books that you read cover to cover, page by page, and bad for things like cookbooks. 

The bigger issue is discoverability. I often buy books I have heard of with a view to reading them at a later point. The problem with buying these books on the Kindle is that I forget about them. The books appear in the Kindle’s library, and I rarely check my Kindle’s library. 

The advantage of physical books from this perspective is that they can be all over your house, winking at you, saying ‘Read me!’. Occasionally, after dinner, or on a weekend, I notice one of these books, and pick it up and start reading it.

Another aspect of this easy discoverability of physical books is that friends who are visiting can see which books you have, and the books can prompt discussion, and so on. 

I don’t know how to solve this discoverability problem with the Kindle. For me, it’s large enough that I now find myself buying physical books mainly, despite the clutter problems associated with them. 

One solution is to envisage some kind of digital emulation of bookshelves, where wallpaper at home becomes increasingly digital, and can display books and other media. 

Another solution is for one’s books to feature more in one’s digital life online - i.e. feature more on Facebook, Twitter, Academia.edu, and other places that one spends online. 

Perhaps an analog would be to have wallpaper on the back of one’s Twitter profile and Facebook profile that displays one’s media, populated directly from one’s Kindle purchases. One would be aware of one’s books in a lightweight way, and one’s friends could comment on them too.

Another idea is that one’s books could occasionally pop up in one’s News Feeds to remind oneself of them. E.g. your Kindle could tweet out to you each day one book you have bought, to remind yourself of it.

The Kindle has an API but the public details of it are fairly thin on the ground, so I don’t know whether one’s Kindle could sync with the Twitter and Facebook APIs to enable this kind of auto-tweeting from one’s library. 

A couple of weeks ago I was in DC, and I visited the Holocaust museum there. It is a really good museum. With most museums, I often feel that I could learn more about the topic by reading Wikipedia, but with the Holocaust museum in DC, I learnt more than I could have from Wikipedia. They have a lot of displays, and original artifacts from 1930s and 1940s Germany that bring a dimension to the history that you can’t get from reading history online. 

As I was there, learning about the rise of Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s, some parallels occurred to me between Adolf Hitler and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and it gave me some insight into why Israel is so terrified of a nuclear Iran. 

Iran and the bomb

Iran clearly wants a nuclear bomb, and one can understand why it might want such a bomb. Iran is surrounded by states that are, at times, hostile to it, and a bomb would bolster its national security. 

Israel is terrified about Iran getting a bomb. A single bomb could wipe out Tel Aviv, which accounts for 17% of Israel’s GDP.

Many say that Iran would never use a nuclear bomb aggressively against Israel, because doing so would lead to an international response against Iran that may annihilate much of the country. 

The argument is that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, and Ahmadinejad would be moderate with a nuclear bomb. A bomb would give them leverage in security discussions, but they would not use it aggressively. 

The problem with this argument is that Ahmadinejad keeps on saying that Israel needs to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Some of Ahmadinejad’s quotes are below:

In 2008, on Israel’s 60th birthday, Ahmadinejad said:

“Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken. Today the reason for the Zionist regime’s existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation.”

and 

“They should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy (it).”

In July of this year, Ahmadinejad said “any freedom lover and justice seeker in the world must do its best for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the path for the establishment of justice and freedom in the world”

In August of this year, Ahmadinejad said “the very existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humanity”, and “the Zionist regime and the Zionists are a cancerous tumor. Even if one cell of them is left in one inch of (Palestinian) land, in the future this story (of Israel’s existence) will repeat.” 

He also said “the nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land”

The original architect of the 1979 revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, said, in the 1980s, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.”

The next Ayatollah, Khamenei, said in 2000, “Iran’s position, which was first expressed by the Imam [Khomeini] and stated several times by those responsible, is that the cancerous tumor called Israel must be uprooted from the region.”

In October 2011, Khameini was more moderate:

“We do not suggest launching a classic war by the armies of Muslim countries, or throwing immigrant Jews into the sea, or mediation by the UN and other international organizations. We propose holding a referendum with [the participation of] the Palestinian nation. The Palestinian nation, like any other nation, has the right to determine their own destiny and elect the governing system of the country.” 

The rhetoric

There are some who play down this rhetoric, and say that Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, in particular, can be attributed to his desire to move further to the right than Khamenei. According to this line of argument, Ahmadinejad is a moderate deep down. The rhetoric is just for show, and he would never risk his country’s security by preemptively dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel. 

Echoes of Hitler

The problem with this line of argument is that it has been heard by the Jewish community before, in the case of Hitler. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920s, where he laid out his extreme anti-Semitic views. In 1932, Hitler campaigned to become President of Germany. He won 35% of the vote, and lost to the incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg. 

The government in Germany was not very effective at the time, and Paul von Hindenburg, the President, decided to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Apparently he had been convinced by his advisors that Hitler would be a moderate in power. 

This was definitely a leap on the part of Hindenburg and his advisors, given that, in the 1920s, Hitler had attempted a coup in Munich, declaring that his aim was national revolution. For this coup, Hitler was jailed in 1923 for high treason, and it was during his jail time that he wrote Mein Kampf.

Despite this history, Hindenburg was persuaded that Hitler would be a moderate in power, and that his early extremist rhetoric was just for show, and not reflective of what he really thought. 

In fact, as we all know, Hitler meant exactly what he wrote in Mein Kampf, and he was a maniac instead of a moderate, who seized virtually all political power just months after becoming Chancellor, and began his campaign against the Jews, the Roma, and other groups. 

Furthermore, Hitler did indeed bring vast destruction, ultimately, onto Germany with his aggressive military strategy. 

Israel

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Israelis are wary of the argument that Ahmadinejad is secretly a moderate who doesn’t mean his anti-semitic rhetoric, and who wouldn’t sacrifice his country’s security as part of an aggressive military strategy. 

Ahmadinejad will be out of office in July 2013, as the President of Iran can serve only two terms, and his time is up. But one can understand Israel’s fear that someone equally anti-semitic will take his place, especially if the political environment favors an extremist.

The idea that Israel may preemptively strike Iran to prevent it from getting the bomb may be seen as crazy, as a sure guarantee of a bloody and escalating war between the two countries. But Israelis have seen an episode of history before, where a man whom people believed would be a moderate turned out to be as anti-semitic as he said all along that he was. 

Furthermore, in this episode of history, the world stood by and failed to come to the rescue of European Jews, refusing to allow mass immigration out of Germany and Austria, and leaving Jews to suffer their fate under someone who had already established an unrelenting anti-semitic policy. 

The international community is currently advising Israel not to strike Iran, but we can imagine that Israel is aware that the international community has not always known what is in the interests of the Jewish community.

Many in the West view the hawkish right in Israel as being overly militant and aggressive in its proposals to preemptively bomb Iran. But it is useful to understand where this fear of Iran may be coming from. The Jewish community has seen people bet on the idea that a ruler isn’t as anti-semitic as the ruler declares he himself to be, and they have seen that bet go wildly wrong.

I sometimes find myself in conversations discussing the role of philosophy. Over the years, I have formed a view of the role of philosophy, and I wanted to share it. My background is that I did a PhD in philosophy at Oxford, where I was a Fellow of All Souls College. I finished my PhD in 2007. 

These observations below are based on my experience talking about the role of philosophy with other philosophers, together with a few of my own reflections. As such this post is not a rigorous piece. It is more like a statement of a hypothesis, based on anecdotal reflections about philosophy’s history. I am hoping that, by airing this hypothesis, people who know aspects of these matters better than me can come along and add their thoughts and criticisms. 

Philosophy’s role in spawning new disciplines

The hypothesis is that one of the principal roles of philosophy is in spawning new disciplines. In this role, philosophy takes a new terrain where there has not been much work, and brings it under theoretical control. Eventually some questions emerge that are precise enough to warrant empirical investigation. 

There was a time, 2,500 years ago, where very little was under theoretical control, and philosophy, as practised by people such as Aristotle, covered more or less everything. Then some areas, such as physics, biology, and chemistry became precise enough that they spun out as separate disciplines. Some recent disciplines to have emerged out of philosophy include economics and psychology. Modern linguistics may have been influenced by philosophy too. 

Predicting the spawning of new disciplines

The birthing process of a new discipline takes many decades, so it’s very hard to predict what disciplines, if any, are being birthed by philosophy right now. When economics and psychology were in the process of being birthed, the people involved in the process probably couldn’t predict that the new questions they were exploring would provide the foundations for entire new disciplines.

Similarly, decision theory is a relatively new field, and it’s the intersection of work in economics, statistics, and formal epistemology. It’s very hard to predict whether this nascent field will grow into a discipline the size of economics. We don’t know what will happen to it. 

Another thing that makes it difficult to predict what disciplines philosophy will spawn next is that philosophy also spawns new sub-areas of philosophy every so often. For instance, philosophy of language is a relatively new area of philosophy, one that emerged in the early 20th century from the work of Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophy of language applied some theoretical rigor to the structure of language, a few decades before the birth of modern linguistics, as pioneered by Chomsky. 

The spawning process: examples from economics, psychology, and decision theory

Economics

Philosophy often seems terribly abstract. Moral philosophers debate, amongst other things, about whether there is such a thing as objective good and objective bad, or whether all moral judgements are just subjective likes and dislikes. Some people consider this an important question in and of itself, whereas others are not moved by it.

Be that as it may, occasionally an abstract topic like this will spawn a new discipline. Adam Smith, who is considered the father of economics, was a moral philosopher, who took the abstract questions of moral philosophy in a new direction, creating the foundation of a new discipline in the process. 

Psychology

The study of consciousness and the mind also seem extremely abstract. Philosophers of mind try to map out the various mental states that we find ourselves in, and try to figure out how those mental states interact with one another. William James, who is considered the founding father of psychology, was a philosopher and a physiologist, who took traditional philosophy of mind questions in a new direction, spawning a new discipline in the process. 

Decision theory

Another traditionally very abstract part of philosophy is epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemologists ask questions such as whether we know anything. One central issue at the heart of epistemology is the idea that our internal visual and sensory states might have been caused by a number of possible external circumstances. They could have been caused by real world objects, such as tables and chairs - i.e. the sorts of objects we believe cause our experiences. Or they could have been caused by a computer that we are hooked up to, as in the Matrix. There are infinitely many possible causes of our internal visual states. How can we know which of these infinitely many possible causes actually caused our visual states on a given occasion?

As with ethics, some people consider this an important question in and of itself, and others are not moved by it. But, be that as it may, one aspect of epistemology that has grown considerably in recent decades is formal epistemology, which is a branch of epistemology, and which studies questions such as how people should update their beliefs in response to new evidence. Formal epistemology is one of the contributing fields to decision theory. Ultimately, we want computers to be able to make decisions with human-like intelligence, so modeling out human decision-making practices is an important first step. 

Progress in philosophy

People often say that there is no progress in philosophy. One way of thinking of the progress in philosophy is that once enough progress has been made in a given area, that sub-area is spun off into an entire new discipline, as in the cases of economics or psychology. 

We haven’t answered some of the central questions in philosophy, such as “Do we know anything?”, and “Is there objective good and objective bad?” But we have made progress in mapping out some of the conceptual terrain around these questions. Some of this progress is manifested in the emergence of disciplines that are focused on specific aspects of these questions. 

The continuing role of theory

It is also worth pointing out that once a new discipline has been spawned, there remains a lot of theoretical work to do. The theorists who do this work are not in philosophy departments, but their work is often highly philosophical in nature. 

In the early days of a new discipline, there will be continue to  be collaboration between theorists in the new discipline, and philosophers. Decision theory is at this stage right now, and there continues to be some collaboration between philosophers and theorists in economics, psychology, and linguistics. 

In other areas, such as physics, the theoretical parts are so large and established that there is no longer collaboration with philosophy. In the case of physics, the influence is now the other way: philosophers of physics take insights from theoretical physics, and bring them back into philosophy to see what ramifications they may have for philosophical theories. 

How philosophy decides what to work on

How does philosophy decide what to work on? It definitely isn’t with a view to spawning a new discipline. No-one would know where to start if that was the guiding goal. Generally the motivating idea in philosophy is to take ordinary concepts that we seem to use a lot, and see if they withstand scrutiny. 

Identity over time

For instance, someone might say “Beside me now is the woman that I married 25 years ago, to this day.” In this remark is the assumption that the woman he is married to now is the same person as the person he married 25 years ago, and that she is a different person from his mother, or his sister. He is assuming that there is such a thing as identity over time. One aspect of metaphysics is focused on taking this notion of identity over time, something that underlies the way we speak, and seeing what it comes to. What is the implicit theory of identity over time that we seem to believe, and does the theory withstand scrutiny?

Free will

Another question concerns free will. We think of ourselves as free agents, and different in kind from a plant, which just responds to external stimuli reflexively, and not by choice, or by the exercise of willpower. But what is free will? If you were a god, creating a new universe, and you said “In this new universe, people will have free will”, what are you granting people exactly? What does it mean for that command to be properly implemented? The study of free will is about answering these kinds of questions. 

Similar points apply to our conception of good and bad, and our conception of knowledge and justification. These are concepts that we regularly deploy in describing how we think of the world around us. Philosophy’s role is to try to extract the underlying theory that we seem to operate with, with regard to these concepts, and then see if those theories withstand scrutiny. 

Every so often, as theoretical rigor is applied to these concepts, and their underlying commitments, an area pops up where questions have been sufficiently defined for them to be studied on their own, using a wider variety of tools: mathematics, experiments, and different kinds of theorizing. That area may fizzle out, or it may be the beginning of a new discipline. 

I have often wondered why so many religions seem to fetishize sex. Sex doesn’t seem to fit into the main functions of religion. Two of those functions seem to me to be:

• Knowledge: providing a physical and metaphysical framework for the world: explaining the history of the universe, and explaining why it was created.
• Ethics: providing an ethical framework for how you should interact with other human beings, and making suggestions along the lines of ‘be considerate towards the welfare of others’ etc.

The fundamental moral principles of religions like Christianity, and also many others, are things like: everyone is born with equal rights; treat others as you would treat yourself; try to alleviate the suffering of others. 

These principles don’t really seem to have any relevance to sexual acts that occur between consenting adults. If two people consent to engage parts of their bodies in various ways, that doesn’t seem to raise any ethical issues of its own. There seem to be no more moral issues raised about a sexual act than there are raised about some other physical act between two consenting adults, such as shaking hands, or giving someone a piggy-back. 

So why is there a huge moral emphasis in many religions about what kinds of sexual acts are moral, and what kinds are immoral? Why do religions care about how consenting adults interact with their sexual organs, any more than they care about how consenting adults shake hands, or give one another piggy-backs?

One possibility is that the fetishization of sex is a growth and engagement strategy for a religion. Most religions deal with topics that are quite dry, and that people don’t think about very much, such as the history of the universe, and the reason the universe exists, and the broader purpose of one’s life. 

These are questions that occur periodically to people, but not multiple times a day. If, however, a religion can attach itself to things that one thinks about every day, such as sex, then the religion will have a much greater chance of avoiding irrelevance and being forgotten.

It may be that the successful religions that are around today are the ones that managed to attach their infrequently thought-about metaphysical and ethical framework to  topics that are thought about many times a day, such as sex. Similar points may apply to the fetishization of food, another topic that is thought about regularly. 

If you think about religion many times a day, it will be at the top of your mind, and the religion will be more viral. There will be more opportunities in conversation with others for your religion to have something relevant to say - e.g. when the conversation veers towards food or sex. 

By contrast, religions that only deal with questions that people don’t often think about, e.g. the meaning of life, and the history of the universe, are more liable to be at the backs of people’s minds, and there will be fewer conversational opportunities where your religion will have something relevant to contribute. 

It may not have been an intentional strategy on behalf of the world’s largest religions to fetishize sex as a growth strategy.  There may not have been an explicit discussion about growth amongst Jesus and the twelve disciples. There may have been other reasons that sex was fetishized, and viewed as a morally significant form of physical interaction. Nevertheless, the successful religions may owe their enormous growth in part to their fetishization of sex, and other regularly-thought about topics.

One naturally wonders whether other basic desires and needs have been harnessed as growth drivers for religions - e.g. the need for shelter and the need for clothing. I can’t bring to mind religions that have fetishized these two basic needs to their advantage, but it may well have happened. 

I’d be interested to hear what others think. How plausible is it that the fetishization of sex was one of the major growth drivers of the world’s religions?

I went to the Growth Hackers conference in Menlo Park last Friday. Among the speakers were people who had headed up growth teams at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Dropbox. 

One of the themes that came up a lot was the idea of the growth team finding a leading indicator of a user who would turn into an engaged user later on. The growth team would then focus on optimizing for that metric. 

Here are how the companies thought about that leading indicator. 

Facebook

Chamath Palihapitiya, who used to run Facebook’s growth team, said that Facebook’s leading indicator of an engaged user later on was the user reaching 7 friends within 10 days of signing up. 

Zynga

Nabeel Hyatt, a VC at Spark Capital, and formerly a GM at Zynga, running a 40m monthly active user game there, said that Zynga focuses on D1 retention (day 1 retention). Zynga has found that if someone comes back a day after signing up for a game, that is a leading indicator of them becoming an engaged and paying user. 

Dropbox

ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Dropbox, said that the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device. 

Twitter

Josh Elman, a VC at Greylock, and a former growth lead at Twitter, said that the leading indicator of engagement at Twitter was related to Facebook’s metric: the user following a certain number of people, and a certain percentage of those people following the user back. 

LinkedIn

Elliot Schmukler, who leads the growth team at LinkedIn, said that the leading indicator of engagement at LinkedIn is also similar to Facebook’s: the user getting to X connections in Y days. He didn’t say what the X and the Y were.

Characteristics of leading indicator metrics

The various leading indicators fit into three categories:

• Network density: friend or following connections made in a time frame
• Content added: files added to a Dropbox folder
• Visit frequency: D1 retention

Nabeel Hyatt mentioned that it’s really useful for a growth team to focus on one operational metric, and then have a number of KPIs (key performance indicators) that they also track.

He said that it’s important for the operational metric to be concrete, and also relatively early in the funnel of the user’s experience of the site. As the funnel continues, drop-off becomes high, and you want to find a leading indicator as close as possible to the top of the funnel that you can work on to minimize the drop-off.

Chamath spoke about how his growth team discovered the “7 friends in 10 days” leading indicator. He said that they looked at cohorts of users that became engaged, and cohorts of users that did not become engaged, and the pattern that emerged was that the engaged cohorts had hit at least 7 friends within 10 days of signing up. 

Other points from the speakers

A few other interesting things were mentioned at the conference. Josh Elman mentioned that Twitter has two degrees of an active user:

• a plain “active user” is someone who has visited their timeline at least once in the last 28 days
• a ‘retained’ or ‘core’ user is someone who has visited their timeline at least 7 times in 28 days.

Chamath said that, when he was running the growth team at Facebook, he focused on four things:

• Acquisition: how to acquire users.
• Activation: how to get users to their ‘Aha’ moment as quickly as possible
• Engagement: how to ensure users experience the core product value as often as possible
• Virality: how to get people to get more people onto the platform

He said there had been a tendency in growth teams he was aware of to measure the time to the “Aha” moment in days. His view is that it should be measured in hours, and ideally minutes and seconds. The idea is that a user should get an “Aha” moment as soon as humanly possible after signing up.

This originally appeared as a guest post on TechCrunch here. 

Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.

Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:

• The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published.
• The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don’t take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.

The stakes are high. If these inefficiencies can be removed, science would accelerate tremendously. A faster science would lead to fasterinnovation in medicine and technology. Cancer could be cured 2-3 years sooner than it otherwise would be, which would save millions of lives.

The time-lag problem

The first major inefficiency is the time-lag problem for distributing scientific ideas. After you have written a scientific paper, it takes, on average, 12 months for the paper to be distributed to the global scientific community. During that time the paper is going through the peer review process, which takes an extremely long time.

If you read a paper, and have some thoughts about it, and write up a response, it is going to take 12 months for your response to be seen by the global scientific community.

Science is fundamentally a conversation between scientists around the world. Currently the intervals between iterations of that conversation are 12 months on average. This 12 month time-lag represents a huge amount of friction in the circulation of scientific ideas.

Imagine the slowdown on the web if every blog post, and every tweet, and every photo, was made available on the web 12 months after it was originally posted. Imagine if all the stories in your Facebook News Feed were 12 months old. People would be storming the steps of Congress, demanding change.

The time-lag in the distribution of scientific ideas is significantly holding back science. It’s critical for global progress that we work to remove this inefficiency.

The single mode of publication problem

Historically, if a scientist wants to make a contribution to the scientific body of knowledge, it has to be in the form of a scientific paper.

Blogging hasn’t taken off in science, because scientists don’t get credit for writing blog posts. You often hear a scientist saying ‘I’m not going to put these ideas in a blog post, because they are good enough for me to incorporate into a paper, which I’ll publish in the next couple of years’. Everyone loses out because of that delay of a couple of years.

Most people who share information on the web have taken advantage of the rich media that the web provides. People share information in all kinds of forms: videos, status updates, blog posts, blog comments, data sets, interactive graphs, and other forms.

By contrast, if a scientist wants to share some information on a protein that they are working on, they have to write a paper with a set of two dimensional black and white images of that protein. The norms don’t encourage the sharing of an interactive, full-color, 3 dimensional model of the protein, even if that would be a more suitable media format for the kind of knowledge that is being shared.

The future of science: instant distribution

Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in order to make it easier for him and his colleagues to share their research papers. The web has impacted science, but over the next few years, the web is going to entirely re-invent the way that scientists interact.

In 5-10 years’ time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded.

The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science.

In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world. Discussing the idea of 12 month distribution delays for ideas will produce the same confused look that it produces today, when one asks someone to conceive of 12 month distribution delays to tweets, blog posts, and general web content.

Instant distribution means bringing the time-lag for distributing a scientific paper around the world down to 1 day, or less. This speed-up will have a transformative effect on the rate of scientific progress in the world. Discoveries will be made much more quickly.

One of the reasons that technological progress in the 20th century was so much greater than growth in previous centuries is that there were so many powerful communication technologies invented in the 20th century that connected people around the globe: the telephone, the TV, the internet.

Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.

The future of science: rich media

Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.

Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind. Most papers are downloaded from the web, and printed out by scientists for reading. The content was written in such a way that it’s fully readable in print-out form.

Most web content is inherently rich. No-one prints out their Twitter and Facebook News Feeds to read them, or blog posts. The idea of printing out content doesn’t make sense for much of the web’s content, such as YouTube videos, Facebook photos, interactive maps, and interactive graphs such as those on you find on Quantcast, or Yahoo Finance.

The hyperlink itself is a piece of interactivity built into web content. One reason you don’t want to print out a Wikipedia article to read it is that the page is full of useful links, and you want to be adjacent to that interactivity when reading the article to take advantage of the full power of the article.

Historically, scientific papers have cited other papers, but those citations are not hyper-linked.

To citizens of the web, the idea of referring to some other page without linking to it seems an impossibly old-fashioned way of sharing content.

Imagine reading a blog, or a Facebook News Feed, where there were no links, and everything was plain text. Instead, there was a set of references at the end of the page, and those references told you were to find certain other pages on the web, but the references weren’t themselves hyperlinked. A citation to a video would something like “YouTube.com, Comedy section, page 10, “Coke bottle exploding”, video id = 34883”. You would then have to go to YouTube and navigate to the right section to get the video that has that title.

This experience would indeed be a nightmare. The difference between that, and how the web currently is, is the difference between where scientific communication is right now, and where it will be in a few years, when scientists fully adopt the rich media of the web.

Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.

The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.

Science is undergoing one of the most exciting changes in its history. It is in a transition period between a pre-web form of communication to a natively web form of communication. The full adoption of the web by scientists will transform science. Scientists will start to interact and communicate in wonderful new ways that will have an enormous effect on scientific progress.

The future of science: peer review

In a world of instant distribution, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets published, and no-one will be able to tell whether a particular piece of content is good or bad?

I wrote a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago called “The Future of Peer Review”, arguing that the web has an instant distribution model, and has thrived. I argued that the web’s main discovery engines for content on the web, namely search engines, and social networks, are at their heart, evolved peer review systems.

These web-scale peer review systems, search engines and social networks, already drive most discovery of scientific content.

The future of science: academic credit

Historically scientists have gained credit by publishing in prestigious journals. Hiring committees, and grant committees, historically have looked at the kinds of journals a scientist has managed to get published in as a measure of the quality of the scientist’s work. In the last few years, such committees have also started to look at citation counts too.

As scientific content moves to become native web content, scientific content will increasingly be evaluated according to the kinds of metrics that reflect the success of a piece of content on the web.

Web metrics vary, and evolve. Some are internet-wide metrics, such as unique visitors, page views, time on site. Others are specific to certain verticals, or sites, such as Twitter follower counts, StackOverflow score, Facebook likes, and YouTube video views.

As these metrics are increasingly understood in the context of scientific content, scientists will increasingly share content that attracts this kind of credit.

If you can share a data-set, and collect credit for it, you will. If you can comment on a paper, and collect credit for it, you will do that too. If sharing a video of a process is more compelling than having black and white images of the process, videos will take off.

Directing Silicon Valley’s resources towards accelerating science

Science is in the process of being re-built and transformed. It is going to be an exhilarating process. The positive impact to society will be significant.

The next wave of science is not being built by scientific publishers. It is being built by engineering-focused, Silicon Valley tech companies. It is being built by talented and visionary engineering and product teams.

Silicon Valley’s formidable resources are starting to turn in the direction of science, having been focused for the past 2-3 years on areas like optimizing strawberry credit flows on FarmVille. Venture capital, entrepreneurial talent, and engineering talent is starting to flow into the space, and the future of science is starting to be built.

The ecosystem needs more resources. It needs more engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. The prizes for success in transforming science go to everyone in the world. $1 trillion a year gets spent on R&D, of which $200 billion is spent in the academic sector, and $800 billion in the private sector. There are vast new companies waiting to be built here.

As the extraordinary Silicon Valley innovation engine increasingly directs itself at transforming science, you can expect to see acceleration on a scale that science has never seen. Science will change beyond recognition, and the positive impact on the rate of technology growth in the world will be enormous.

The time to act is now. If you are a VC, invest in science startups. If you are an entrepreneur, hunt for an idea in the space and run with it. If you are an engineer or designer, there is a list of startups trying to accelerate science here.

Poorly thought-through copyright bills seem to be popular in Congress these days.

Congress is currently considering a bill called “The Research Works Act”, whose purpose is to restrict public access to publicly-funded research. The bill is sponsored by large academic publishers who are keen to keep all research, including publicly-funded research, behind paywalls in perpetuity.

Academics are up in arms about this bill, and so are universities, and funding bodies. Over 5,500 academics have signed a boycott of Elsevier, who is the largest academic publisher, and one of the main sponsors of the bill. Elsevier is the target of the boycott not only because of its support of the Research Works Act, but also because of the increasingly high prices that it is charging for its journals.

Making research accessible: the open access mandate

Currently the US government provides about $30 billion of funding every year for research in biology and medicine. This funding is dispensed by a federal agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As part of its “open access mandate”, the NIH requires that any NIH-funded research has to be made freely accessible 12 months after publication. There can be a 12 month paywall, during which the publishers can recoup their costs, but after 12 months, the paywall has to come down. The thinking here is that the US taxpayer should not have to pay for research twice: once to fund it, and a second time to read it.

The aim of the Research Works Act is to reverse this open access policy, and ensure that all research remains behind publisher paywalls in perpetuity, even if it has been funded by the public.

Journal publishers have managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney (NY) and Darrell Issa (CA) that this Act is in the interests of the American public.

Journal publishers have two arguments in favor of the Research Works Act. I’ll refer to these publishers generically as ‘the journal industry’, though it’s worth noting that a there is a minority of journal publishers who don’t support the Research Works Act.

Journal Industry argument (1): The moral argument

The journal industry thinks that it is morally wrong for the government to ask for publicly-funded research to be freely accessible to the public.

The way the research process works is like this:

1. An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant
2. The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal
3. The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.
4. The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world.

However, in step 3, the journal publishers add some value to the paper, which we can call the “publisher delta”; this delta, or added value, consists mainly in formatting and secretarial skills around the organization of peer review (the peer reviewing itself is done for free, by academics).

The publisher delta is something they own, and is the result of private investment, rather than government funding. They believe that if an academic wants to share that publisher delta with the world, they should have to ask the publisher first.

In the eyes of the journal industry, it’s unfair, and a case of unwarranted government intervention into private markets, that the government should mandate that the publisher delta has to be shared with the public after 12 months.

Journal industry argument (2): The Sustainability argument

The public has a commitment to fund scientific research, and, as part of that commitment, it is wants to ensure the successful distribution of research.

The journal industry has historically supported itself by charging for access to research papers. It believes that the government’s open access mandate threatens the sustainability of the journal industry.

In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free.

As a result of this, revenues in the journal industry will drop, leading to the whole journal industry collapsing. If the journal industry disappears, the public will lose out, as it will lose its primary distribution model for research.

The flaw in the moral argument: customers should be allowed to negotiate for better business terms

The US government provides about $30 billion of funding each year for research in biology and medicine. In return, it gets around 80,000 published articles.

In the pre-web days, it cost quite a lot to distribute papers around the world. As a result, the US government understood that, if it was going to support distribution, it was going to have to offer relatively attractive distribution terms to the journal publishers. In particular, it was going to have to allow journal publishers to keep taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls in perpetuity. It was considered that no weaker terms would cover the cost of distribution.

Now, in the days of the web, distribution of content is dramatically cheaper. Correspondingly, taxpayers should be getting better distribution terms for the money they are investing in research. In particular, they should be able to read the research they have funded for free, at some point after publication, instead of being confronted with paywalls that exist for perpetuity.

To reflect the idea that the public should be getting a better deal, the National Institutes of Health, the dispenser of the US government’s $30 billion annual biomedical research budget, enacted its open access mandate in 2008. It’s this open access mandate that the journal industry wants to reverse.

Not only this, but the purpose of the Research Works Act is to make it illegal for the US government ever to negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research.

The journal industry wants the distribution terms that made sense in the pre-web days written into law, so that the US government can never change those terms. Economically handcuffing the US government like this would be a great outcome for the journal industry, and a terrible outcome for the public.

The moral argument carries no weight: clearly a customer who is buying a product should be allowed to seek better terms. In this case the customer is the US government, who is buying published scientific articles on behalf of the public.

A monopsonistic situation

The US government does, however, have to be careful with what it asks for. It is a monopsony in this situation, i.e. a single buyer. It funds virtually all the academic research into biology and medicine in the US. It therefore gets whatever it asks for, and so it needs to be careful that what it asks for is, indeed, in the interests of the public. It does not want the journal publishers to go out of business.

This pushes the focus onto the Sustainability argument. The journal industry argues that the US government’s open access mandate jeopardizes its revenues, and thereby puts the whole scientific distribution model at risk.

The flaw in the Sustainability Argument: revenues and profits in the journal industry are at record highs

The US government’s policy has been in place since 2008, so there are 3 years of revenue data to look at.

The top three academic publishers are Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. From 2008 to 2010:

• Their combined revenues grew 11% from $4.7 billion to $5.3 billion.
• Their profits grew 17% from $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.

It’s worth noting that these healthy revenue and profit increases occurred during a global recession.

The reasons that revenues have been rising are:

1. Journal subscription prices have been going up
2. The open access mandate hasn’t led departments to cancel their subscriptions

To be research-active, departments have to have the latest research. They can’t unsubscribe, and wait 12 months to get access to free research that is a year old.

The strong revenue and profit growth in the academic publishing industry leads one to wonder what Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa were thinking when they said that the US government’s open access policy would jeopardize their revenues and their business model. How did they reconcile the tale of woe that the journal industry has been telling with the annual reports of the journal publishers, which tell of growing and thriving businesses?

The strategic significance of The Research Works Act

The journal industry maintains a very strong grip on academic departments: they can keep on increasing subscription prices, and the departments have to pay up. You cannot be in business as a research institution without access to the journals. That grip currently shows no sign of loosening.

The effect of the Research Works Act would be that the journal industry would have a similarly iron grip on the US government, by making it illegal for the government to negotiate for better distribution terms for research.

Strategically the Research Works Act would be an amazing coup for the journal industry.

The journal industry has two paymasters in the US:

• the research institutions who buy the journal subscriptions
• the US government who funds almost all of the research.

The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

Fortunately, there is another paymaster, the US government, who can negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research. With the journal industry squeezing departments with price hikes over the last 15 years, the US government has managed to score a win for the public with its open access mandate in 2008.

If the Research Works Act passes, the journal industry will be able to continue squeezing departments with price hikes, and the only other major negotiating force, the US government will have been gagged. It would be a genius heist by the journal industry.

What next?

The journal industry is very good at lobbying. Somehow it managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney, and Darrell Issa, that the Research Works Act is good for the American people. Through a lack of scrutiny and care, Maloney and Issa are willingly embracing the handcuffs that the journal industry wants the US government to wear.

The brands of the journal publishers supporting the Research Works Act are currently in free-fall within the academic community. Hopefully Congress will notice this, and apply some scrutiny to the journal industry’s arguments for the Research Works Act.

Two excellent blogs for keeping up with the discussion around the Research Works Act are:

• Tim Gowers’s blog, one of whose posts sparked the Elsevier boycott
• Michael Eisen’s blog. Michael is the founder of the open access journal, PLoS.

The Elsevier boycott is gathering momentum on The Cost of Knowledge site. A good resource page of further links is maintained by Michael Nielsen here. The text of the Research Works Act is here.

You can contact Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa via their webpages:

• Carolyn Maloney’s Congressional page
• Darrell Issa’s Congressional page

A development in the last few days is that five members of Congress have proposed a counter-bill, called the Federal Research Public Access Act, which requires that virtually all federally research be accessible within 6 months of publication.