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Comment by thefool | Hacker News Reader

The one potential problem with going down this road is that even fewer people will have a broad understanding of what is going on in complicated experiments as labs are increasingly encouraged to specialize in a technique.

Without some incentive for such people to exist, it seems likely that "obvious" connections between different fields may be missed for extended periods of time as people focus on executing incremental experiments.

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I'm somewhat more worried about just the lack of vertical integration, rather than even the cross-field collaboration. The more you treat parts of your experiments as black-boxes done by someone else, the more likely it is you might misunderstand some details of what exactly is happening, and draw the wrong conclusions. It requires the abstraction boundaries being very good, anyway, so that nothing gets changed at one level that actually impacts another level's results, without the sides communicating. If it's the same people, or at least people who see each other daily in the same lab, they're much more likely to notice that a "minor" change in a detail is actually experimentally relevant, due to how the result will be used somewhere else, or assumptions about the process that were baked into an equation, or something along those lines.

Even in a field like CS this happens a lot; tons of benchmarks are screwed up or at least misleadingly reported because someone didn't 100% understand the entire stack on which their part was running, and what its implications were for their results.

Actually I think this has the potential to increase the connections between different fields because it will truly incentivize collaborations through a market mechanism rather than the bartering system which currently exists (i.e I'll trade you conducting this expt for authorship).

The way I envision it working is that the person who has the grand idea obtains a grant and then breaks it up into microgrants which are outsourced to specialists to conduct the expts efficiently. The results are then combined to obtain a broad understanding of the particular question being asked by the grant holder. The broad results can be communicated to all participants.

You are alluding to _co_llaborations, while describing a market-based system in which "specialists" would would essentially _sub_contract to your grand idea. In effect just veiling the (current) feudalism in market PR, as it happened to the economy at the turn of the last century.

Managing intellectual peers as subordinates will not work, if the "specialist" is any smart, not just educated.

Btw: a grand idea is worth nothing as it is: everybody has grand ideas. Verne had the idea to go to the Moon, wrote it (ie. published it). I wonder why he is not credited for it...

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