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You blog, you get a few comments, you respond and move on.... and blog again. More push-button publishing. How do we, writers and readers, decide the viewpoints that really make sense, that make a contribution and somehow move us on? Through Facebook likes?
Really?
And what do we make of the obligation to play a bit part in the science of the day, the world we live in, to make more sense of it rather than add to the noise? If you blog you should care about critique.
I am therefore going to become a very big fan of hypothes.is. Before hypothes.is launched I was chewing over the problem of peer review. Do we get enough peer review in a world of open communications?
As someone who's blogged for a decade I'm conscious of sprawl and the energy that I've wasted chasing down perspectives that don't quite add up. That's wasted my time and that of the people around me.
My sense is though we're too quick to praise. We've lost the art of taking the time to position our own work or the work of others in a critical perspective.
The dawn of something new though seems to be upon us.
Movements like "Open Notebook Science", the practice of scientists publishing work-in-progress from the inception of a project, are big reminders that we need to make what we know observable to critics. And that we're right to do it early on, before we've honed our ideas and insulated them against criticism.
That though is why we need more peer pressure to make the thought process more, from inception onwards. What open notebook science allso tells us I think is that peer review shouldn't wait on the finished word.
Writing a book in public I was hoping to capture some of the peer review spirit. Through email I have received some really good criticism. So peer review at inception is available if we can find ways to capture it. I have big hopes of hypothes.is.
The one weakness of hypothes.is might be that it assumes finality in the work we do - instead of seeing peer review as part of an unfolding process. But let's wait and see. Here's the prospectus.
Imagine:
If wherever we encountered new information, sentence by sentence, frame by frame, we could easily know the best thinking on it.
If we had confidence that this represented the combined wisdom of the most informed people--not as anointed by editors, but as weighed over time by our peers, objectively, statistically and transparently.
If this created a powerful incentive for people to ensure that their works met a higher standard, and made it perceptibly harder to spread information that didn't meet that standard.
Yesterday I wrote briefly about games and crowds bringing the competitive spirit to what we know. The reason for bringing it up is the meme du jour is collaboration - and I've never quite bought into it.
Competition and observable knowledge breeds great performance. So how does peer review fit in? It's about taking responsibility for knowledge in a public space but I don't read it as collaboration. Good peer review depends on everyone wanting to be better than they are.
Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701
Criticism of The Elastic Enterprise warmly welcomed.
