Nothing like hatred to increase the expediency of mankind’s development of ‘truth’.
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interesting thought about the schools of thought. I’m not sure i agree on your war analogy, for the same reason i don’t believe that breaking a shop’s window improves the economy.
I dunno if you can draw the analogy between the technological advances following war and straight up abstract knowledge. This might work for anything where you get a real-world application that either works or doesn’t work (like, say, an airplane) but maybe not for things where you’e just trying to get bstract knowledge which isn’t easily testable by the people they’re reporting to.
Boose- The war analogy here is not to show that economy’s become more productive during war but that people become more innovative during war. This innovation is derived primarily from the frustration of being beat by the enemy. By placing competing labs in close proximity you cash in on that frustration when one lab pull ahead of the other lab leading to the lower lab working harder towards innovation.
Darwin- Interesting point the idea that solid abstract thinking is not derived from competition. I suspect that the likes of Einstein, Newton, Wundt, and any other number of scientists were definitely driven by a strong competitive force. However it seems like this force was derived internally and required no external motivation. Value transformation is motivated internally.
However in cases where free form abstract thinking may not be ideal I think the aphorism holds. I’m thinking of instances were a definite set of goals must be met. Perhaps an example would be research groups working on finding a cure to AIDS. By placing several labs with differing methods in close proximity to each other would not the competition drive innovation?
One might argue such close quarters competition would cause strong acrimony leading to wasted efforts at hurting the competitors in ways that were unrelated to finding the cure. In this case it would be a simple matter of calculating whether the damage done by acrimony negated the gains made by close quarter competition.
my point is that just because a war results in developments in certain areas doesn’t mean that those developments couldn’t have happened anyway. Part of the motivation people get from a war is the frustration and anger you talk about. But I’d say a larger cause for development is the huge amount of money that the military spends on engineers and scientists. I think labs are already competing quite a lot, regardless of proximity, and the only difference a war makes is that the amount of money being spent on those labs increases tremendously.
I would say pouring money into something is likely to be the least efficient way at generating innovation. Placing the source of frustration in closer proxmity to the lab will generate more novel responses likely to lead to innovation.
I want to step away from the war analogy because i fear its being taken to literal. I envision the application of this idea even when a nation is not at war.
Certainly I think increased internal drive and determination will lead to quicker innovation, but I’m not sure it’s so easy to generate this type of competition- just because you put two labs next to each other and tell them they’re in competition, I’m not sure they’re going to buy into it and get worked up the same way a scientist would when he fears his country may be invaded by foreign powers (or whatever). Not to say it would neccessarily fail to generate such drive, I’m just not sure how reliable it would be, or whether it would be better than other methods (such as cash awards to the first lab with a solution, or prestige like the Nobel Prize, or taking the researchers to an african village where all the children inherited Aids from their parents in order to personalize the work, or etc.).
i’d definitely agree with darwin on this one. Anyway, i wasn’t taking the war analogy litterally. I was just saying that there are bigger factors than anger/frustration creating the increased innovation during wartime. Also, your point about money is just false. Do you honestly think that BIAC wouldn’t be much more productive if it had another couple MRI machines, more technicians, etc? Of course they would increase their output.
December 19th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
interesting thought about the schools of thought. I’m not sure i agree on your war analogy, for the same reason i don’t believe that breaking a shop’s window improves the economy.
December 20th, 2006 at 7:33 am
I dunno if you can draw the analogy between the technological advances following war and straight up abstract knowledge. This might work for anything where you get a real-world application that either works or doesn’t work (like, say, an airplane) but maybe not for things where you’e just trying to get bstract knowledge which isn’t easily testable by the people they’re reporting to.
December 20th, 2006 at 8:08 am
Boose- The war analogy here is not to show that economy’s become more productive during war but that people become more innovative during war. This innovation is derived primarily from the frustration of being beat by the enemy. By placing competing labs in close proximity you cash in on that frustration when one lab pull ahead of the other lab leading to the lower lab working harder towards innovation.
Darwin- Interesting point the idea that solid abstract thinking is not derived from competition. I suspect that the likes of Einstein, Newton, Wundt, and any other number of scientists were definitely driven by a strong competitive force. However it seems like this force was derived internally and required no external motivation. Value transformation is motivated internally.
However in cases where free form abstract thinking may not be ideal I think the aphorism holds. I’m thinking of instances were a definite set of goals must be met. Perhaps an example would be research groups working on finding a cure to AIDS. By placing several labs with differing methods in close proximity to each other would not the competition drive innovation?
One might argue such close quarters competition would cause strong acrimony leading to wasted efforts at hurting the competitors in ways that were unrelated to finding the cure. In this case it would be a simple matter of calculating whether the damage done by acrimony negated the gains made by close quarter competition.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:07 am
my point is that just because a war results in developments in certain areas doesn’t mean that those developments couldn’t have happened anyway. Part of the motivation people get from a war is the frustration and anger you talk about. But I’d say a larger cause for development is the huge amount of money that the military spends on engineers and scientists. I think labs are already competing quite a lot, regardless of proximity, and the only difference a war makes is that the amount of money being spent on those labs increases tremendously.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:31 am
I would say pouring money into something is likely to be the least efficient way at generating innovation. Placing the source of frustration in closer proxmity to the lab will generate more novel responses likely to lead to innovation.
I want to step away from the war analogy because i fear its being taken to literal. I envision the application of this idea even when a nation is not at war.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Certainly I think increased internal drive and determination will lead to quicker innovation, but I’m not sure it’s so easy to generate this type of competition- just because you put two labs next to each other and tell them they’re in competition, I’m not sure they’re going to buy into it and get worked up the same way a scientist would when he fears his country may be invaded by foreign powers (or whatever). Not to say it would neccessarily fail to generate such drive, I’m just not sure how reliable it would be, or whether it would be better than other methods (such as cash awards to the first lab with a solution, or prestige like the Nobel Prize, or taking the researchers to an african village where all the children inherited Aids from their parents in order to personalize the work, or etc.).
December 20th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
i’d definitely agree with darwin on this one. Anyway, i wasn’t taking the war analogy litterally. I was just saying that there are bigger factors than anger/frustration creating the increased innovation during wartime. Also, your point about money is just false. Do you honestly think that BIAC wouldn’t be much more productive if it had another couple MRI machines, more technicians, etc? Of course they would increase their output.