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FoldIt and "Citizen Science" | | | Why does Wikipedia work? Under traditional capitalistic models, it should not. There is no payment, no remuneration for the hours upon hours editors put into it, yet it still exists and is constantly improved. The problem with understanding the new Information Goods Society where marginal cost of informational goods is zero is in grafting old models of compensation that ill fit the reality of online collaboration. | |
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< | Is it naïve to believe that people will contribute to the greater good merely out of their desire to improve the human condition? The failure of communism in practice was in the old economy where marginal cost does not equal zero. In the Informational Goods Society, economic models of compensation hold less weight. Eben speaks to this in the dotCommunist Manifesto. If compensation is not the model in the Informational Goods Society, then what is the main motivation for work? | >
> | Is it naïve to believe that people will contribute to the greater good merely out of their desire to improve the human condition? The failure of communism in practice was in the old economy where marginal cost does not equal zero. In the Informational Goods Society, economic models of compensation hold less weight. Eben speaks to this in the dotCommunist Manifesto.
This is just
apple-polishing. There's no actual reason to be citing my writing
here. There's also no "failure of communism" to discuss. Communism
didn't fail, because there never was communism anywhere. You will
have some recollection, I'm sure, that communism was the end stage of
socialism, after the "withering away of the state." The 20th century
"socialist" regimes had little enough to do with socialism, and
nothing to do with anything that presupposed the non-existence of the
State. The euphemism employed in the USSR was "presently existing
socialism," which speaks volumes,
If compensation is not the model in the Informational Goods Society, then what is the main motivation for work?
How did the existence of
monetarily uncompensated activity become "compensation is not the
model"? Do you mean "not the exclusive model"? In that case the
latter part of the sentence makes no sense, because what is not the
exclusive model might still be the "main motivation." In fact, this
"death of compensated work" meme is wrong, and the logic overall
needs tighter editorial scrutiny.
Michael Goldhauber
suggests that motivation on the Internet is driven by reputation.
He's Goldhaber. Editing includes both fact-checking and proofreading
This is further refined by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who reapplies economic concepts to the Internet.
What's the refinement? If it was worth citing, it must be worth stating. Name-dropping serves no purpose here.
Yet whatever the form the remuneration takes, it is still premised on a quid pro quo. Yet reputation would lose its incentivizing effect as the activity becomes increasingly dispersed and individual contributions are further anonymized. This is precisely the environment necessary to harness the widest participation. I focus instead on the frequently overlooked incentives of satisfying human curiosity, problem solving, and amusement as driving forces for scientific research.
If that's what you
"focus on," why are we more than 30% of the way through the essay
before we hear about it for the first time?
These incentives drive the human attraction to games. Harnessing these incentives joins gaming with research in a way that channels mindless diversion into productive causes. | | | | |
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< | Michael Goldhauber suggests that motivation on the Internet is driven by reputation. This is further refined by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who reapplies economic concepts to the Internet. Yet whatever the form the remuneration takes, it is still premised on a quid pro quo. Yet reputation would lose its incentivizing effect as the activity becomes increasingly dispersed and individual contributions are further anonymized. This is precisely the environment necessary to harness the widest participation. I focus instead on the frequently overlooked incentives of satisfying human curiosity, problem solving, and amusement as driving forces for scientific research. These incentives drive the human attraction to games. Harnessing these incentives joins gaming with research in a way that channels mindless diversion into productive causes. | | | Games and Citizen Science
FoldIt is computer game designed by University of Washington researchers that allows players to design protein structures by folding amino acids. Given the complexity of folding dozens, if not hundreds, of amino acids into viable protein structures, brute force computing power would not be a practical way of solving the problem with the current technology. Humans have an advantage in recognizing patterns and certain three-dimensional spatial intuitions that computers cannot currently simulate. What had stumped scientists for more than a decade, a retrovirus protease in rhesus monkeys, was solved by a worldwide consortium of players in ten days. The vast majority of these players had little biology or chemistry experience, relying only on the rules of the game as dictated by real physics. The discovery of the retroviral protease has been published in a scientific journal, naming a team of players, the FoldIt Contenders Group (FCG), as coauthors. In an interview with one of the FCG members, “mimi” preferred to be credited pseudonymously or anonymously. The main motivation for many of these players was advancement of science, not fame or recognition. They were not paid for their participation; many simply wanted a challenge and to work towards something big. | |
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< | Video games, at their most fundamental level, are sets of puzzles. Why create arbitrary puzzles when real life puzzles exist with greater implications for their completion? FoldIt is only one of several other projects collectively grouped together as “citizen science.” These projects crowdsource because they benefit from certain human attributes that are not duplicable in computers currently. | >
> | Video games, at their most fundamental level, are sets of puzzles. Why create arbitrary puzzles when real life puzzles exist with greater implications for their completion?
For proprietary game
producers, because there is more money to be made from sex and
violence than there is from science. This is an example of the
distortion of technology by capitalism. The primary mechanism of the
essay at this point appears to be to assume the realities
away.
FoldIt is only one of several other projects collectively grouped together as “citizen science.” These projects crowdsource because they benefit from certain human attributes that are not duplicable in computers currently.
Yochai Benkler’s paper Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm evaluates the motivations for contribution to the open software movement.
He identifies the spontaneous creativity birthed when components from production are “sufficiently small grained, and the cost of connecting people to projects sufficiently low thanks to cheap network connections.” By breaking difficult project into discrete consumable parts and make participation as least cumbersome as possible, crowdsourced projects can harness the creative spark in a wide participatory network. While this phenomenon has been documented before, I suggest that there is an additional incentive that is a driving factor for FoldIt—specifically, gaming taps into satisfying human curiosity, problem solving, and diversion.
Is that an incentive, a
motive, emergent human behavior? Does it matter? What's the
psychology here? You seem to want us to understand that you're not
using the thin psychology of the economist, but you don't actually
give us any sight of the model of human behavior you are using. In
what system of thinking about human behavior is diversion an
incentive, or curiosity a motive? Don't you need to ask what the
incentives are for solving problems or the motives for diverting
oneself in one way rather than another?
Tapping into the non-gaming online behavior has been a critical model for the success of such projects as Google, which reinforces its search algorithms based on the conduct of its users.
Is this what we mean by
"learning"? Or even "existing"? "Tapping into behavior" is what
organisms do, right?
But given the tremendous amount of energy devoted to quick and simple online games (Farmville at its peak had 83 million monthly active users) some of that mindless clicking can be channeled into more productive projects.
What does the adjective
"productive" mean here? Producing more diversion? Producing less
curiosity? Producing more profits for drug companies?
People naturally seek out fun and challenges. | | | | |
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< | Yochai Benkler’s paper Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm evaluates the motivations for contribution to the open software movement. He identifies the spontaneous creativity birthed when components from production are “sufficiently small grained, and the cost of connecting people to projects sufficiently low thanks to cheap network connections.” By breaking difficult project into discrete consumable parts and make participation as least cumbersome as possible, crowdsourced projects can harness the creative spark in a wide participatory network. While this phenomenon has been documented before, I suggest that there is an additional incentive that is a driving factor for FoldIt—specifically, gaming taps into satisfying human curiosity, problem solving, and diversion.
Tapping into the non-gaming online behavior has been a critical model for the success of such projects as Google, which reinforces its search algorithms based on the conduct of its users. But given the tremendous amount of energy devoted to quick and simple online games (Farmville at its peak had 83 million monthly active users) some of that mindless clicking can be channeled into more productive projects. People naturally seek out fun and challenges. It takes what Benkler calls an “integrator” to manage those clickstreams and combine the discrete component functions. He identifies four mechanisms for solving the integration problem. | >
> | Umm, are you sure?
It takes what Benkler calls an “integrator” to manage those clickstreams and combine the discrete component functions. He identifies four mechanisms for solving the integration problem. | | |
- Iterative peer production of the integration function itself
- Technical solutions embedded in the collaboration platform
- Norm-based social organization
- Limited reintroduction of hierarchy or market forces to provide the integration function alone.
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< | Though the last mechanism would run the risks of the firm, real-life examples in open software, such as Mozilla and Red Hat have shown its value. For scientific research, the first three mechanisms may not be appropriate unless the players are all sophisticated because it would require a high level integrator to atomize the tasks and divine larger meaning from their outcomes.
The reintroduction of the firm for the purposes of integration does not necessarily have to be completely noncommercial. Scientists can team up with game developers to create a saleable video game with puzzles that have real-life applications. The game developers are not looking to control the outcome of their puzzles; they only seek to provide the highest level of amusement. Scientists may benefit from game designers who can help craft seemingly mind-numbing research tasks into appealing challenges and puzzles. | >
> | Though the last mechanism would run the risks of the firm, real-life examples in open software, such as Mozilla and Red Hat have shown its value. | | | | |
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< | I think this is a good
first draft. You've identified some phenomena you want to write
about, and you've understood them to be linked to other phenomena, of
which they are illustrations.
What the next draft needs is an idea about these phenomena that you
can explore with your readers, rather than presenting the
illustrations at the heart of the essay. Your theoretical
propositions in this draft are sketchy at best. They don't lead you
to a thesis which can organize your reader's new acquaintance with
the material you're discussing, as you can tell from your first
paragraph, which indulges at first in mystification (no one actually
ever thought communication was a one-way process, after all) and
winds up in obviousness. Nor does it lead to a conclusion, as your
last graf shows.
You've seen that there's an economy of peer production, but you
haven't figured out what you want to say about it. The best place to
start is with the wonderful piece Yochai Benkler wrote ten years ago,
Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,
where peer production in
general and scientific peer production in particular is given a
rigorous theoretical location. From where Yochai leaves matters you
should be able to pick up in one of the obvious directions,
generating a new idea or two of your own. | >
> | What is the similarity
between Mozilla, which is a non-profit primary producer of free
software, and Red Hat, which is a commercial organization supplying
combinations of free software, almost all of which they don't
produce, to businesses? Perhaps some actual attention to the facts
would make this illustration informative, but at present it seems
more confusing than illuminating, at least to a reader who actually
knows what these things are.
For scientific research, the first three mechanisms may not be appropriate unless the players are all sophisticated because it would require a high level integrator to atomize the tasks and divine larger meaning from their outcomes.
I don't understand this
statement. What does it mean with respect to MarsClickworkers? , the
example that Benkler uses, or the anthrax detoxifier that was an
initial example of folding proteins at home? Technical integration
measures embedded in the collaboration platform don't seem to require
"sophistication" from users. And what has that to do with
"norm-based social organization"?
The reintroduction of the firm for the purposes of integration does not necessarily have to be completely noncommercial.
Indeed. One supposes it
wasn't meant to imply "non-commercialness" at
all. Why do you suppose it does?
Scientists can team up with game developers to create a saleable video game with puzzles that have real-life applications.
Why should "saleability"
be relevant? Now we have gone from "needn't be non-commercial" to
"must be commercial" without any reasoning.
The game developers are not looking to control the outcome of their puzzles; they only seek to provide the highest level of amusement.
No. They only seek to
achieve the highest level of profitability. Whether that lies in
producing "the highest level of amusement" is completely obscure to
me, and gets no argument from you.
Scientists may benefit from game designers who can help craft seemingly mind-numbing research tasks into appealing challenges and puzzles.
What? Where did this
idea of "crafted puzzles" come from? The puzzle originally proposed
was the actual problem: folding a protein following particular rules
to achieve a given shape. The "video game" is the physical chemistry
visualization software. There's no "game-designer" involved. To
describe these as "video games" is imprecise. They're not
technically remotely like the games produced by entities like
Electronic Arts, nor are they web services like Zynga products, nor
even like the world's 900 million Tetris
clones. A little attention to the technical issues might be helpful.
Overall, it feels to me like the draft has wandered somewhat off
center. It is still difficult to tell what the main idea is. Even
what you say is the primary focus of the essay doesn't appear until
graf after graf has come and gone. I suggested looking at Benkler in
order to further develop your own ideas; now we have a longish
summary of Benkler that nonetheless manages to leave out most of
his ideas without, apparently, much furthering your own.
The first draft gave us the material that underlies your thinking.
In the second draft I hoped for your thinking. That apparently must,
however, await the third. | | | | |
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This is very interesting. It reminds me of the sports application where the sports news all comes from users. The difference there is that people do get credit for their contributions and perhaps gain popularity / notice from fellow fans, but it is similar in that users contribute to a community's knowledge. I like the characterization as "a desire to solve puzzles."
--Sylvia Duran | | | | |
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