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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Ideas Spread Faster Due to the Source more than their Quality - So Much for Science's Meritocracy

By Chuck Dinerstein — December 17, 2018

In 1962 Everett Rogers wrote the Diffusion of Innovations trying to explain how good ideas spread through society and culture; nearly sixty years later we still are trying to understand how information diffuses. Some suggest that it is a Darwinian survival of the fittest, good ideas percolate to the top; bad ideas dying from lack of results and support – a meritocracy of thoughts. Others suggest that structural elements in our culture make some ideas more fit - elements that are based more on eminence than evidence. You would anticipate that the scientific method would be a meritocracy, but it is increasingly clear in studies of scientific funding that the rich get richer irrespective of the quality of their work and thoughts. Is Big Science, academic, public science we fund, built best evidence or best eminence – a study takes a look at the issue from an epidemiologic point of view.............


Using an epidemiologic approach, the researchers described the “quality” of a paper on how often it was cited, how infectious were those papers. Ideas from more eminent institutions spread to more institutions and were cited for longer periods than similarly “infectious” quality papers from less eminent institutions. Ideas that were less infectious coming from mid-level program’s stalled and died, while similar mid-quality ideas from the distinguished institutions took far longer to be abandoned if they were at all. The eminence of an idea’s origin provided a structural advantage irrespective of quality. That should be no surprise given that most faculty came from these institutions – you might consider these eminent institutions as a like of intellectual Typhoid Mary........To Read More......

 

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