Once accepted in the community, the statement “My scienceoverflow.com score is larger than (some number).” will be an immediate job ticket.

@ Richard E: the Galaxy Zoo project has an incredibly active forum that is essentially led by the users (although the science team and project leads do comment and provide answers to questions about the data). It’s amazing to see how much knowledge some of the users have sought out, entirely on their own accord, simply from classifying some Sloan galaxies….

First of all, I’d submit that at least the vast majority of peer reviewed research should be published for free, online. How can amateurs be expected to do anything of note without access to all the information? This is something that should have happened yesterday. ArXiv, and the physics community, should be applauded once more for setting a great example for other branches of science.

The Cosmist is quite right about signal to noise ratio when including amateurs, but I think that certain forms of hierarchical organization* make sense here. Just as Google’s PageRank was implemented to recognize the relative importance of web pages, a similar algorithm is probably needed organize and rank ideas. As far as I can tell, this also means ranking people as “processors” so that those on the very high end (namely, eminent professors) do not waste their time on ideas that have not been vetted up through the processing tree by a number of “processors” of lower rank.

As far as I can tell, this system of problem delegation and promotion is somewhat already employed in the traditional model of academia, with interactions between professors, graduate students, postdocs, and even undergraduate researchers. A codified structure should not only enhance the contributions of the lower level processors (many an ambitious undergrad has had their spirit crushed under the weight of a thousand fruitless experiments).

It’s debatable on how to actually handle the promotion and delegation of ideas between processor levels, and obviously it isn’t for every idea. But I think there is something worth pursuing here. At the very least, journals shouldn’t be locking things behind a paywall in 2011.

* – Somewhat inspired by Goertzel’s “The Structure of Intelligence”

It would be very interesting if you could find a problem that interested amateurs could realistically contribute to, although I suspect it’d be more likely to end up being a few real experts collaborating more-or-less as they already do, except in a public forum.

Maybe something that requires a lot of numerical computation, so programmers with strong math skills but not necessarily extensive physics knowledge could reasonably contribute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

The World’s moves were by plurality vote (democratic chess!). Kasparov and everybody expected that it will be a cakewalk, since nobody expect that The World will vote for the strongest move as most voters are assumed to be amateurs. “The World” turned out to be an incredibly strong opponent.

The reason is that after a few moves, several “ringmaster” began to take lead, and in a remarkable demonstration of crowdsourcing in action, analyzed the game in online forums, *and* then deciding on the best move. Several strong GM (and reputedly Fischer himself) started to contribute, and at the end Kasparov nicked a win by the barest of margins.

(I participated in it, being a strong club player at that time, so had a nice ringside seat ).

I think the lesson learned in this crowdsourcing business is that (1) you need ringleaders (in the gowers example, T. Tao was almost herding the crowd…) (2) groupthink can lead people astray so you need a rabble rouser in the mix to keep people honest.

Eugene

Clearly this is how things are; but is it always how they should be?

On one hand, “embryonic” ideas (most wrong) may be easy to toss around, and the devil is in the detail. So of course whoever develops an idea to a practical or predictive state deserves a good deal of the credit (especially if this requires more ideas).

But there is another angle to the saying about “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, which is perhaps more what Edison had in mind – The 1% can be the elusive spark which might never occur to most (least of all perhaps to experts steeped in current thinking), and the perspiration can be little more than competent drudgery.

If, say, Einstein (or anyone for that matter) had rashly announced in the company of fellow physicists “Perhaps light has the same speed for any observer in uniform motion”, then most or all of them wishing to explore that insight could have rushed off and whumped up Special Relativity in a couple of days!

I guess if an amateur outside academia has the germ of an idea, which they are unable to develop, their best bet is to summarize it in a short paper and publish this on ViXra.org – Lame as that may sound, it is a “stake in the ground”, and if the same idea is later developed by someone else then its presence in a paper might at least give the latter pause for thought, and merit a footnote of credit, if diplomatically brought to their attention!

Gowers reflects on this after the first Polymath succeeded:

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/polymath1-and-open-collaborative-mathematics/

“I could go on, but from the point of view of discussion I am more interested in the way that the project fell short of my expectations, and there is one way that stands out. There seemed to be such a lot of interest in the whole idea that I thought that there would be dozens of contributors, but instead the number settled down to a handful, all of whom I knew personally. (Actually, Randall, I know of you so well that I feel as though I know you but I can’t quite remember whether we have met — hope to do so soon.)”

I remember when this started, it seemed interessting but I was busy with my own calculations, and only had rudimentary knowledge of the area. I had intended to try to follow it and hopefully put in ideas every now and then. With Gowers and Tao and collaborators working at what Gowers describes as incredible speed for them, it would have been a full time job or more for me to just follow what was being produced by them.

I have looked at the some of the “math blogs” (there was a wiki/blog based analysis of a recent attempt to prove P=/=NP too — or maybe it proved P=NP — I can’t remember which, but it turned out to be wrong, either way — but given than each step in a proof has to hold up attacking the job of checking one in parallel is a good idea). With a proof you often have a good idea of where you want to wind up, and need to find a path to that point from your initial premises, and that task can again be fragmented into a series of substeps.

However, I was not suddenly seized with the need to try it with my own work….

I can see it working for some things — say figuring out the physical basis of a clear signal of beyond the standard model physics at the LHC, when you may have a lot of options to check — but I suspect that in practice you will see a slew of individual papers on the archive

One thing which may be pertinent is that there are some very good, technical math blogs with extremely strong discussion sections. In theoretical cosmology, cosmocoffee made a concerted attempt to get a good online discussion underway – and while it is a great resource for problems with computing, it has very little discussion of new and unpublished ideas (and much of what it does have is dominated by cranks).

But I will be interested to see what ideas Sean throws into the mix

From the noise we DISCOVER the CMB(cosmic microwave background), and development starts from there, it’s a natural process.