Greetings Economists, I think this is an important topic of socialist discussion which points at foundational questions to socialist work as well. On Sep 26, 2006, at 12:34 PM, ravi wrote:
Most of the fundamental contributions in Internet technology, I would suggest, happened during the 70s and 80s, at a time when the Labs would have had even stronger funding and autonomy. Nonetheless, I can see little contributions from its researchers, who woke up to this new field/technology as late as the mid-90s. Perhaps the Internet and related developments (protocols, standards, etc) were too pedestrian for "serious research", but even that defence seems weak, considering that similar efforts (communications protocols, text formatting, etc) were underway within the Labs, around the same time. At a time when openness and sharing was built around "rough consensus and running code", Bell Labs was stuck in its old structure of isolation and politics.
Doyle; In knowledge management in business that's called in the jargon, Silos. So in essence I see Ravi raising that research at Bell Labs did not know or understand how to address knowledge work and relied instead on traditional modes of academic like workshops for knowledge production. If so and I agree with Ravi from my experience, this must certainly then brings out a fundamental flaw in the conceptual framework of science in that the community function of science is low performing in 'knowing'. Since Ravi was there at Bell Labs as an individual and says he wasn't examining things systemically there is a limit to how much he can say from that time and I'll respect that. Ravi writes; But it seems a strange model to pay people lots of money to crank out papers and have coffee room chats just because they obtained a Ph.D. Doyle; I can say as has been said about Math, that during that period it was common to say so much work was being produced no one could keep up and that so much of the work was lost simply because it would never reach the right person in a life time. Or that the system depended so much on face to face contact like over coffee. So that personal contact and stimulation was important. Roughly said Ravi brings up what I think are critical components of socialist change. One that the scientific research was socially limited to face to face contact processes like talking over coffee. Therefore the principle of the whole working class common to Marx is at play in understanding basic research activity as an isolated poorly performing branch of common social intercourse. The knowledge production or papers were behind walls the outside couldn't know especially someone who could benefit. But coffee chats also imply face to face conversation or the interactive properties of the knowledge production. In other words documents themselves had properties that impeded interactivity to which the clumsy and highly limited coffee chat supplemented. Ravi writes; MIT is a bad comparison for me, since it is the home to the Media Lab and other stuff like the AI craze of the 90s. In those ways, perhaps it is indeed similar to Bell Labs ;-). On the other hand, Berkeley and Stanford, even CMU (the non-AI parts), would have, IMHO, done better things with that money. Also, academic institutions, at least in some small part, fulfil the role of educating the young, for the money that they absorb. Doyle; I'm familiar with medical research facilities from a staff role, math institute in Berkeley, Lawrence Labs in Berkeley and Livermore Lawrence labs in terms of conversations with researchers, friends at SRI, and PARC, MIT and W3C, and Marxist thinkers in some party like settings where 'research' happened. I think Ravi is too vague here about evaluating the differences between say Bell Labs and Berkeley. Nor is Ravi addressing key differences between Military Research and broader social research, and economic roles of capitalist profits. Be that as it may, I think socialism as a principle of thinking ought to give insight exactly into what Ravi is asking. One, modes of production as in research interactivity. Can the meaning of research reach the whole of the working class? What exactly are the barriers and what could be done to advance a socialist process of knowledge work. Now this does not mean we are focusing upon research as a primary goal of socialist knowledge production. Rather a socialist whole of knowledge production ought to dramatically change all forms of knowledge production. This is not so different from how Google sees building its' business of search. The whole is how we all attach to each other. So the attachment is what is being developed. The principles of attachment apply to all of us. Knowledge production is not strictly language like, there are boundaries in which knowledge work shades into distinctly different types of thought including language but not solely language. But the system of attachment can be developed to include all the forms of knowledge production. In so far as what is materially 'not' known, then we have a model from human brains to address 'research'. What does a system of knowledge production from the materially unknown require is a potent question to ask of our present tools of production. All humans begin from not knowing the material world and they then proceed along distinct means of knowing. Certainly we can understand that, and socialize that. thanks, Doyle Saylor
