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Computer Scientists Say Meme Research Doesn't Threaten Free Speech
dcblogs (1096431) writes "In a letter to lawmakers Tuesday (PDF), five of the nation's top computing research organizations defended a research grant to study how information goes viral. The groups were responding to claims that the government-funded effort could help create a 1984-type surveillance state. The controversy arises over a nearly $1 million research grant to researchers at Indiana University to investigate "why some ideas cause viral explosions while others are quickly forgotten," particularly on Twitter. "We do not believe this work represents a threat to free speech or a suppression of any type of speech over the internet," the letter said. "The tools developed in the course of this research are capable of making no political judgments, no prognostications, and no editorial comments, nor do they provide any capability for exerting any control over the Twitter stream they analyze," they wrote. The controversy over Truthy may be just another sign of the ongoing deterioration between the science community and lawmakers over basic research funding as well as the science itself.
If Szilárd had chosen not to publish, it would have delayed nuclear fission research for decades - possibly indefinitely.
I see this kind of extrapolation a lot, and it's completely wrong. Science doesn't progress by the work of "geniuses". It progresses by trial and error. Szilard was the first person to observe this, that's all. It's easy to assume the second person wouldn't have come along for decades, but lots of people were working on this, so the discovery could equally have been made only a few months later. Or it may have already been made and Szilard just published first. There are plenty of examples in science and technology of two people inventing something at about the same time - Newton & Leibniz is canonical. This invention isn't even radical. We already had all the scientific models for fission, we just needed to refine the technology slightly. Inventions are far more a product of their time than they are a product of some kind of unique "genius" without whom we would never have had that invention. The process is like a chain, and the inventor is just the last link in the chain, that's all. Without him, some other guy would be the last link in the chain.
Pay attention to this, it affects your conclusions radically. Like, why Szilard and not Einstein? And what if Szilard didn't publish and then some guy in Japan figured it out, and they nuked the US, winning the war. You talk about hindsight, but all you have hindsight on is the consequences of a billion different factors working in tandem. You can't pick one strand out of the rug and say that's what holds it together.