Dear Dean Mark Aldenderfer,
“Science is driven by discovery,” and through the discovery of public aid it is possible to
cut down on the amount of time it takes scientists to analyze certain bits of data that can be very
helpful in scientific research. This aid is not to be taken lightly and with the right adjustments it
can prove to further scientific research at an alarming rate. Although leaving things to the public
may not always be the best of ideas and may indeed backfire in some situations, it is important to
look at the situations where it can excel and provide useful information gathering that scientists
do not always have time for. I agree with the article “How Crowdsourcing Is Changing Science”
and I believe that it can provide many benefits to society but also acknowledge that if used in the
wrong sense that it can provide more work for scientists as well.
The article states that crowdsourcing is a process in which scientific research/information
is given to the public with the intent for them to aid scientists by providing a different standpoint
that the scientists may not be seeing. This process provides to be useful especially in the field of
pattern recognition such as in the Oxford experiment to have common people help with
deciphering 2000-year-old papyrus from a garbage dump in Oxrhynchus. This works out so well
because the process to decipher these artifacts is mostly pattern recognition and “the brain excels
at pattern recognition,” as stated by James Brusuelas, an Oxford classicist. Therefore, this
process could help with other projects such as decoding large amount of genetic code since that
is also mostly pattern recognition, which would save scientists a lot of time. As the article states,
this process could help with other fields as well such as in taxonomy because people can take
pictures with their phones and it may lead to a discovery of a new species, however this process
may even lead into more work for scientists and must only be applied to certain fields.
There are many possibilities that could go wrong if crowdsourcing is used without
caution and may lead into more work for scientists. “A woman who never went to college can
provide the crucial transcription that reveals a spidery script to be a love poem from 2000 years
in the past,” it is precisely this reason that crowdsourcing must be monitored and caution must be
taken when obtaining information from the public. This type of information gathering is similar
to gathering research for a research paper and the same questions must be asked; “is this source
reliable?” “Where did they get their research from?” “How did they come to that conclusion?”
The fact that scientist would have to ask these types of questions every time a piece of
information might seem useful could set scientists further back than if they were to simply try to
solve the problem by themselves. The fact that anyone could add to this type of research is
reason enough to make this type of research only available for certain fields and leave others
such as quantum physics, molecular biology, and other areas of science that require certain
degrees unless they require an analysis of a pattern since the human brain is adept at that type of
analysis. Not only would it require more work for the scientists to back up the research of
someone else and allow them to consider it, there would be an addition to work to sift through all
of the contributions made by other people to try to find an explanation for something. There
would need to be certain amounts of scientists that would need to sit and look through all of the
posts that people have made about the topic and try to determine if anyone if remotely close to
the hypothesized answer and then take even more time to analyze the other person’s work. This
process could take more time than if the scientists working on this grouped and attempted to
solve the problem themselves, thus causing a backfire that they would need to make up for later.
On top of the scientists having to look through all of the legit answers to their problem, they
would have to look through all of the answers made by internet “trolls” (people that purposely
input an absurd answer for the amusement of seeing other people’s reaction) that would waste
even more time trying to sift through which is why crowdsourcing would need to be used with
caution.
Despite all of the negative results of crowdsourcing, I believe that it can be a very
valuable way to obtain information as long as it is used for only specific areas of information. As
stated before, the human brain does well at recognizing patterns which would be useful for
certain areas of gathering information. For example, if the public was given a series of graphs of
information and given the task to analyze the similarities of the graph, the public could provide
an outlook that scientists may have overlooked and could lead to new information. There are also
many times where scientists have too much DNA/RNA to translate and the time could be
severely shortened to decode them if given to the public to translate and find errors since
translating proteins is a fairly simple task that requires patterns of amino acids. These kinds of
processes would greatly benefit from crowdsourcing and shorten the time it takes scientists to
analyze large groups of data while also giving the public enjoyment in that they feel that they
have helped a cause and would most likely inspire them to help again in the future.
Crowdsourcing is a great way for scientists to obtain free information about a topic as
long as it is used in the right context. If given to the general public, then only simple information
and pattern recognition projects should be considered because the use of an input from a
completely random source could turn out to be wrong and would only set scientists back and
cause them to waste a lot of time. One recommendation that I strongly insist is to allow a
separate exchange of complex scientific information on a similar system but instead if it being
given to the general the public, allow only fellow scientists to view and comment on the data as
to not waste as much time meticulously scanning through information that doesn’t apply to
answering the question because people without degrees were allowed to input ideas without
knowing much about the topic. I think that this type of research would benefit the community by
allowing a transfer of inputs as long as the scientists were left with the information that needs
degrees and the public was left with the information that doesn’t require as much knowledge of
the subject.
Sincerely,
Brent Bumann