This is not a real post. Sorry! I created this post just to be able to put a question into the public forum. You know, if you want to publish something in Digg, the first thing they ask is an URL. So, I created this one. Yet the point is not this blog but the question itself.
Have you wondered how much intelligence and huge talent flows through the pages of Digg or Newsvine every single day? By the thousands, we all go to keep us informed, to get some entertainment or find smart and amusing people from all over the world. Arguibly, sites as Digg are visited by real geniuses: people exceptionally smart that are working in all sort of exciting projects and have deep and life-changing insights.
My question: Is there a practical way of putting some of all that talent in tackling big questions? I am thinking of a combination of these:
- collaborative work;
- huge exposure (I mean: huge–it’s the only way of recruiting new gifted people for the project);
- with some non-intrusive moderation system.
Imagine that we (thousands of minds working with freedom, each one at his or her own pace) take a problem, an unsolved-but-not-too-technical problem, and that we keep track of the different approaches to it, so that new-comers can both propose new ideas or quickly know what has been already tested.
This system could prove succesful in tackling popular yet defying brain-teasers, as the Collatz conjecture. At some point I suppose we all will learn that pride, not intelligence, works “better” in isolation.
Perhaps what I long for already exists somewhere in the Net! Please, tell me if it is so. Or perhaps some web 2.0 marvels could have a special corner for this kind of work–provided is not an isoleted corner, for we don’t want to mimic what so often happens in the typical academic world.
What do you think?