Author: David Rasmussen
Date: 02:21:33 01/12/01
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On January 11, 2001 at 20:25:47, Christophe Theron wrote: >> >>Mankind benefits from the sharing of truth. > > I agree totally with Dann on this, and I've stated similar views before. > >Really? > >The main engine of mandkind progress is competition. It is not cooperation. > >This is how it works. The ideal of "sharing the truth" is a generous idea, but >this is not how it works in the real world. > >The only animal that behaves according to your idea is the ant. And maybe the >bee (I'm not a specialist). > >But competition is written in our genes. We love to hate each other and to fight >each other. We love to create groups and to belong to groups, then to fight the >groups in which we do not belong. Fighting is the activity we love to spend our >energy in. > >That's ugly, but that's the way we are. > > >Computer chess would be nowhere by now if there was no competition in the field. > > > I disagree completely. It is a nice idea, and it works in some cases, but history has thousands of examples of development flourishning when knowledge is shared or released. Look at what happened in shift from middle ages to renaissance. Enlightenment begets development. Also, look at the mathematics community of the last 500 years. There are examples of the competition you mention, but that hasn't been "the engine" at all. There are also examples of people discovering the same thing simultaneously. But most of all, there are countless examples of what happens when knowledge is released. It is developed in countless new ways, that the originator of the knowledge couldn't have done alone. One man, one team, one country etc. cannot fully exploit an idea. It will always developed further when shared, published. A society that hides it's knowledge inside competing teams, will never develop as quickly as one where knowledge is shared. The competition will still be there: "How can I take all this public knowledge and develop it further or revolutionize it?". One person, team or country can only do so much.
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