A Need For Openness

Life is an interesting challenge. So much of what we honour and desire is for freedom. We want understanding, knowledge, improvement, and freedom. We want utopia, but how far are we really willing to go in order to get it? That is an important question. But that is what we, as a whole, really seem to want.

Individuals, on the other hand, are different. They want power, and money, and they want to be right. Of course, these goals in many ways oppose the goals described in the previous paragraph. Power and money for individuals, while not incompatible with understanding, knowledge, improvement, and freedom, does not work towards it above all else. People wanting to be right, on the other hand, tends to be directly in opposition to those ideals.

Power and money are the main results of patents, for example. In theory, patents were designed to protect innovators by giving them a chance to monetize their inventions before everyone started using the technique, but in the modern landscape, many claim that it actually prevents others from building on past success. In other words, it stifles improvement, and represses knowledge and understanding. I'm not going to argue either side of this today, although I will likely cover it in a future blog post.

Life should be based on principles of openness, however. There are benefits to closed systems, primarily economical, but as a whole, that isn't what we want. This is particularly so in the world of science. Research, comparison, learning, and so on is always going to be improved the most by co-operation. That is the key tenet of an open society. Co-operation. Working together so that we can build on our earlier mistakes, and our earlier successes.

That is a big problem with the world today. All scientific endeavours require co-operation, but there is no system in place to ensure co-operation happens, or even to make it possible. Instead, people want to use it as a means to make even more money, and so scientists are forced to work in their own little bubbles, slowed down in their effort to make our lives better. Life would be better in an Open society.