No, of course he wasn't saying that. But there is a problem with the reward structure of the system.
Scientists have to eat and pay the bills, too. Unless you're really rich, it's tough to do much serious science in your spare time on weekends, paying for equipment from your own pocket. So the idea is that a scientist gets a job that pays him/her to do science. The system rewards scientists who advance knowledge and penalizes those who do not.
How do we determine whom to reward? It is extremely difficult to evaluate most scientists' work unless you are an expert in the same field. So we let peer reviewers evaluate the work, and reward scientists for publications in prestigious peer-reviewed journals.
The problem is that these incentives work against some kinds of sharing.
It's not all bad. A scientist whose work never sees the light of day is fired; no publications means no job. But sharing of ideas apart from those that are necessarily published is something the system tends to punish.
What to do about it? It's easy to propose some radical revision of the system. But we still have to deal with the question of how to evaluate the work of someone whose ideas can only really be understood after a decade of specialized study.
Scientists have to eat and pay the bills, too. Unless you're really rich, it's tough to do much serious science in your spare time on weekends, paying for equipment from your own pocket. So the idea is that a scientist gets a job that pays him/her to do science. The system rewards scientists who advance knowledge and penalizes those who do not.
How do we determine whom to reward? It is extremely difficult to evaluate most scientists' work unless you are an expert in the same field. So we let peer reviewers evaluate the work, and reward scientists for publications in prestigious peer-reviewed journals.
The problem is that these incentives work against some kinds of sharing.
It's not all bad. A scientist whose work never sees the light of day is fired; no publications means no job. But sharing of ideas apart from those that are necessarily published is something the system tends to punish.
What to do about it? It's easy to propose some radical revision of the system. But we still have to deal with the question of how to evaluate the work of someone whose ideas can only really be understood after a decade of specialized study.