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If a doctor would say you to quit smoking otherwise you'll die by lungs cancer, you'll cease smoking or continue along this route because you are not willing to do any sacrifices to change this bad style of life and to regain so your full health and to continue living?
Well, a lot of folk are happy to keep smoking. For now ignoring some of my elderly relatives who smoked and died in their 80s..
However, this is not quite the same, the smoker shortens only his own life, and may actually do the rest of us a favour by freeing up some space.
This is more like
If a doctor would say you to quit smoking otherwise someone else on the far side of the globe you have never met will probably die at some point in the future?
Which as we are seeing, is not anything like such a strong persuasive argument...
Added to which a lot of people feel that, as a point of principle, no-one should be telling them what to do. Which is a bit of a problem in a case like this.
Yes, I like that article by Prof Rees, however there is a huge, huge challenge for both scientists and engineers, whether in academia or industry, which is that we aresimply not set up to work collaboratively on any problems. None of us would dream of, say, having a serious discussion here about a new engineering solution for any problem because we'd be giving away our IP. We wouldn't have our NDAs in place. And of of course we'd need to be confident that we'd recoup our costs within 3-5 years, because that's the only reason we can do anything.
What I find very annoying is that academia are just as bad at this as industry - as a lecturer friend once said to me "oh no, I can't collaborate with any other UK university, we're all competing for the same funding pot..."
So it does seem that there needs to be a Government initiative that ensures researchers and developers only win in the short term if they openly work together in this. That way we'll all win in the long term. Any other ideas welcome!
