Anonymous Science

Instead of an author list, results would just be from “The Lab.”

Jane Street is a financial firm with a fascinating internal structure: they have no job titles and no individual attribution. The attitude is that if everybody checks their egos and desire for credit at the door, they can collectively make a lot more money.

This is the polar opposite of how science works today. The core units of work are authorship and citations. Nobel Prizes are awarded to individuals. To get to the top of the hierarchy you need to start your own lab, often named after yourself, and establish a strong personal brand. To a large extent, the goal of the entire game is to have the most impressive work done in your name.

What if there were science organizations that operated like Jane Street? A group of researchers who agreed that they could get a lot more done if they rejected the current system and joined together into a single unit. Instead of an author list, results would just be from “The Lab.” What work would they be able to accomplish that is hard or impossible today?

Perhaps the closest thing we have to this today is a massive project like CERN that publishes papers with 5000+ authors.

There are many reasons why this system is unlikely to work! It’s hard but straightforward to orient a group around making a single number go up with with tight feedback. In science, there is no clear metric and it can take decades or more to see who is really right. The temptation to break ranks and take credit would be huge and without a fortune at stake, there wouldn’t be a strong countervailing force.

Despite the impossibility of the platonic version of a truly monolithic org, experiments to move in that direction would be valuable. There is a lot of important work that only gets done when you put aside questions of credit. It’s also not a law of the universe that a global attribution and credit system is the only organizing principle for science.