{"id":1136,"date":"2021-12-30T20:46:24","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T20:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2021-12-30T21:06:49","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T21:06:49","slug":"on-being-scooped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/on-being-scooped\/","title":{"rendered":"On being scooped"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my colleagues have over the years expressed concern their ongoing projects are in danger of being &#8220;scooped&#8221;, and as a result, they need to work rapidly to disseminate the projects in question. This concern is particularly prominent among the fast-moving (and unusually cargo-cultish) natural language processing community, though I have occasionally heard similar concerns in the company of theoretical linguists. Assuming this is not merely hysteria caused by material conditions like casualization and pandemic-related isolation, there is a simple solution: work on something else, something you yourself deem to be less obvious. If you&#8217;re in danger of being scooped, it suggest that you&#8217;re taking obvious next steps\u2014you&#8217;re engaging in what Kuhn calls <em>normal science\u2014<\/em>that you lack a competitive advantage (such as rare-on-the-ground expertise, special knowledge, proprietary or unreleased data, etc.) that would help <strong>you in particular<\/strong> advance the state of knowledge. If you find yourself in this predicament, you should consider allowing somebody else to carry the football across the goal-line. Or don&#8217;t, but then you might just get scooped after all.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my colleagues have over the years expressed concern their ongoing projects are in danger of being &#8220;scooped&#8221;, and as a result, they need to work rapidly to disseminate the projects in question. This concern is particularly prominent among the fast-moving (and unusually cargo-cultish) natural language processing community, though I have occasionally heard similar &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/on-being-scooped\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;On being scooped&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1141,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/1141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}