In November, Ana Hevesi and I published the first version of our Cumulative Culture Theory of Developer Problem-Solving as a preprint, synthesizing evidence and theory from 90+ refs (yeah...my job requires reading a lot). But we missed one! A remarkably relevant one! About a month ago I stumbled on a study I hadn't yet read. And in true "cumulative culture" spirit, it just filled me with joy and validation to see parallel work. So I wanted to share it and tell you about it.
Here's the paper: "Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests" (2018), by Elena Miu, Ned Gulley, Kevin Laland and Luke Rendell. It walks through their summary of some fascinating data, and implications they see for understanding how cumulative cultures function and evolve, interrogated via programming solutions: "Here we present a detailed investigation of cumulative cultural evolution in a large-scale context that reflects the real-world complexity of human behaviour. We analysed a database of 21,745,538 lines of computer code in total and 483,173 unique lines, originating from 47,967 entries to 19 online collaborative programming competitions organised over the course of 14 years by the MathWorks software company." What a joy it was to find other folks publishing in this space and across these topics. While I am a little astonished my previous lit review didn't turn this up for me, this just further goes to show how any individual work is made better by open sharing and iteration...EXACTLY the points of both of our papers. I will be integrating this reference into our preprint! A wonderful source of continued evidence that backs up everything we were arguing, by my read. I think a wonderful contribution of this kind of work is that it helps us see past our simplistic models about programming work: for instance, we might be tempted to think "oh, an online contest is about isolated and individual solutions." Instead, by seeing the importance of the relationships between solutions and the dialogue we are in, as a collective, this analysis is so much richer (and more accurate), thinking about solution-crafting as dynamic across a population.
Science is about sharing, dialogue, and converging evidence, to me. It's a huge gift to our shared cultures to do "free revealing" (as per Von Hippel); I don't know anything about this team or these authors but knowing how much work it is to gain access to and work with data of this sort, I am so impressed by this project. Sometimes competition feels the only language we're allowed, but I am bored by that limitation. I am proud to be a translator, to cite others, and to be in community. This also made me think about and continue to be proud of my commitment to open science and what it affords me. Sometimes it can feel very laborious and like extra, invisible labor to do things like put up preprints, share out loud about iterations, and try to bring transparency end-to-end to your science in an era where scientists are scrutinized and criticized more than ever. But our values bring us forward and help us care more about creating change than the conventions we were trained in. I'm relieved and grateful when others do work that I didn't have access or opportunity to do, and I'm excited to build on it. I have approximately thirty thousand manuscripts in progress right now but when you see a new version of the Cumulative Culture preprint go up, here is your context and you can look forward to this great paper being integrated into our references as it deserves. The processes of iterative open science allow us to transparently draft out loud and share that with you!