By radically improving filtering, however, advanced information technology can lead this same heuristic to inordinately favor depth at too great a cost in breadth. Old strategies can become counterproductive in new environments. The Web accumulates 200,000 new pages daily, along with thousands of postings to public discussion groups, a wealth of information that creates a need to sort the diamonds from the dust. Communications that once depended on geography, proximity, and serendipity are screened and filtered for perceived relevance and reputation. Science advances not just from publication but from dialogue, apprenticeship, and collaboration.
Incentives are necessary to encourage creation, distribution, and use.
The incentives faced by individual scientists, however, do not automatically encourage them to maximize scientific progress. For example, overspecialization can be privately beneficial while erecting virtual walls between scholarly communities. If intradisciplinary interactions substitute for interdisciplinary ones, then the intellectual cross-pollination of ideas can suffer. Conceivably, reducing the spillovers between thermodynamics and finance could have forestalled the development of options markets. Balkanization can be avoided.