Different behaviours in line-final words...?

[RenegadeHealer]

So now I have this huge resource that is not compatible with anything else out there. Sharing it piecemeal doesn't seem to work. I'm a big picture person and the bits and pieces don't mean anything unless you have the whole puzzle in front of you. But if I give it all away, then I'm giving away 12 years of work.

So... as of a couple of days ago (because of threads like this), I'm putting some brain cycles into how this can be done (and whether it should be done). I hate seeing people re-invent the wheel when good tools are available, but there also has to be a balance. It wouldn't be fair if I simply gave up a considerable chunk of my life and got nothing in return.

Exactly. If I were a treasure hunter who had a promising lead after many years' work but had hit an impasse, I'd be sorely tempted but extremely wary of revealing everything I knew to anyone. Finding a person both qualified to offer me constructive help and trustworthy enough to not just take the treasure for themselves first would be a major problem. After all, as Benjamin Franklin said, two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them is dead.

I think wheel-reinvention might just be an unfortunate but unavoidable side product of any race to solve a mystery. There can be only one true solution (at most), and finding it is a zero-sum game. There are real incentives to share and collaborate, but there are also very real attenuating forces to these incentives. I'm reminded of a clinical rotation I did when I was learning psychiatry, which involved visiting a homeless shelter and resource center exclusively for diagnosed schizophrenic patients. Schizophrenic people feel the world as a hostile place, and are globally scared of pretty much all other people. However, like all people, they need some social interaction to get access to things they can't do themselves. So a conversation in the shelter became a form of currency — something everyone needed but nobody really wanted wholeheartedly. Being willing to converse with someone and share information was a favor that was traded quid pro quo. I feel a similar though less severe social force at work here and in many special-interest communities around a mysterious phenomenon: trusting others has both very real benefits and equally as real drawbacks.