The Hacker Ethic for Gifted Scientists

Abstract

This chapter explores the ethics of gifted people in science with a special emphasis on a” hacker ethic.” Gifted students and professionals in science create new ideas and products that can be used in the benefit of our society. However, the creative process in science includes many ethical issues that need to be considered before publishing the new idea or the product. Combining excellence with ethics relates to ethical models developed in the academic context, such as Pekka Himanen’s theoretical approach to the hacker ethic. In his work, Himanen (2001) introduced a new kind of ethic, the” hacker work ethic,” which has replaced the dominance of the Protestant work ethic with a passionate attitude and relationship to one’s work. With the word” hackers,” he referred to people who did their work because of intrinsic interest, excitement, and joy, whereas the Protestant work ethic emphasized work as a duty and a calling. The successful scientists resemble the hackers with their strong inner drive to excel (Koro-Ljungberg & Tirri, 2002; Tirri & Campbell, 2002). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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