Ben Reinhardt

The topic I wanted to research, and got about 1/3 the way through, was institution building in the Great Weirding. It’s the sort of thing that’s not a natural fit for any corporate funding source.

Current plan is to package and flush out what I have so far as a sort of “Christmas Special” about 1/5 the scope/ambition of S1.

A more basic problem with kickstarter type ideas is that anyone good at creating the buzz and hype for that is almost by definition going to be bad at R&D and vice versa. Content mismatch aside.

Writing grant proposals to satisfy a few bureaucrats is already enough of a mismatch to research personalities. Crowd-pleasing requires 10x that painful mismatch.

List of actually credible indie researchers 1. Stephen Wolfram (math/complexity/computation) 2. Jeff Hawkins (neuroscience) 3. John Carnack (AGI) Notice something, besides the fact they’re smart and have the right subject-matter prep? They got rich first

Don’t mean to be a downer. There’s possibly imaginative models that could work in indie mode that I simply haven’t thought of.

Many things get called “research” and a lot of ego-sensitivity gets attached to it. I think of it mainly in terms of (high risk of no valuable output)*(high ratio of invisible to visible output)*(high time demands). Let me try to pseudo-quantify this and take the ego element out:

1. Intelligence briefs 2. Gartneresque research 3. Investigative journalism 3. Market research 4. Broad societal trend research 5. Data-heavy trend research, pure math 6. Tech futures, humanities 7. S/W tech, social science 8. Generic STEM 9. Big science 10. Paradigm shifts