🎉 New essay reflecting on my experiences so far as an "independent researcher"—ill-defined though that term is.
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I view "independent researcher" as a probably transitional-title. If the work is good, it'll probably be better to institutionalize.
Why not start a startup? Doesn't make sense to optimize for growth.
Why not be an academic? Some big misalignments with my adjacent field (HCI).
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Crowdfunding has been a surprisingly successful route for sustainable independent research. It's pretty clear that my experiences depend on lots of accumulated career capital, but I suspect other experienced tech people could crowdfund weird work like mine.
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"Working with the garage door up" has been a rewarding source of weird inbounds—a great metric for work like mine! Creates an interesting challenge, though: others will most easily grasp the most familiar bits in nascent ideas, so replies may reinforce regression to the mean.
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It's been quite difficult to do both good research work and good implementation work! The essay also elaborates some of the implications of this thread:
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I've noticed that consciousness recedes when I'm deep in a coding phase, many back-to-back days in flow. My mind narrows to tunnel-vision, fixated on the software and its issues. My sense of self shrinks; non-code ideas cease to arise; I get less curious; writing yields little.
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"Is it enough to just come up with the ideas, or do you have to be the one to deploy and scale them?" I've enjoyed this framing in reply: build ideas enough that they become "obvious" to others. Fun to watch my quick public notes design show up in half a dozen products this year.
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Thanks for sharing this! I'm on a similar journey, though earlier on the path. The section on startups and insight generation through prototypes resonates.
The growth equivalent for me is building an audience (spreading ideas for impact and feedback)
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really liked this essay! my view of academic HCI basically agrees with yours. i get the impression that the problem is largely driven by funding sources (esp NSF grants + tech megacorps), which are heavily biased toward the incremental. in HCI they fund projects, not people
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i've gotten away with doing a lot of weird speculative work at UCSC, but i've largely been supported by fellowships, TAships, & dregs of funding from previous grants – i genuinely have no idea how to acquire long-term lab-scale funding for the kind of work i do right now
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Rings true with my experience.
In search of "scenius", I've found it surprisingly easy to organize academic workshops, where the gatekeepers are not so vigilant.
Keep at it!
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Your workshops immediately came to mind when I read that section of the essay :)
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