🎉 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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It's kinda sad you're not in a Kahn Academy "lab" helping change online learning at scale. I'm hoping your ultimate inventions will be stolen widely. :)
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My problem with HCI is that its fundamental assumptions are about the limitations of computer systems. It's not that they're unlimited, it's that the field has so little historical awareness, self-insight, and understanding of actual human cognitive structures: humanities work.
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This very much resonates with me (as an HCI outsider). “Elaborate artificial evaluations of uninteresting systems” feels like a fairly common problem. It feels like HCI is overcompensating against being perceived as a ‘soft’ or ‘imprecise’ discipline.
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I’ve also seen many HCI papers with super extensive (and expensive) user studies to answer ill conceived and ill posed questions. But of course there is excellent work being published also.
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