🎉 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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I really loved reading this - thank you for sharing.
While I’m a different kind of independent researcher, this section (in the photo) really resonated. Interested to see how (and with whom) you cultivate this space moving forward - assuming you continue to share so openly!
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as someone who only casually follows your work - do you have a list of what these products are? it's hard to figure these out unless people follow you *and* the various startups super closely.
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there's some links to examples in the article
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