michael_nielsen

Huh—I'd never heard of that law, but have been citing ~ the concept a lot when describing my journey. More as a curse then anything else though. I'm always drawn toward things that I feel are deeply important that no else is doing...which can make it hard to get paid!

It's my terminology, after Groucho Marx's "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member". I know exactly what you mean.

I like to think about it in 2 ways: (1) “OMG, why does no one realize this?! I must work on this" (2) If it’s popular, there are hopefully enough qualified-for-the-challenge people to sufficiently tackle the problem(*). Put your efforts to something that needs *your* help

(*) Of course, that’s prob where my point breaks down. (1) Depends on your definition of *qualified* (2) Depends on your definition of *enough*— if it’s space filling like education, then unsure what enough is...

There's a Kevin Kelly piece somewhere where he talks about pitching writers on particular stories. He said most stories either a writer eventually followed up, or he (Kelly) got tired of pitching. But for some he couldn't let it go, & that's how he knew the pieces he had to write

Maybe we could rephrase point (2) at a different level of abstraction: are there competent institutions that will solve this problem? If so, then the human race has sorta got this covered.

I tend to feel this about the market. There are a lot of types of problems the market is just mind bogglingly good at solving. And so you don't need to worry about those problems being solved. Someone is on it!

On the other hand only a very few people (near 0 per million) can work at the same intensity for as long a time that the markets demand in an orthogonal venture alone. You work harder when you’re in the vicinity of others working hard.

That may or may not be true, but you also end up making something that would have existed anyway. Which seems rather dispiriting to me.

Yes. My original point (perhaps too subtly made) is that academia is just as suspectible to market forces as industry, so they shouldn't take the moral high ground

Perhaps what Bret is saying is that there’s no real necessity that academic research has to have that market pressure. The incentives aren’t really setup for that though (e.g. in the past universities used to fund all of a profs research, now it’s mostly centralized to NSF etc).

I completely agree, and have been living this professionally for several years now. Was trying to say that the incentives problem is real, but academic vs. corporate is a false distinction. The problem exists in both sectors

Hmm...this may be true for benefiting one's reputation, but not net social benefit. I wouldn't discount the ability of funding + urgency to accelerate discovery. Collaboration is so important! (When I wrote that tweet, I was thinking of the Space Race.)