Conversation

The psychological boundary between research and development is marked by the onset of nerd-OCD. When you adopt what would seem like draconian, oppressive levels of discipline and rigor if someone else imposed it on you. An everyday example is calorie tracking in dieting.
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The "rigor" lies not in the "scientific" aspect of the R&D (the actual science part tends to be scribbles on paper napkins) but in the almost ceremonial/ritual behaviors that kick in once you know what you have to figure out correctly.
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Much of the rigor in rigorous science is actually embodied by the non-human instrumental parts, whether it is a telescope or an Excel spreadsheet. Humans don't actually do rigor themselves. They delegate it to tools. Even closed-form math has gone that way now, with Mathematica
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