tldr: Get tenure, or get rich. Software has not eaten R&D, and won’t eat it anytime soon. Possible outliers like Satoshi (who may have been in an R&D institution or indie-wealthy in 2009 for all we know) notwithstanding.
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Ironically, most modern tenured faculty don’t get to do much R&D either, at least in STEM. They’re too busy fund-raising. They’re more like angel investors and board advisors to grad students and postdocs. Humanities and social sciences may perhaps be better, I don’t know.
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If you’re thinking kickstarter-like funding mechanisms, forget it. You’ll be asking for 10x as much money as typical artistic or startuppy projects, have no natural rewards to hand out, and a far lower likelihood of success.
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A good public example: Breaking Smart S2 was a medium-depth research project I thought I could sustain on my own (a16z supported S1). I gave up looking for funding after a couple of half-hearted pitches to orgs I thought might be a fit for the topic.
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The topic I wanted to research, and got about 1/3 the way through, was institution building in the Great Weirding. It’s the sort of thing that’s not a natural fit for any corporate funding source.
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Current plan is to package and flush out what I have so far as a sort of “Christmas Special” about 1/5 the scope/ambition of S1.
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A more basic problem with kickstarter type ideas is that anyone good at creating the buzz and hype for that is almost by definition going to be bad at R&D and vice versa. Content mismatch aside.
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Writing grant proposals to satisfy a few bureaucrats is already enough of a mismatch to research personalities. Crowd-pleasing requires 10x that painful mismatch.
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List of actually credible indie researchers 1. Stephen Wolfram (math/complexity/computation) 2. Jeff Hawkins (neuroscience) 3. John Carnack (AGI) Notice something, besides the fact they’re smart and have the right subject-matter prep? They got rich first
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Don’t mean to be a downer. There’s possibly imaginative models that could work in indie mode that I simply haven’t thought of.
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Many things get called “research” and a lot of ego-sensitivity gets attached to it. I think of it mainly in terms of (high risk of no valuable output)*(high ratio of invisible to visible output)*(high time demands). Let me try to pseudo-quantify this and take the ego element out:
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1. Intelligence briefs 2. Gartneresque research 3. Investigative journalism 3. Market research 4. Broad societal trend research 5. Data-heavy trend research, pure math 6. Tech futures, humanities 7. S/W tech, social science 8. Generic STEM 9. Big science 10. Paradigm shifts
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This scale isn’t commentary on the intelligence, creativity, or imagination of the people who do such work. Higher on the scale is simply riskier, more time-consuming, and requires more backend work, even holding the human factor constant
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One thing I probably could do is raise funding for a small research institution/lab working on problems in the 6-8 range. Maybe 4-5 staff. The thing is I don’t want to run a research org, which is an entirely different interest/ambition than doing research. It takes a COO type.
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Strange-looping in a secondary meta thread I did later.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195937380210921472 …
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End of conversation
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