The reason software doesn’t eat R&D even though people think it should is that tools or open access to published lit/libraries, or free peer-reviewed publishing/presentation forums (if you want that) are only a tiny fraction of the cost for most ideas. The main host is time.
-
-
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
Writing grant proposals to satisfy a few bureaucrats is already enough of a mismatch to research personalities. Crowd-pleasing requires 10x that painful mismatch.
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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:
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
Strange-looping in a secondary meta thread I did later.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195937380210921472 …
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.