This isn’t cheap talk btw. I dropped 2k on a personal Matlab license after I went indie and kept it current for years, and went through dozens of false starts working on various ideas. Couldn’t find the time to develop any of them to even bad-conference-paper level.
-
-
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.