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Note #3 Learning projects to prepare to go deep on a subject are not research even if it feels like it Reading published literature and blogging a few derivative observations is not research Critiquing/finding flaws in published papers is indie peer-review, not research
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I find that autodidacts who haven’t experienced institutional R&D environments have a self-congratulatory low threshold for what they count as research. It’s a bit like vanity publishing or fan fiction. This mismatch doesn’t exist as much in indie art, consulting, game dev etc
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I’m on a year-long fellowship right now, and this is partly what has made me admit the conceit in the “indie researcher” self-label. I’m doing this sort of thinking for the first time since ~2006 or so (the year I last submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal).
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Replying to @vgr
One answer is smaller institutions like @nwspk or Mozilla Foundation that offer time limited research fellowships rather than tenure
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It’s also reminding me how much I enjoy doing the real thing. It’s like a year long vacation back to my own past.
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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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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.
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Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it. twitter.com/vgr/status/119…
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This is a great thread. A lot of people look down upon “if I had more money I would do X” type of statements. I never got that derision, as I tend to view money as compressed/portable time than as wealth in traditional sense.
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