That’s the real deal. Anyone below that threshold calling themselves an independent researcher is either talking about something like market research or trend research (which is really environmental intelligence work not R&D in the sense that interests me), deluded, or lying.
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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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Best-case outcome if neither applies: your idea has commercial potential and you can get a startup out of it. Which means the vast majority of ideas, both STEM and humanities, are out. Even I’m not optimist enough to think your R&D on 16rh century French poets can be a unicorn.
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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.
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Even if the most expensive research tools like LHC or Hubble got as cheap as Arduinos, it wouldn’t help. That’s not the cost bottleneck. The bottleneck is researcher time. Even crappiest, cheapest conference paper I ever wrote took at least 6 months (~7k grad student salary then)
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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.
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Note: peer-reviewed publishing or patents just as depth cal9bration. I wouldn’t necessarily publish in such forms since I don’t think those institutional processes have ever added much to my work. Nor into them tbf, in the peer reviewing I’ve done. But I’d aim for that depth.
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Note #2: I enjoy proper research, but wasn’t a great talent even at my peak and am now likely at 60%. So in a way this is an okay market outcome. If I were wealthy I might do self-indulgent mediocre research for the rest of my life, but no reason you should pay for it.
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Replying to
One answer is smaller institutions like or Mozilla Foundation that offer time limited research fellowships rather than tenure
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We can do slightly different things, more like what a digital agency might do. Agility is a benefit. See electiontechhandbook.uk for a recent output.
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As long as they’re ones nobody else is looking at 🤷♂️
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Being first/original on a topic is not actually a primary motivation in research for most researchers in my experience. Interestingness is the primary driver. Nobody picks a problem simply because it’s at the intersection of fundable by a model and unworked-on.
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A lot of the value in these kinds of institutions is the common room, the peer group. That is much harder to maintain and especially to build online
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Not for me. I got very little out of peers. It was pure;y about paid-for time for me.
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