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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 21 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      6 replies 3 retweets 55 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 27 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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.

      2 replies 1 retweet 27 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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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 🙂

      7 replies 3 retweets 51 likes
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    10. Cathal‏ @Cathal72887956 16 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @vgr

      (that and Hubert Horan on Uber, but he was already a well established researcher in an adjacent field, so maybe doesn't count)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 16 Nov 2019
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      Replying to @Cathal72887956

      That sounds like research in the sense of investigative journalism, which is a much cheaper thing to sustain

      2:31 PM - 16 Nov 2019
      0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

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