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.
Conversation
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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Writing grant proposals to satisfy a few bureaucrats is already enough of a mismatch to research personalities. Crowd-pleasing requires 10x that painful mismatch.
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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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Replying to
Strange-looping in a secondary meta thread I did later.
Quote Tweet
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…
Show this thread
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Replying to
Would love to chat about this some time re: research. Also, ironically was thinking about Breaking Smart S2 the other day - glad to hear it’s still in the works. Lmk if you want any eyes on it. Been awhile since my org science days, but always fun to dust up
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