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.
Conversation
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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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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Replying to
Does Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures fit in that list?
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