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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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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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
Strange-looping in a secondary meta thread I did later.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195937380210921472 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
Venkatesh Rao @vgrThinking 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. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195789557465153536 …Show this thread2 replies 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @vgr
Enjoyed this thread but I just realized aren't you currently doing indie research at the beggruden institute thing? Doesn't that count?
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It’s not really indie in the sense I’m talking about. I’m officially an adjunct faculty at USC as part of this gig so a part of the traditional system. In fact the power of this gig is what leads me to see the stark inadequacy of true, ie unaffiliated, “indie research” conceits.
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Replying to @vgr
Hmm but aside from being associated with the institution you're mostly operating as an indie no? Curious to understand the difference
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Replying to @tomcritchlow
It’s ability to generate funding for research reliably, year after year, without having a permanent institutional home, or even a temporary one.
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