I was briefly calling myself an independent researcher: somebody who self-funds spec R&D on their own ideas. In theory it’s something like indie-research : academic research :: blogging/self-publishing : traditional publishing.
But the idea doesn’t really work.
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She’s not talking about the same thing. Her project looks like a classic institutional project. Just not a university one.
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Could you clarify?
If Nadia's is a "classic institutional project", then what are you talking about?
What differentiates the two?
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See first tweet. Like blogging is to traditional book writing. Where you’re not dependent on a big anchor to sustain. I don’t need an agent or the book publishing industry to do it. Amazon affiliate and spare time is enough.
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She had a Ford fellowship at one point. I had a16z funding for breaking smart S1 and now Berggruen funding for my new project. I don’t consider these indie research.
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Too much to unpack here in tweets, but a few thoughts: there's def a difference between focused vs wild explorations, but I don't value doing the latter indefinitely as much as I used to, for a lot of the reasons stated in this post
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I will say that whenever I *do* feel the need for totally unbounded exploration, I'd def do that off my own savings, for the reasons you state. (Pre-Ford funding was like that.) But I don't feel the desire to do that indefinitely, as I used to, vs. "cycling" between periods
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That's normal. Many funding sources like DARPA are in fact explicitly structured to allow such cycling. I think the wild vs. focused axis is orthogonal to self-controlled vs. institutionally-controlled funding continuity. I'd like full-lifecycle capability for myself :)


