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I think all the talk of indie research/scholarship etc. are basically impossible if you're also earning a living doing something else. Ie you have to be retired-early and independently wealthy.
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It's nice to see people trying to make various sorts of micro-grant programs happen, but I don't think they're funded at levels high enough to make meaningful indie research possible, in terms of freeing up time for later-life people with higher cost of living.
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Even in my first year as a grad student, I made ~18k/yr, and in my last year as postdoc I think I made ~55k, and that was mostly as a single guy with very low cost of living and expectations...
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I personally don't count my writing as research. If it goes straight from idea to writing, without intermediate steps like field work, coding, math, deep prep notes, or experiments, it's not research in my book. Going straight from reading to writing is more like criticism.
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Structuring time for research is far harder than structuring material resources (equipment, lab bench) or space (properly sized/ventilated/lit area for the type of work). Research is a natural time monopoly. It wants to take over all your waking hours.
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Natural monopoly in time is an interesting concept. Language learning is another example. The speed increases superlinearly with time fraction of immersion. That's why actually being immersed in the foreign language country all waking hours is the fastest.
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My material resources state is basically complete. I have all the stuff I need except for a high-powered workstation (not a good time to be shopping for that). Spatially, my spare bedroom is a decent space, but not the best, it's about 12x12 feet, and ideally I'd like 3x that
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But time-wise, I'm not able to arrange my time properly to make progress at the rate I want to. I need time for a) refreshing old subjects b) studying a few new relevant ones c) working on the research proper (I'm thinking here mainly of my rover project, though I have others)
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If mixing in writing (non-research... blogging/newsletter) and consulting work weren't an issue, I'd arrange a grad school like schedule: study sessions, lab sessions etc. on a fixed calendar.
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Replying to
Today’s research accomplishment: made a cardboard tube pinhole sun-observing thing like in grade school. It doesn’t work very well 😐
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I don’t really work that way. Nobody can use me a full week at a time given what I do. A “heavy” gig for me is a steady couple of hours a week, and total load is maybe 3-8 hours/week scattered throughout week. Enough to disrupt full time attention.
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I have been totally unsuccessful in attempts to context switch to/from research work on smaller granularity than a week. Even week-by-week is awfully hard, honestly.
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There is an enormous overhead to context switching between writing code and writing prose. It doesn't seem to get lighter with practice either. Sometimes it feels like it gets harder even.
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Taking a week off just to work on something sounds great actually. I have thought about it for the rover project. There are many work cottages in Finnish forests here that advertise themselves as “workation” places. I might try it out. John Carmack does this
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