Even if the most expensive research tools like LHC or Hubble got as cheap as Arduinos, it wouldn’t help. That’s not the cost bottleneck. The bottleneck is researcher time. Even crappiest, cheapest conference paper I ever wrote took at least 6 months (~7k grad student salary then)
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This isn’t cheap talk btw. I dropped 2k on a personal Matlab license after I went indie and kept it current for years, and went through dozens of false starts working on various ideas. Couldn’t find the time to develop any of them to even bad-conference-paper level.
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Note: peer-reviewed publishing or patents just as depth cal9bration. I wouldn’t necessarily publish in such forms since I don’t think those institutional processes have ever added much to my work. Nor into them tbf, in the peer reviewing I’ve done. But I’d aim for that depth.
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Note #2: I enjoy proper research, but wasn’t a great talent even at my peak and am now likely at 60%. So in a way this is an okay market outcome. If I were wealthy I might do self-indulgent mediocre research for the rest of my life, but no reason you should pay for it.
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Note #3
Learning projects to prepare to go deep on a subject are not research even if it feels like it
Reading published literature and blogging a few derivative observations is not research
Critiquing/finding flaws in published papers is indie peer-review, not research
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I find that autodidacts who haven’t experienced institutional R&D environments have a self-congratulatory low threshold for what they count as research. It’s a bit like vanity publishing or fan fiction. This mismatch doesn’t exist as much in indie art, consulting, game dev etc
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I’m on a year-long fellowship right now, and this is partly what has made me admit the conceit in the “indie researcher” self-label. I’m doing this sort of thinking for the first time since ~2006 or so (the year I last submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal).
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Replying to @vgr
One answer is smaller institutions like @nwspk or Mozilla Foundation that offer time limited research fellowships rather than tenure
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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.
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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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I can believe that. Math is probably the most efficient field. Coffee to theorems like Erdos said. You guys even use computers in a focused and efficient way.

