Conversation

One of my favourite quotes, from Michael Atiyah I've struggled a fair bit with the idea that research is goal- or problem-oriented. Many people take this for granted, but for me creative work is intuitive & exploratory. I usually don't know what I'm doing until it's nearly done
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Given a choice of writing a grant application & unaesthetized dental surgery... ladies & gentlemen, please start your drills. I don't mean that. Well, I don't _quite_ mean that.
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This is a difficult style for students and collaborators (with rare exceptions), and in practice some projects are pretty problem- or goal-oriented. But it's not a natural fit for me.
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This is one (though not the main) reason I've become so interested in James Scott's legible/illegible distinction. Research institutions favour legibility: that, in some sense, is what legibility is _about_. But much of the research I most admire was illegible for a long time
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To come back to legibility / illegibility: problem- or goal-orientation is highly legible. Failure is met with: "At least we were working on an important problem!" Whereas exploration that doesn't work out seems like just faffing around. Institutions much prefer the former.
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(Parenthetically: it's amazing how much of our lives is about making sense of the tension between our individual preferences and those of the institutions that surround us.)
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