13/ The challenge is working out a systematic business model for delivering Weird Topics learning material from the Long Tail of the Great Weirding. My experiments so far have been Random Acts of Mildly Profitable or Break-Even Teaching, and I don’t trust that to be sustainable
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You could do premium pricing but probably not for the most research-interest frontier topics. The examples you offered are more a sort of luxury lifestyle consumption product than what I’m talking about.
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Many actual research-frontier PhDs are well-modeled as “luxury lifestyle consumption products” where people spend via opportunity cost, fwiw.
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I guess I’m thinking of it more as a form of intellectual entertainment or personal development, not as actually pushing the frontier of anything. Still hard to imagine that happening outside of institutions, even for me
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That’s likely because you have an exalted view of what happens inside institutions. If you’re willing to trust my word for it, the only serious difference is high capex equipment like electron microscopes. Otherwise they do exactly what we outsiders do: read, think, code, write.
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Would there also be benefit (to the teacher) of simply getting feedback on how the Course affects the students? e.g., when I taught SW engr, I learned a lot about my "market" and got better "course-student fit". Adjusted course accordingly. Good prep for writing a book.
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So basically same reason famous professors who’ve achieved financial independence continue to teach
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