Coming out of Uni with a PhD in the UK in 2003, I went looking for some "curiosity driven" research and didn't find any. The dotcom bust had sucked budgets dry and no-one was hiring. I've dipped my toe back into the market a few times and not found any. I'd have to move to the States and even then there was no guarantee of doing unfettered research. I carried on in my spare time but it's not the same as being surrounded in a melting pot of like minded (yet different subject) people.
I got a PhD in 2004 and could not find any non-academic research positions in the US. (I was pretty fed up with academia at the time, so I didn't look at those.) The closest I got was a job offer from a group at Telcordia Research, but when I went up for an in-person interview, I found the building mostly empty, most of the people there very bitter, and the only group that was hiring doing product development, not research. (And it was in New Jersey.) I declined the offer and went back to contracting.
Sometimes a good manager lets you work on ideas you believe in, as long as you continue to pay lip service to "the official project" so that one can move forward as well.
The term "under the radar R&D" has not been unheard of in many corporate research labs.
But what worries me there are reports that the corporate R&D lab as an institution is in decline. I cannot judge whether this is true, since I recently switched back to academia to have a bit more autonomy after a decade in industry R&D.
In semiconductor-industry related companies, I've seen the departments continuing to exist, but the expected time-to-market for R&D decrease from 10 to 5 to 3 years.
With an expected product launch in 3 years, it's effectively development, without any research.
I'm a researcher in Biotech, and honestly, a working at curiosity driven research institute is all I've ever wanted from a career. I have the credentials and have proven myself academically, and in industry, but this kind of position is just so hard to find! I really just need time and a small amount of resources to work on ideas. I usually struggle to get more than 20% of my time working on my own ideas.
I've spoken with colleagues over the years, and when I bring up this desire, so many of them feel the same way. Many of these people are incredibly accomplished and come from top institutions. What a waste to not give that magnitude of creativity an outlet! The only path I see to this type of life now, is independent wealth. It just strikes me as such an opportunity to create a place for these people. If you build it they will come!
> It just strikes me as such an opportunity to create a place for these people
the problem is finding and filtering the applicants that come to such a place. How do you tell the difference between somebody who just phones it in, from somebody who would actually produce some valid research breakthroughs?
Unless you have unlimited resources to spend, this is a difficult problem to solve.
I was lucky to take a grad-level math course in error correcting codes from Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, the author of the essay.
I read a lot of his papers ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ ) in the hopes that I would learn something to improve my exam scores, but he has a knack for asking questions so fundamental that they have almost never even been properly formulated before.
If you have some time, I recommend reading a few of his papers. He completely changed my view of mathematics.
Wow, what a diverse body of work. Could you give an example of a paper that you feel fits your description of having "almost never even been properly formulated before"?
Indeed, for example this page [1] is absolutely fantastic, it hits a lot of right buttons in my case (history of railways, history of finance/economics, a combination between history of railways and the history of finance, which is even more interesting).
A lot of times people are afraid of wasting money by giving research grants where it isn't clearly specified what they are to be used for. What is missed, is that there is a huge amount of waste, when researchers are forced to work on a dead end ideas, they know wont work out, just because that's what they have promised to do, while it was still looking promising. Scientists should be penalized for piloting to something new. unfettered research doesn't just let people work on what ever the want, it also lets they drop anything they don't believe in.
As someone who sat on a committee handing out (small) research grants in the past (usually as no-strings-attached donations), the concern was never really that you would not deliver exactly what was promised. The concern was that you would not do anything at all (or very little). I know it might not even occur to an honest person that this would be a problem, but you would be surprised.
If you no longer believe what you proposed is a useful thing to do... send an e-mail. This may be easier to resolve than you think.
> If you no longer believe what you proposed is a useful thing to do... send an e-mail. This may be easier to resolve than you think.
eh... I know of one similar instance (student had found that what they were looking for has been proven false by another team) - the advisor basically said "okay, we're stopping the phd there". Two years to the drain.
What should someone do if they are a PhD student who believes their funded project is a waste of resources and their advisor agrees, but their advisor refuses to contact the funder about that?
I have no doubt there is a lot of fraud going on! I just don't think making researcher write 5 years plans for what they plan to do is the way to combat it.
HHMI grants are unusual, in this respect. The grant is to an investigator over seven years, not to specific a project. They have to have demonstrated significant research in the usual funding system to be eligible, though.
The thing that is needed is trust. Its by far the best way to do it, it just that going on trust sounds like the worst and most irresponsible way of doing it so people don't dare do it, and they don't dare argue for it.
"You could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund eugenics or something."
The thing about basic research is that you usually cannot see the consequences down the line.
Few of the original researches that discovered ionizing radiation could anticipate the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons. And yet their contributions were crucial.
Part of this is just the professionalization (bureaucratization) of research. Maybe in the future more independently wealthy people will simply do science for fun.
So I recently came across an interesting idea that I think applies here. The idea is that "bureaucratization" and "professionalization" are actually opposites. This is a semantic argument, but the ideas themselves are interesting enough and we need to attach words to them either way, so let's just roll with it.
A professional is someone you trust to do their job. Like a doctor or a lawyer. If you have a medical or a legal problem, you go to a professional and the professional uses their professional judgment to make a decision and works on your behalf to try and solve that problem. And they take personal responsibility for their professional decisions. For instance, when a professional engineer signs off on building plans, he is saying, "this building is not going to collapse and kill people, and if it does, I will take personal responsibility".
A bureaucratic environment is an environment where processes and controls have supreme authority and there are no professionals. You have to jump through hoop A, fill out form B, and have everything reviewed by committee C to do anything because you are not a professional and your judgment isn't trusted. To some degree, this means doctors aren't fully professional anymore.
This is a nice story but I don't think it makes much sense.
As you observed, by this definition surgeons are not professionals but the teenager who's the sole employee at a lemonade stand is a professional. The former is extremely constrained by bureaucracy while the latter can do pretty much whatever they want as long as nothing burns down or gets too many people too sick.
Bureaucracy and professionalism are largely orthogonal. There are horrible bureaucracies where some individuals have immense power. In fact, that's probably way more common than not. There are also relative anarchies where no one has any real power because the whole org is completely beholden to the market in every aspect of its operation; e.g., most corner pubs on a crowded business street. Even the owners have at best marginal control over their employees and rented space.
A professional is just someone who does the same sort of skilled work year over year for pay. Most blue collar workers think of themselves as professionals, and you'll see plenty of discussion of "professionalism" in any trades training program.
Historically, the connotative notion of a "professional" that you're using here -- basically, upper-middle class professions with a certain amount of social esteem -- were always the most bureaucratic occupations. Have they gotten even more bureaucratic with time? Sure. But they were always more bureaucratic than other occupations of their time (mostly farming). Medicine or law being more bureaucratic than than farming is not a new thing.
Going full circle then back into the old days when this was almost always the case. Sadly no matter if it’s the old way or the new way of doing research politics, ego and personal disputes will still always play a big part.
We're going to have a relatively large number of children/inheritors to billion dollar scale fortunes within a decade or two. These individuals will have more money than they would ever need to use - however they will lack for prestige and impact.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of them choose to create university positions for themselves, or otherwise "self-fund" their own prestige projects.
One potential saving grace is in falling costs of tools from technological advancement but science is a very broad subject where material demands vary greatly. Theoretical physics may have minimal material needs. A citizen scientest might be theoretically able to do something with CRISPR to say, modify e-coli to start producing carbon nanotubes or try to evolve plastic eating bacteria. But not making their own Large Hadron Collider.
One would need a very complete picture to be able to accurately generalize in such an absurdly broad area.
A huge contributor to this imo is the grant system and how it works particularly at very large research institutions and universities. Typically the only people with the means and time to do "just for curiosity" / fundamental research are people in long-term professor / research positions where they are allowed to pursue whatever they want (as long as they are frequently published). Grants work against this, as they create an incentive to work on specific, often more short term projects / applications rather than fundamental questions. In this way, injecting money into academia via grants actually reduces the amount of fundamental research being done, because a majority of researchers are going to chase the grants aka the short term interests of corporations and governments rather than do less financially rewarding fundamental research.
That's really not true. My advisor in undergrad publishes 5-6 papers a year and has never bothered to seek grants in his entire career because he works at an institution that actually emphasizes teaching and compensates it's professors accordingly.
I find this article a bucolic tale of tech and research.
Right after WWII with the planet in shambles, living in the "winning" country, you're working on computers and found unfettered access to funds and investment? No surprise.
GE in 1956? To leave out the massive macroeconomic power of GE in that day and age is shortsighted. Same with Bell Labs, et all. This was an age where military spending rose from 1% of GDP to 10%. It was military spending and military might that bought you that "unfettered research". Yes, society should be better at allocating for the long term regarding research and tech -- but 1956 GE was not some sort of utopia.
We're just in a lower part of the cycle right now. Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be war. Hopefully modern financial markets will be able to create those cycles without as much bloodshed.
War only pushes the reset button in a positive way when it's WWII and you're America. See the economic consequences of the war in Vietnam for a more typical outcome of putting military spending to use.
Military spending as a percent of national income rose a huge amount in the 1940s, but so did spending on pretty much everything else. Over the period from 1930 to 1950 the United States (as well as many other Western countries) transformed themselves from societies with pretty low taxes who spent the bulk of their (small amounts of) revenue on defense to higher-tax societies which spent (a lot more) revenue on defense, education, all kinds of scientific research etc. In fact, while defense spending rose a lot during this period, these other categories of spending rose significantly more (as percentages of national income) because prior to the early twentieth century they weren't really considered core functions of the state. That is the bigger story (rather than World War II).
> Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be war.
In my opinion this claim needs significantly more justification even though it is frequently tossed around.
I've got to say, that 4th paragraph is, or at least should be, the modus operandi of every scientist in any related field.
>In this style of work, the researcher is allowed, and even required, to select problems for investigation, without having to justify their relevance for the institution, and without negotiating a set of objectives with management. The value of the research is determined by other scientists, again without looking for its immediate effect on the bottom line of the employer. The assumption that justifies such a policy is that "scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity."
It's sad the current state of science doesn't appreciate the work done purely through curiosity, and instead want to milk professionals for other means and agendas. The paragraph sheds a light on what science really is, and what's kept fueling it for millenia, curiosity. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come from curiosity in answering burning questions. Yes we still have some great discoveries, but not as much now I would think. Most of what science today seems to be is just proving or disproving agendas with clear incentives. There are some that seem to be born out of organically produced work, but it's hard to know because who knows the incentives and agendas behind the scenes.
Readit News
At IBM. That wasn't a smart move either.
The term "under the radar R&D" has not been unheard of in many corporate research labs.
But what worries me there are reports that the corporate R&D lab as an institution is in decline. I cannot judge whether this is true, since I recently switched back to academia to have a bit more autonomy after a decade in industry R&D.
I've spoken with colleagues over the years, and when I bring up this desire, so many of them feel the same way. Many of these people are incredibly accomplished and come from top institutions. What a waste to not give that magnitude of creativity an outlet! The only path I see to this type of life now, is independent wealth. It just strikes me as such an opportunity to create a place for these people. If you build it they will come!
the problem is finding and filtering the applicants that come to such a place. How do you tell the difference between somebody who just phones it in, from somebody who would actually produce some valid research breakthroughs?
Unless you have unlimited resources to spend, this is a difficult problem to solve.
Deleted Comment
I read a lot of his papers ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ ) in the hopes that I would learn something to improve my exam scores, but he has a knack for asking questions so fundamental that they have almost never even been properly formulated before.
If you have some time, I recommend reading a few of his papers. He completely changed my view of mathematics.
Indeed, for example this page [1] is absolutely fantastic, it hits a lot of right buttons in my case (history of railways, history of finance/economics, a combination between history of railways and the history of finance, which is even more interesting).
[1] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/bubbles.html
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/PT.3.4521
If you no longer believe what you proposed is a useful thing to do... send an e-mail. This may be easier to resolve than you think.
eh... I know of one similar instance (student had found that what they were looking for has been proven false by another team) - the advisor basically said "okay, we're stopping the phd there". Two years to the drain.
https://www.hhmi.org/programs/biomedical-research/investigat...
They also have their problems, but it's good to have some of them in the mix.
There could be a whole range of topics that could be worked upon and you could allow the researcher to move freely between them,
The thing about basic research is that you usually cannot see the consequences down the line.
Few of the original researches that discovered ionizing radiation could anticipate the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons. And yet their contributions were crucial.
A professional is someone you trust to do their job. Like a doctor or a lawyer. If you have a medical or a legal problem, you go to a professional and the professional uses their professional judgment to make a decision and works on your behalf to try and solve that problem. And they take personal responsibility for their professional decisions. For instance, when a professional engineer signs off on building plans, he is saying, "this building is not going to collapse and kill people, and if it does, I will take personal responsibility".
A bureaucratic environment is an environment where processes and controls have supreme authority and there are no professionals. You have to jump through hoop A, fill out form B, and have everything reviewed by committee C to do anything because you are not a professional and your judgment isn't trusted. To some degree, this means doctors aren't fully professional anymore.
As you observed, by this definition surgeons are not professionals but the teenager who's the sole employee at a lemonade stand is a professional. The former is extremely constrained by bureaucracy while the latter can do pretty much whatever they want as long as nothing burns down or gets too many people too sick.
Bureaucracy and professionalism are largely orthogonal. There are horrible bureaucracies where some individuals have immense power. In fact, that's probably way more common than not. There are also relative anarchies where no one has any real power because the whole org is completely beholden to the market in every aspect of its operation; e.g., most corner pubs on a crowded business street. Even the owners have at best marginal control over their employees and rented space.
A professional is just someone who does the same sort of skilled work year over year for pay. Most blue collar workers think of themselves as professionals, and you'll see plenty of discussion of "professionalism" in any trades training program.
Historically, the connotative notion of a "professional" that you're using here -- basically, upper-middle class professions with a certain amount of social esteem -- were always the most bureaucratic occupations. Have they gotten even more bureaucratic with time? Sure. But they were always more bureaucratic than other occupations of their time (mostly farming). Medicine or law being more bureaucratic than than farming is not a new thing.
Deleted Comment
I wouldn't be surprised if some of them choose to create university positions for themselves, or otherwise "self-fund" their own prestige projects.
I wonder what such people currently do with their time? Actually, HN is a great place to ask this, as lots of them are here! wait
Deleted Comment
One would need a very complete picture to be able to accurately generalize in such an absurdly broad area.
I don't buy that because it's very expensive to experimentally prove the difference between various theories.
Right after WWII with the planet in shambles, living in the "winning" country, you're working on computers and found unfettered access to funds and investment? No surprise.
GE in 1956? To leave out the massive macroeconomic power of GE in that day and age is shortsighted. Same with Bell Labs, et all. This was an age where military spending rose from 1% of GDP to 10%. It was military spending and military might that bought you that "unfettered research". Yes, society should be better at allocating for the long term regarding research and tech -- but 1956 GE was not some sort of utopia.
We're just in a lower part of the cycle right now. Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be war. Hopefully modern financial markets will be able to create those cycles without as much bloodshed.
> Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be war.
In my opinion this claim needs significantly more justification even though it is frequently tossed around.
>In this style of work, the researcher is allowed, and even required, to select problems for investigation, without having to justify their relevance for the institution, and without negotiating a set of objectives with management. The value of the research is determined by other scientists, again without looking for its immediate effect on the bottom line of the employer. The assumption that justifies such a policy is that "scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity."
It's sad the current state of science doesn't appreciate the work done purely through curiosity, and instead want to milk professionals for other means and agendas. The paragraph sheds a light on what science really is, and what's kept fueling it for millenia, curiosity. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come from curiosity in answering burning questions. Yes we still have some great discoveries, but not as much now I would think. Most of what science today seems to be is just proving or disproving agendas with clear incentives. There are some that seem to be born out of organically produced work, but it's hard to know because who knows the incentives and agendas behind the scenes.