hunch_net hunch_net-2005 hunch_net-2005-132 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: How do you create an optimal environment for research? Here are some essential ingredients that I see. Stability . University-based research is relatively good at this. On any particular day, researchers face choices in what they will work on. A very common tradeoff is between: easy small difficult big For researchers without stability, the ‘easy small’ option wins. This is often “ok”—a series of incremental improvements on the state of the art can add up to something very beneficial. However, it misses one of the big potentials of research: finding entirely new and better ways of doing things. Stability comes in many forms. The prototypical example is tenure at a university—a tenured professor is almost imposssible to fire which means that the professor has the freedom to consider far horizon activities. An iron-clad guarantee of a paycheck is not necessary—industrial research labs have succeeded well with research positions of indefinite duration. Atnt rese
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1 An iron-clad guarantee of a paycheck is not necessary—industrial research labs have succeeded well with research positions of indefinite duration. [sent-11, score-0.886]
2 One significant part of stability is financial stability of the parent organization. [sent-16, score-0.501]
3 The nature of research implies that what makes ‘funding sense’ depends on the size of the set of people who can benefit from it. [sent-17, score-0.509]
4 University-based research is relatively terrible about this while industrial labs vary widely. [sent-20, score-0.82]
5 Running the university requires very significant time and energy. [sent-22, score-0.424]
6 Writing grant proposals for funding requires very significant time and energy (success in grant writing is typically a necessity to achieve tenure at US research universities). [sent-23, score-0.731]
7 Advising students well requires significant time and energy. [sent-24, score-0.415]
8 In industrial labs (think of “IBM research” as an example), there is an tendency to shift research towards short term rewards. [sent-26, score-0.754]
9 This is partly becaue the research labs have not proved very capable of using the big successes and partly because even large businesses have ups and downs. [sent-27, score-0.641]
10 During a ‘down’ time, it is very tempting to use the reserve of very capable people in a research lab for short duration projects. [sent-28, score-0.481]
11 One thing to understand about research is that it is not the case that a person with half as much free time can produce half as much work. [sent-29, score-0.627]
12 Problem exposure The set of research problems which people could work on is much larger than the set of research problems which are plausibly useful to the rest of the world (*). [sent-31, score-0.98]
13 This is true, but there are several important caveats: The “hit rate” (in terms of big impact on everyones lives) for unmotivated research is much lower. [sent-37, score-0.468]
14 University-based research is may do this best via giving the researchers the ability to form their own companies with partial ownership. [sent-47, score-0.453]
15 In the context of machine learning, spam filtering is of obvious and significant common use, yet a researcher with a better spam filter can not easily create a company around the method. [sent-50, score-0.685]
16 The benefit structure in industrial research labs is (perhaps) often even worse. [sent-59, score-0.929]
17 University style research partially achieves this (a notable complaint of students is that they do not have enough freedom). [sent-78, score-0.443]
18 Research students are of course much more common on university campuses, although there are sometimes government funded research labs such as MPI in Germany and NICTA in Australia. [sent-88, score-0.909]
19 The effort of explaining a new topic of research often aids research via simplification and consideration in new contexts. [sent-92, score-0.695]
20 The internet has greatly aided concentration because some significant benefit can be derived even from people who are not physically near to each other. [sent-99, score-0.621]
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