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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science Mart by Philip Mirowski does a good job of laying out, for those in research but also for those who are not, the political-economic changes that are responsible for this.
I do industry R&D. I don’t think I am all that fettered. I do accept that there is a certain “social contract” involved though! I understand my employers business and my work is done with the ambition to advance the companies long term position.
Practically speaking this means that my work is restricted in that it deliver something resembling a product or service within a couple of years. Even if only the thinnest of MVPs of a concept. String enough of those together and you get pretty close to something resembling “unfettered”.
I suppose my point is that industry R&D is not all that bad right now, you just need to be a reasonably responsible corporate citizen.
"It is widely acknowledged that science made this transformation possible." Widely acknowledged by scientists, but not necessarily true. In the generation since this essay was published, could anyone argue that innovation has withered?
> It will be a long time (if it ever happens) before Netscape earns
enough profit to justify its initial stock market valuation.
Now that a long time has passed, I would be interested in hearing an analysis of this exactly as it is phrased: financially, with respect to profits vs valuation, and not in terms of historical impact.
From the perspective of stability-loving wealth, unfettered research is opening pandora's box.
At last, the internet, opium of the masses, finally neutralizes the intelligent classes.
Wealth will not care for genuine research until two aliens races war bitterly over some unique natural resource we take for granted. We will not recover.
One of the reasons I took the position I did was that - fairly rarely for my field, which is heavily grant funded - there was enough hard money to do some curiosity driven research and methods development.
A lot of blame on the university side goes to Bayh-Dole patent laws of the 1980s which allowed patents from publicly financed research to be effectively transferred to the private sector, via the mechanism of the exclusive license. This is going on right now with vaccines and antivirals as well, but it's been a steady theme for over three decades.
This could be fixed with the commonsense solution of requiring public access to publicly financed research and patents without burdensome fees. This would have allowed numerous private entities to begin their own development and manufacturing processes without worrying about patents and IP lawsuits.
Unfortunately, the end result wa the rise in power of the academic Intellectual Property Office which oversees the licensing (and gathers in the percentages). The UC and MIT systems are most notorious for pushing this approach in the 1990s, but it seems to be everywhere these days.
Effectively, the administrators put researchers with patent-generation potential at the front of the food line, and also pushed hard for public-private partnerships with mega-corps (UC Berkeley and BP, Stanford and Exxon, etc.) As part of that mentality, short-term profitability became the guiding light, not basic blue-skies research into whatever the researchers wanted to look at. Since much basic research generates nothing of immediate commercial interest, it was viewed as less important and even a drag on the bottom line.
Running with this mentality equates to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, as groundbreaking discoveries leading to truly new technologies then become much less likely.
On the business side, the large private research centers of the post WWII era seem much diminished. Giving corporations a tax exemption for increasing their R&D spending while also raising their taxes to 1960 levels might be an efficient way to reverse that trend. Elon Musk could then avoid the tax bill by putting all his money into a SpaceX R&D facility to rival the old Bell Labs, which is kind of a good idea anyway isn't it?
What he described in the beginning of that essay is how Microsoft Research worked just 15 years ago. Maybe it still does, I wouldn't know. Yes, you are judged by your results. But beyond that and beyond some flimsy constraints dictated by what "team" you were on, there were no limitations whatsoever. This was the most productive and enjoyable time of my entire 25+ year career, and a staggering contrast to how the rest of Microsoft works. And the people were by far the smartest I have ever met, and this was not the only lab I worked at. Most of them weren't genius level (although they were still unusually smart), but some very clearly were, to the point where I'd sit in some meeting and lecture and think "what the fuck am I even doing here". Too bad most of the stuff they do never ends up in products - the rest of Microsoft can't tell a gradient from a hole in the ground, with very few exceptions (basically just Bing and some parts of Ads).
I recently proposed an idea to create a new data transfer protocol that involves drones to carry data in a medium with a prong attached to them.
When the drone lands on a platform atop a building, the prong connects to a computer connected to the platform and sitting inside the building triggering a mount action.
The data gets transferred to the computer. Now, whoever needs to transfer data from this building to another will use the same method to upload it.
I do not think this will be the best way to move data but if a protocol is in place it could be used as a basis for future intra-campus data movement.
So it is like Sneakernet but with wings.
A winged sneaker net if you will
Name it after some mythological hand maiden to Athena
and you can't go wrong.
[+] [-] brainwipe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|4 years ago|reply
At IBM. That wasn't a smart move either.
[+] [-] moffkalast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DrHedgehog|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jamesmishra|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quelsolaar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derf_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|4 years ago|reply
https://www.hhmi.org/programs/biomedical-research/investigat...
[+] [-] temp131|4 years ago|reply
There could be a whole range of topics that could be worked upon and you could allow the researcher to move freely between them,
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blowfish721|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Nasrudith|4 years ago|reply
One would need a very complete picture to be able to accurately generalize in such an absurdly broad area.
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whatshisface|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whakim|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] coliveira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanSpearo|4 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] daniel-thompson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmmmpancakes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabbits77|4 years ago|reply
Practically speaking this means that my work is restricted in that it deliver something resembling a product or service within a couple of years. Even if only the thinnest of MVPs of a concept. String enough of those together and you get pretty close to something resembling “unfettered”.
I suppose my point is that industry R&D is not all that bad right now, you just need to be a reasonably responsible corporate citizen.
[+] [-] stagger87|4 years ago|reply
So fettered, as per the articles definition of the word fettered.
It really just sounds like you don't like the word fettered for some reason. Maybe it has a negative connotation to you?
[+] [-] berko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
The Decline of Unfettered Research (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2952423 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)
[+] [-] danans|4 years ago|reply
Now that a long time has passed, I would be interested in hearing an analysis of this exactly as it is phrased: financially, with respect to profits vs valuation, and not in terms of historical impact.
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|4 years ago|reply
At last, the internet, opium of the masses, finally neutralizes the intelligent classes.
Wealth will not care for genuine research until two aliens races war bitterly over some unique natural resource we take for granted. We will not recover.
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
(I’m always amused that the Lambda-the-Ultimate papers were paid for by the Office of Naval Research.)
[+] [-] Fomite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|4 years ago|reply
This could be fixed with the commonsense solution of requiring public access to publicly financed research and patents without burdensome fees. This would have allowed numerous private entities to begin their own development and manufacturing processes without worrying about patents and IP lawsuits.
Unfortunately, the end result wa the rise in power of the academic Intellectual Property Office which oversees the licensing (and gathers in the percentages). The UC and MIT systems are most notorious for pushing this approach in the 1990s, but it seems to be everywhere these days.
Effectively, the administrators put researchers with patent-generation potential at the front of the food line, and also pushed hard for public-private partnerships with mega-corps (UC Berkeley and BP, Stanford and Exxon, etc.) As part of that mentality, short-term profitability became the guiding light, not basic blue-skies research into whatever the researchers wanted to look at. Since much basic research generates nothing of immediate commercial interest, it was viewed as less important and even a drag on the bottom line.
Running with this mentality equates to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, as groundbreaking discoveries leading to truly new technologies then become much less likely.
On the business side, the large private research centers of the post WWII era seem much diminished. Giving corporations a tax exemption for increasing their R&D spending while also raising their taxes to 1960 levels might be an efficient way to reverse that trend. Elon Musk could then avoid the tax bill by putting all his money into a SpaceX R&D facility to rival the old Bell Labs, which is kind of a good idea anyway isn't it?
[+] [-] m0zg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketanmaheshwari|4 years ago|reply
When the drone lands on a platform atop a building, the prong connects to a computer connected to the platform and sitting inside the building triggering a mount action.
The data gets transferred to the computer. Now, whoever needs to transfer data from this building to another will use the same method to upload it.
I do not think this will be the best way to move data but if a protocol is in place it could be used as a basis for future intra-campus data movement.
The proposal was shot down. A schematic of the idea is drawn here: https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/datadrone/blob/main/sche...
[+] [-] turbinerneiter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politician|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcims|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tejtm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaltPurvis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitchc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trzy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]