Surely you're publishing, Mr. Feynman
praveshkoirala.com
praveshkoirala.com
> Research should never be driven by success, because the pursuit of it either disheartens, or beguiles, even the greatest of men. An ideal Research should truly ever be ignited by curiosity. It should be fueled by the desire to know. And it should be done for the pursuit of truth and truth alone, no matter what it is. Feynman investigated the curious wobbles only for the pure joy of satiation. And the rest, as they say, is history:
> "I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”–working, really –with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
There's a somewhat old adage (?) that says: "Don't fund projects. Fund people."
The gist of it is that by funding projects, you're funding a somewhat myopic view in that anything discovered adjacent to the project is now out of scope of the funding. By funding people with interesting ideas, you get a much more creative and free-flowing research program.
And in 30 years, no project officer from a funding agency has ever complained that we'd delivered really good results but they weren't the results we'd promised. They're generally happy something good came out of the funding, because frankly, most funded projects don't produce much of value. Very occasionally (mostly on EU projects) we've had to write up the results in a project report with the original section titles that no longer match the new content to tick some boxes and keep the funder beancounters happy.
But what I was describing was slightly different - once the proposal is funded, many PIs feel compelled to deliver what they said they would, whereas in the two years since you wrote the proposal, the world has moved on, you've learned things, both from your early work on the project and from others, and more promising avenues are now possible. If you feel compelled by the funder to continue in the original direction, you'll very rarely deliver good research.
Many of the most critical research results came out of some random hallway conversation, as a response to some new result that didn't exist when the research plan was formulated, or because someone had a brain fart. If at each point someone had put up their hand and said "sorry, scientist, that's not on your current grant roadmap" we'd probably still be dying of preventable diseases and lighting our homes with gas fixtures.
Funding should be a mix of track record with project consideration, not either exclusively.
Funding projects is a terrible idea that you should keep at a minimum. If you fund projects you will end up with the BS we have now - marketing in the form of grant proposals.
I think a really helpful analogy for how science should be funded is to think of how angels and VCs fund early stage startups - I mean, how they really fund them. Which is: is this a promising area to startup within? Is this a great team? And that is pretty much it.
The downside of this approach I think is that personal biases can creep in and create a lack of diversity. You can counter that with pots of funding that directly target diversity.
Fund people, your assessment of their ability, their team, and their area of interest.
In modern academia that would be a terrible record.
But giving him tenure was a smart bet, because he might have produced more.
It's the Sabine Hossenfelder problem. Should physics fund incremental research which is a fairly safe bet in employment terms? Or should the money go on talented and creative researchers who may waste most of it - but one or two may produce something transformative?
Academia is heavily slanted towards the former approach. Because academia is now a business and has the same bureaucratic and corporate values as other bureaucratic corporations.
This is terrible for original research, because smart people need to given a free hand to follow their intuitions and interests.
Being able to afford to explore, play, and potentially fail would transform physics.
Because in reality academia is producing a lot of failure anyway, without the upsides of transformative new insights.
> terrible record
> might have produced more
You do not seem to have much knowledge of his publication record.
Here is a list of 272 journal articles by Einstein and coauthors, the majority of which would certainly be considered peer reviewed by modern standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publication...
From just these papers, among the things you put into the bucket of "not huge breakthroughs" were (in small length scales) Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensates (notably his 1924 and 1925 papers), his atomic emission and absorption theory (the "stimulated emission" in laSEr), and his paper with Podolsky & Rosen and (in large length scales) General Relativity, Einstein gravitational lensing, the Friedmann-Einstein and Einstein-de Sitter expanding universe cosmological models.
I mean general relativity is one of the most tested and verified physical theories, and it was practically done all by Einstein himself. It’s a hallmark of a theory. That alone is worth everything, and yet he was also the genesis for several other fields, both before and after general relativity.
Einstein is not a great example for this discussion. Even his “failures” are useful contributions. Many here are missing the point in that it is failures that we should not be afraid of funding, within reason of course. I.e., it’s okay if a promising idea “fails”. It is input to the broader research community and questions.
In the startup world it is widely believed that a bit of hardship is needed to show dedication.
1. Make the application process much simpler
2. Support with smaller amounts, individual subsistence salary
3. Provide the right placing in the right environment.
I know a few institutions where exploring and playing is a standard procedure, however they aren't many. And even this has a limit because science is expensive. So you need a way to know which silly ideas to pursue and how to best utilize your resources and budget.
Everything else I’m not going to read because it’s just bleeding heart nonsense.
Stopping caring about whether projects work or not is practically the point. Research isn’t about only tackling things we know will work. That’s effectively engineering and not research.
A lot of the funding today is already about status. There just needs to be less funding given out to people based on status and funders’ pet projects and more funding based upon the people and proposals. Solid people and proposals should not be turned down via lack of status or not fitting into some box of “this will work”.
A lot of topics are lumped into “that will never work”, but it’s often the case that they were never tried or even explored.
Then I read your comment. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree.
That may have been a problem in Feynman's day, but today academic papers takeup negligible storage. The only limiting factor is the number of peer reviewers, I have no idea if there is a shortage of those or not.
The number of peer reviewers may be one limitation, but I think the main one is the number of readers. The hard limit is how much time readers spend reading. Getting access to that is hard.
Anybody can publish. You don't even need a journal; just put it up on your blog. But as with all blogs, the hard part is getting anybody to care that you've done it.
Two mechanisms should be used:
1. Administration decides which projects had real world effect, years or even decades after the work is done.
2. A directed social graph is built from citations and from working together on projects.
Money should be allocated to the network. Administration decides who did good work in the past; funding is allocated to everyone endorsed by those people; scientists vote with their grant money for projects that they believe in.
Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.
It’s just a wild guess looking at it from the outside, I don’t have any experience with proper science at all.
To me this stuff just always reads as “ah great so that’s how we killed the potential for that (classic/next-gen) Star Trek future”.
with the anticipatable outcome that a great many people "waste" their time on uninteresting, incorrect, ludicrous, ideas,
and a few people who might have been fundable today, do solid real work,
and sometimes, a few people who would have NOT have been fundable (per OP), do work which Changes Everything, which might not have been done today otherwise.
Those of us reading this, we live in a surplus economy.
We could fund everyone.
Indeed, we should, because it would over a reasonable time frame, pretty likely Change Everything.
All it would cost is fewer 100m long yachts for a few thousand sociopaths.
Does it always escape?
Could everyone work like this? (Surely not)
How can people that want to work like this do so while others sort of harvest the value that may not be harvested by those who are consistently curious and researching?
What I'm getting at is how can we keep the curious curious while also capturing value from them. Let some people stay in this state -- I am mostly one of them, and have others follow them around implementing their ideas. Some of us have too many ideas and good thoughts.
"This is because all efforts trivially lead to some results. It’s an entirely different matter whether it is an expected one or not. But such is the world we find ourselves in that anything short of a ground-breaking discovery is treated as an unacceptable embarrassment. And thus, every marginal increment is touted as ground-breaking, and every deviation is repackaged to look like an intended result (which is again touted as ground-breaking)."
It's even worse than this in my opinion, as the reasons ground-breaking discoveries occur are generally not why the field thinks (or asserts?) they occur. So it's not just the results that are misrepresented, it's the whole chain of things leading to them, and what comes afterward: how they came about, who was involved in what capacity, who considers them ground-breaking or not and why, and so forth and so on.
The right model should be like the Oscars. Write your paper, put it up in arXiv for free, and let people read, review, and react to that. At the end of a certain period (months or year depending on it's a journal or a conference), the committee chooses a bunch of them and publishes them officially, somewhere. And leave all the rest of the crap out.
For example, Google seems to be downweighting search results older than a certain amount, and I've noticed that if you go that route, it can be difficult to find certain unpublished/preprint-type papers of a certain age unless they appear in press. I think this might lead to an exacerbation of fad dynamics, because then papers that people know and remember are those that get a lot of buzz -- this happens now of course too, but I think it could be magnified in a different system.
You could introduce new search engines and so forth, but that adds a layer of complexity to it, and I think journals always have a way of drawing attention to certain new papers and maintaining their real-world availability.
I'm not sure I have a solution to this, but I've sort of become convinced that the approach you're describing, even though it's something I'm sympathetic to, has its own sets of problems that aren't necessarily better. I also wonder if journals will just end up being reinvented because there seems to be a logical train of thought that goes "well pay attention to those you trust to find papers" -> article curators -> fickleness about what's curated -> curation by committee/group -> reinvention of journals.
Things are completely broken imho (in academics in general, not just journals) but I'm not sure what to do about a lot of it. Maybe the problems in academics have always been social weaknesses that get brushed under the rug, but now with so many people involved there's too much to brush.
Sadly I think it has to do with external threat: When there is one (like during the Manhattan project) the mediocre can accept a standard of excellence, because deep down they know what the alternative is. But when there isn’t one the cultural focus shifts towards mediocrity, and “politics” becomes the dominant game. And the less socially focused curious minds are easily outmaneuvered.
I think this idea that the most important thing of all is that everyone passes is a good example of the mediocre mind’s value system. It’s utterly pointless. There’s plenty of work you can do without understanding calculus. But it does limit excellence, and (sadly) I think that’s the whole point.
I spent my post-doc trying to tackle a rather fundamental challenge (in the architecture of analytical DBMSes). The result of my efforts took a long time to materialize, and their form was not a short article of the kind you put in conferences, but a long tract. I believe it is very useful for my (now former) field; but I could simply not get it published. Not because I was rejected for lack of novelty or anything - it was simply not in the "least publishable unit" form, and not easily (or at all) reducible to that form. The large chunk of preliminaries required motivation in use, and the motivation required the preliminaries etc. But in my field, people don't publish new research as monographs. Bottom line - put the monograph on arxiv, very few people noticed it, and life goes on without it having left a mark.
Plus, by the time this was done, my post-doc had ended, and my weird former career and lack of "publishable paper generation skills" meant I didn't have much chance at another position.
So, in a sense, my personal experience is a bit of the flip-side to that of Feynman, described in the post. Still, the sentiment definitely resonated with me.
If you're still interested in picking up an academic career I noticed you spent some time in Europe (if the link under this post is your puplication). I'm not sure about the Dutch system but in Germany there are universities of applied sciences. Requirement for tenure as a professor is usually PhD+3 years work experience in the field outside academia. It's very teaching focused and you have to slowly ease into research again because you'll start doing it as a one person show but it's a decent option for an academically inclined person with a PhD to "come back" into the system from odd/unfitting career paths. Not sure if this construct exists in other countries but my guess would be the anser is yes. These days there's also plenty of positions that are international programs so language might not be an issue.
I know a couple of people from grad school who worked on massive infrastructure projects ranging from designing the ISA to verilog implementation to compilers, simulators and everything in between. I think they faced similar challenges in that it's a lot of important work but not easily publishable. It's unfortunate that we don't have a good way of recognizing this type of work.
He thought it broke down roughly like this:
fun + tenure = Awesome!
fun + no tenure = Not bad, you still got paid for six years to work on fun stuff, which probably more than you'll get anywhere else.
no fun + tenure = Okay, but was six years of no fun really worth it?
no fun + no tenure = What am I even doing?
He thought it was clear that working on fun interesting stuff before tenure maximized happiness. Your milage may vary.
This issue of students is something often missing in discussions of the modern research enterprise. Speaking as a computer science faculty, if a PhD student wants to compete for an academic job, they need about 1 publication per year. Sure, back in the 1970s and 1980s you could get a CS faculty job with just 1 good publication, but that's not the case anymore. Of course, everyone is doing this, which then leads to more publications overall.
The second is the overall funding of science. There's an unstated compact that the public is funding science to help solve important problems and lead to breakthroughs that can advance the economy. This is the framework that has been in place in the USA since WWII thanks to Vannevar Bush, and is why NSF, NIH, and other funding agencies exist. Sure, as researcher, I strongly agree that we should be doing things we view as fun. But those fun things should have some angle as to why others should care. Another way of framing this is Pasteur's Quadrant, which is good science and good applications.
The more general advice I give to all students (undergrad, MS, and PhD) when looking for jobs: do something that is (1) fun (because there are many job opportunities in our field and life is short), (2) something that will keep pushing your boundaries (because you're smart and will be bored otherwise), and (3) good for humanity.
(Also, I would argue that advancing the economy is not actually part of the compact for the NSF, which is really a jobs program for scientists based on the experience during WWII that having scientists around in a pinch was really useful.)
Interestingly, not every field is on this economic treadmill. Mathematics (pure, not applied), seems to declare problems as important based on whether they're unsolved and subjectively interesting. And economics, unsurprisingly, doesn't consider it rational to run large PhD programs that flood the market with competitors and reduce the market value of an economics PhD.
This is a very nice quote.
This is a non-explanation. Chalking something up to genius is just a specific kind of chalking it up to magic. "Here's this person, how does their mind work, what goes inside on it? Magic! They're a genius!"
It may be so that the way Feynman worked followed from the way he thought. If so, that doesn't mean we just throw up our hands and recommend it to people who fit our genius-pattern. Instead, we need to explain genius, which involves treating it like any other object of scientific study. Once we do that, then we can figure out how to cultivate it. That's what this article should inspire.
There’s people I know that can quickly understand complex ideas that would take regular people several hours/days to grok. Some humans just have different kinds of brains; either they’re born with it or through their love/training their brain is great at understanding knowledge. I don’t think thats very controversial?
It is not about being the best. It is about contributing something that you actually care about.
Also add if there are not great examples to learn from. Most radical ideas require mastery of the topic. Incremental work can be done copying and simply adding one on top. Advisors have gone through all of this experience. Most people underestimate power of good mentors.
Lots of geniuses are unaware of the difference between their intelligence and other people’s.
Write down the problem. Think very hard. Write down the solution.
1. Draw some circles. 2. Draw the rest of the f*ing owl.
Extrinsic rewards or punishments are at best poor substitutes and at worst destroy intrinsic motivation.
It's of course a bit tricky because sometimes it would be nice to have an accelerator or Google compute power at the ready and sometimes you can do excellent work as long as you have a roof over your head and are well fed and have a piece of paper and a pen :D
It's a complex problem, especially with competiton from other acedemic institutions and industry. I feel like the current system is ok-ish but many things are horribly wrong. I still feel like by and large good academic minds will end up in positions where they have a good environment to do what they want but the cost for this is that there's a lot of cruft and mediocre stuff that'll end up in essentially the same or better environments.
Eh, I blame the reviewers for this in large part. Every reviewer craves novelty like a drug addict. They'll reject papers because "it's not novel, just a bunch of engineering/implementation", or reject them because a mere 1.5x improvement does not meet the bar (Is it even science if it's not an order of magnitude ?). Then people will cry about dubious papers. The academic community deserves this.
But in general you are right: we deserve this because the amount of arrogance is too high, and more often than not you have to deal with someone who firmly believes they deserve the Nobel price.
And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”… I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
It's basically for this reason that he "retired" from theoretical physics relatively shortly after his Nobel prize, he just couldn't keep up with the rest of the research being done.
I think your curiosity might give way to other obligations at some point which is why you have to be somewhat goal oriented.
Worth noting that I have spent hours pursuing a hobby as a kid: programming. And I think that is probably true of many of the readers here.
I think the computer lends itself to this in a weird -- perhaps unique -- manner. The act of programming, or writing, is like a video game in that you get this reward just for the act. And it is easier to spend hours for days for weeks programming (or writing) than say mulling over other matters.
One trick for turning a task you cannot spend time on into a task you can spend time on is to turn it into an activity. This is why mathematicians have to write out their equations and diagrams when they're mulling plates.
https://medium.com/illumination/why-a-tennis-racket-led-russ...
All I remember is it was the same sentence, repeated, with a different word overemphasized each time to show how you can change the meaning of a sentence with a bit of… emphasis.