Research as leisure activity | Hacker News Reader

Research as leisure activity

personalcanon.com

189 pointsgmays37 comments

That is a beautiful article, but if you are time constrained skip 1/4 down to the definition of research as leisure activity.

I felt like the author was describing me in the paragraph: “”” I’d also say that pretty much every writer, essayist, “cultural critic,” etc—especially someone who’s writing more as a vocation than a profession—has research as their leisure activity. What they do for pleasure (reading books, seeing films, listening to music) shades naturally and inevitably into what they want to write about, and the things they consume for leisure end up incorporated into some written work.”””

Are there publications for “research as a leisure activity”?

Somewhere where I can read what “amateurs” are researching in their free time?

There’s a few channels I follow on YouTube, but they all seem to be living off of the content they produce

I’m curious about communities of people with scientific inclinations, doing experiments of interesting things “at home”

Yes, every journal in the world will happily accept "research as a leisure activity" if your paper is high enough quality. The quality bar is somewhat higher than if you are in the academic-industrial complex (like it or not, people can recognize authors by writing style even on blind review), but you are able to do and get through peer review as an independent researcher.

Be prepared to be underwhelmed if you are doing it for the publication, though. Most published papers don't lead to anything. Do the research for fun, and publish to share your results. Actually, if you are a small "research for fun" shop, you can target tier 2 journals and conferences, and you will run into an enthusiastic community of people in your subfield.

Of course, this depends on knowing how to do new research, write research papers, and talk to peer reviewers. That is the bigger barrier to entry.

When I was cooking professionally I was pretty serious about it, and one thing that was really striking was that almost all of the good research done about food processes was in response to the needs of large-scale commercial food producers. There are still quite routine kitchen processes that are incompletely understood and not under active research, because they are of no interest to the industrial food system that drives most of the research.

In a totally different vein, there are alternative & traditional sailboat riggings that have no value to race sailors for tightly constrained performance reasons, and have been completely abandoned by production boat builders. The optimal configuration of sail surface and control lines for these rigs on modern hulls is actively researched by amateurs, sometimes with quite a lot of rigor.

Someone I know is an orchardist with an interest in historical/regional pear varietals. Most of them don't stand up well to shipping and so are commercially unviable, but he communicates with a loose network of other similarly interested growers, exchanging information about growing conditions, pests, and results specific to these fruits.

I'm sure there are many many other examples, these are just some that I'm aware of. I don't think there's a single place where this sort of thing happens, I doubt most practitioners even think of themselves as participating in research per se separate from their specific interest.

You seem to equate research as a leisure activity with amateur research. If you read 'leisure' simply as 'outside your main, bread-earning job', then it absolutely can be cutting edge research published in peer-reviewed outlets. It's not even that uncommon, look for people who have a university affiliation (that isn't just teaching) as a side gig. And that's just one way you could be pursing serious research outside your main job, you don't even need a university affiliation - it's certainly helpful with access to resources, feedback, ideas (and, let's be honest, it probably helps with visibility/credibility too), but it's not strictly necessary. As a different example, there are some (rare) examples where legitimate mathematical results were discovered by hobbyists going completely on their own. I also remember a documentary about a crew of retirees, including former physics professors and a precision mechanics engineer, who were performing physics experiments of masses at extremely low accelerations to test some limits of special relativity iirc - which in itself was technically the result of 'leisure research', like several of Einstein's most famous discoveries.

If it's something you're interested in, my suggestion would be to decide on a rough area and then seek out experts to brainstorm ideas for a suitable problem for you to work on, maybe one that leverages your existing skills in a creative way (like the engineer in the above example).

Since you mentioned Einstein, it reminded me of a comment by Max Born on the subject, from the Born-Einstein letters:

“Einstein expressed over and over again the thought that one should not couple the quest for knowledge with a bread-and-butter profession, but that research should be done as a private spare-time occupation. He himself wrote the first of his great treatises while earning his living as an employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He believed that only in this way could one preserve one's independence. What he did not consider, however, was the organizational rigidity of almost all professions, and the importance which individual members of a profession attach to their work. No professional pride could develop without it. To be able successfully to practice science as a hobby, one has to be an Einstein.”

> look for people who have a university affiliation (that isn't just teaching) as a side gig.

Can you expand on this? Like people who have full time jobs in perhaps a different field but do research on the side using the facilities/resources of a university? If so how does one slide into a gig like that?

Having done that, I can answer. I'll be a little vague on the topic to keep some anonymity.

Without a plan, per se, I nurtured a burgeoning personal research interest that was well outside my field. The initial hobby was very rudimentary but it gave me enough feedback and fuel that over a number of years I built more advanced software and hardware to investigate it more scientifically. Eventually, having reached the limits of the data I had access to, I reached out to a local university to start a collaboration.

If you already have an idea, I think, as long as you're sufficiently interested in actually doing research, you'll be able to find some professor that is as well. On the flip side, I know for a fact that most professors have more research ideas than students, so they can certainly provide you with things to investigate.

As a bonus, for the professor, since this is a side gig for you, there isn't an cost for them (or much less of one). Access to facilities and resources depend on the university. But I was certainly surprised by what I was given access to in the service of doing the research.

Wow ive been hoping to do something very similar! If you're open to chatting a little more, i would love to learn a bit about how you do this - my email is in my profile or i will contact you if you drop an email here.

I work as a software developer at a major research university. I got a PhD there long ago and I've worked in a wide range of jobs ever since including another job at that university. PhD connections helped me get the first job but not my current job. The university hires a large number of people to do everything from food service, building maintenance, the trades, to technical and administrative. All of those employees have a number of privileges such as being able to take a free class every semester (a grad level seminar can open opportunities like nothing else) and if you have flexibility in hours you can go to talks, etc.

Let's put it this way. If you can write a (1) good grant proposal with a good chance of getting funded you are required these days to (2) get a professor to be the principal investigator if you want to spend it and I'd say (1) is much harder than (2). Not like it is easy, but it is possible.

I do research as a hobby. It resulted in a published data set and news article that was picked up by global media outlets. The article led to a documentary.

And, I just keep doing the research because I love the research part of it. I find it relaxing and it allows me to stretch my tech skills at the same time.

I have contributed to and written 4 papers "for fun," and have another one going through review. GP seems to want to do it for the prestige marker (the publication), but that publication on its own is kind of worthless. The quality and enjoyment of the research is what matters.

I have the impression that there are a lot of people doing interesting things on their own and probably not sharing them. Maybe in big part because they are scared of getting rejected

I want to be able to see what “normal” people are doing. Would love something like a GitHub/stack exchange of people just openly and curiously sharing their research with other “normal” people

“Serious” research is just too serious and exclusive for people who are not doing it to become researchers nor care about scientific prestige

There is a surprising amount of excellent computer science research that is done as a private hobby where no attempt is made to publish it. An important aspect of this is that the goal of the research is often to solve the problem. Publishing it is irrelevant to that objective and a tedious chore that can be readily dismissed if it is not your job. It may not be a satisfying answer but in my experience "I have better things to do with my time" is a primary reason to not publish amateur research.

This naturally creates two problems. The first is discovery amidst the noise of non-serious research activity. To find it you have to be aware the research is happening and you literally have to talk to the people doing it. One thing NSA used to (maybe still does) do very well was finding non-academic researchers doing interesting theoretical computer science work that was never going to end up in a journal. The second is that there are a couple domains where there are decades of accumulated research where almost none of it was published, so it is difficult to bootstrap yourself into the state-of-the-art because so little of it was written down. There is also the reality that some traditional sponsors of non-academic computer science research have asymmetric advantage as an explicit objective, which benefits from non-publication.

I actually believe the main problem that keeps "normal" people out of "serious" research is the cultural part around writing a good research paper, getting through review, and reviewing papers.

ArXiv is close to what you suggest and helps with the last two, but there's no real reason for anyone to read your paper on ArXiv without any authority signal that it's worth reading.

I'd argue that iNaturalist counts as a leisure research community. It's a platform for tracking animal and plant species and sharing your findings with others. Of course most people who use it don't produce publications or any other conventional outputs of academic research, but still they are participating in researching the ecological communities that are present everywhere.

Thank you! Yes, this is very much along the lines of what I was imagining

Now I wonder if there are other communities like that one, but around other topics

"Mindat" might be another one that fits. It is a community-built database of minerals. New minerala are still being diacovered and named by hobbyists & dealers.

We need a radical recalibration/rethink of what research is and how it should be done in the 21st century.

There are way too many gatekeepers, far too little creativity and a lot of manufactured noise.

If things had gone slightly differently for me, I would be a neuro-psychiatric medical researcher right now instead of a programmer. As it stands I write code to pay bills because I lacked the money to go to college, and (thankfully) the experience necessary to know how to get the student loans necessary to pay for any of the pre-med programs I was accepted to.

Having lived past the age of 25 and feeling my mind settle down I can say with the utmost confidence I would make a terrible researcher. I'm far too erratic and emotionally invested in my ideas, among many other personal traits I've come to acknowledge.

HOWEVER, if I had been able to pay for college, I would have pursued an academic career because that's what everyone said you should do as I went through the public school system.

Which of course makes me wonder how many people are writing papers and performing research because that's just what you do when you're smart and how many are actually adept at performing research and conducting scientific experimentation?

One of the things that stands in the way of this (for me) is that I've been out of academia for nearly ten years. I never even got verified for submitting CS pre-prints https://arxiv.org/ for example, which I should have done before leaving school.

At [1] the first chapter is "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". I think it continues to be valid, we are currently amazed about AI but we need to keep our eyes open for more.

[1] https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/01.html#Chap01

Has anyone used are.na? It's mentioned in the first paragraph.

I'm sort of disappointed that this isn't actually about research as leisure activity. I love to learn about topics in-depth, which will entail going through all kinds of literature and scientific papers to see what We've collectively learned about a particular topic. It's basically my replacement for reading novels in my free time. I guess it's not real research in an academic sense, but I try my best to be thorough and systematically go through the papers in detail (more or less, since in the end reading and learning to read papers is an art that can be practiced and refined).

It does start out touting a particular piece of software, but the last section, "What does doing research for leisure mean?" does go into research as a leisure activity, and the author promises more posts on the topic in the future.

I'm with you, I really enjoy learning just for the sake of learning and feel very lucky that I get to live now, when there is almost always a rich lode of existing research that I can read on almost any topic that strikes my curiosity.

> when there is almost always a rich lode of existing research

Yes!

And it highlights how people these days aren't any smarter than the people in times gone by. We just have a greater pile of existing knowledge to mine.

Reading papers is absolutely part of academic research. The other part is probably producing things and submitting to journals/conferences advancing things based on what one has read (and hopefully having a day job that pays for the publication fees and travel fees...)

Yes, definitely. But I feel doing research is more associated either with the fringe that is anti-science or academics who are actually doing science and publishing papers. I'm under no illusion that I'm doing anything akin to what a scientist does, but I also don't mean "doing my own research" as some shorthand for being skeptical of all the world's news media and the scientific establishment.

I, too, love doing in-depth research of things as a recreational activity. Particularly things that are outside of my sphere of competency.

I also end up writing essays about what I've discovered, basically as a means of having some sort of "goal" for the research.

You are doing research, it’s just the first stage of it. From a computer vision perspective, the steps are

1) pick up a topic 2) do a literature review 3) establish a baseline and state of the art 4) improve upon model until you beat state of the art or find something interesting and unusual 5) publish

Where do you like to go to find and read those research papers? I've been curious about this off and on but don't really know where to hunt down papers beyond the ocassional random one I get linked to.

It used to be the nearest university (especially if they have an adjoining curriculum), sometimes a local business. Don't be afraid of microfiche for older pubs. Don't be afraid to introduce yourself.

I still find libraries pretty useful while simultaneously being amazed at the quantity of papers online - I have found papers I would have nearly killed for decades ago now online at faculty pages of my favorite researchers. I'm guessing online is better for most, especially when coupled with browsing faculty pages for the author of your random linked papers. Also, look for citations listings that include authors of papers You like (it's printed and at your local research/eng lib for older obscure authors).

Before Eternal September and still today (though maybe less?), sending an intro email to someone that is studying a subject You are interested in is often useful (possibly better for niches). I'm guilty of not responding in a timely manner.

Probably Semi-OT: look at some indexes for CoEvolution Quarterly.

> Don't be afraid of microfiche for older pubs

A million times this, and the value of libraries. There is a vast amount of information online, but the amount that isn't is still even greater.

I generally use sci-hub to get any paper I want to read. It's not quite legal, but I feel locking the world's knowledge behind paywalls is so immoral that I honestly do it with some measure of satisfaction.

Very interesting, this seems like a potential source of great power.

It did so for some of the "gentleman scientists" of previous centuries.

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