5 ms·

> Of course, the irony is that US society now has more than enough wealth so that anyone who wanted to could live like a graduate student researching whatever t

> Of course, the irony is that US society now has more than enough wealth so that anyone who wanted to could live like a graduate student researching whatever they wanted on a basic income. Which is more or less my plan. Some details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610362 > My plan right now is to save money, retire early, and then do whatever research I want that fits my budget. This avoids many of the problems with the current system, but is not possible for many. > This would allow me to pursue more risky research (in the sense that the research may fail to produce useful results) than an assistant professor trying to get tenure could. I also wouldn't have to raise funds, so I could focus on projects I believe are important, not just what can get funded. I wish this option was more known and accepted. Some people seem to think I'm insane to intentionally pursue this, but as far as I can tell they don't see that the ship they are on (academia/government research/etc.) is sinking. It would be nice to talk with other independent researchers of this variety, exchange best practices, etc.

overeater 9y ago
I wish you the best, but there's no one to talk to because no one has succeeded doing it. No science is done by independent researchers. You'd be limited to a very tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment. You'd be doing research without the support network of peers in a department, or colleagues at a conference to talk to. We should not advertise this as an option since it might make the gullible think this is feasible to do.
- btrettel 9y ago
  > I wish you the best, but there's no one to talk to because no one has succeeded doing it. There are many examples. Charles Darwin is the most famous. In my field (fluid dynamics) Robert Kraichnan is also well known and influential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist Of course, plenty of cranks go this route too. It's an option, not a panacea. > You'd be limited to a very tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment. Not a problem for me as a theorist. And I believe that expensive equipment is overused in my field anyway. I also disagree that this is a "tiny sliver" of the research. Computation and theory is roughly half the research in my field, and I suspect this is true for many fields. If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it. > You'd be doing research without the support network of peers in a department, or colleagues at a conference to talk to. I disagree. Collaboration does not require "official" status, and neither does attending a conference. In my field, no one cares what your affiliation is. At worst I could start a consulting company, which I'd probably do anyway. Plenty of consultants attend conferences in my field and collaborate with researchers in government, industry, and academia.
  - overeater 9y ago
    > If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it. No need to get overly defensive. I'm responding to your argument that this should be more widely known and accepted. Science gets harder to do every year as the the lowest hanging fruit keeps getting plucked. Your examples aren't convincing -- Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and things were different back then. Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities. But hey, if you end up doing this successfully. Come back and tell us how it went. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue disagreeing with you, that this is a reasonable route to productively conduct research.
    - btrettel 9y ago
      Low hanging fruit is one great example of where independent research can shine. The incentives are different, so what is considered "low hanging fruit" is also different. An independent researcher can focus on projects where the timescale is longer or the project is unlikely to be funded. With independent research being rare, I can see a lot of low hanging fruit for independent researchers which traditional academics would not touch. I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested. > Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities. Kraichnan was an independent researcher from 1962 to 2003, the majority of his career. Yes, he was affiliated with a university at multiple points of his career, but he spent 4 decades as an independent researcher and produced some of his most important work during that time.
      - aldoushuxley001 9y ago
        > I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested. I'd be interested, if possible.
        9y ago
- brownbat 9y ago
  > tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment Like anyone who presents at tech conferences.
  - brownbat 9y ago
    I wasn't being dismissive of tech conferences, I genuinely meant there's a lot of valuable research done by small teams. Sure, it's not work with the large hadron collider, but assuming the only thing that advances human knowledge is big budget research is just plainly false. You're on Hacker News for Knuth's sake. The entire premise baked into the word hacker is that enterprising smart people can change the world with just a little determination and hustle. Even the hackers out there not making the next breakthrough technology but emulating and testing some arcane ICS, it's crazy to warn people away from that as risky and possibly not useful. Every career is possibly not groundbreaking, every path has that risk. People should be realistic, sure, but if someone wants to support themselves while they do interesting research, I have no objections to that. Do what you love, this isn't someone whose hopes and dreams are contingent on starring in the next Hollywood blockbuster, it's someone who wants to geek out on their own dime. Great! Amazing! Tell HN how it goes and most of us will love it, world changing or even just something fascinating to you, we have your back.
- cge 9y ago
  That depends on what you mean by "independent." There is a space between standard faculty and hermit researcher. Depending upon the field, you can do research, publish, go to conferences, have a network of peers, without being standard faculty. I know research professors who have very few of the standard faculty obligations, for example. I also know people who do research entirely on private funding, but this almost always requires significantly more than just savings from retiring early, and they still stay part of the academic community. I agree that it is not something that should be advertised as an option, because it is very rare, but it does exist.
- maxander 9y ago
  Increasingly, you can simply contract out the physical end of experimentation out to dedicated commercial labs (at least in the biological sciences.) It takes a bit of money (well, a lot, even) but it’s much friendlier to small-scale enterprises, among the other advantages.
gnak 9y ago
I have a similar plan! I think the opportunities in tech are promising towards this end, and would be interested in getting in contact with other people with similar plans. I'm on the "build skills, save money" - phase currently, and probably will be for > 5 years to come. So that is my main focus right now.
- btrettel 9y ago
  Sounds like we're at a similar place. Feel free to contact me. My email address is in my profile here.
rifung 9y ago
This is something I used to think about too but how do you do research without learning about prior work and how do you learn about prior work without an advisor to guide you?
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  All disciplines have journals, and many are either public access or available on sci-hub. If all else fails you can get a limited JSTOR subscription for only a moderately outrageous sum. Mostly you do reaearch by being interested in something. If you need someone to tell you what to be interested in, a PhD may not be for you. A good supervisor will tell you to be interested in things you may not have considered. But empirically, most supervisors will steer you in the direction of their own interests. These may or may not match your own interests. The mismatch us at least as likely to be a bad thing as a good one. In my own experience, I decided to work independently instead of starting a PhD. There are only a couple of directly relevant journals, and I literally skimmed every issue, reading and taking notes on the papers that counted as prior art. Those papers often quoted other papers outside the immediate domain, so I followed them up - and that’s how you start. I have a pretty good idea of the directions I’d be steered in if I was being supervised, and near certainty that those are not the directions I want to explore.
  - rifung 9y ago
    > Mostly you do research by being interested in something. If you need someone to tell you what to be interested in, a PhD may not be for you. Maybe I'm misinterpreting but this comment seems a bit condescending. The thing is, it's not really research unless it's something new, and you can't know if something is new unless you know what already exists. > All disciplines have journals, and many are either public access or available on sci-hub. If all else fails you can get a limited JSTOR subscription for only a moderately outrageous sum. Sure you can have access to journals but how do you even know what you should search for? I suppose this is sufficient if what you want to do research in is something that is currently mainstream?
    - 9y ago
akvadrako 9y ago
This is basically what I do and recommend. After saving up around €100K and continuing to freelance 2 months per year, I spend most of my time on research projects. It's too bad there isn't more of an independent academic community, but it sure beats pressure to publish and writing grant applications.
awelkie 9y ago
I feel like there's an opportunity for a web platform for the collaboration of (independent) researchers. Some place where I could propose an idea and others could tell me why that idea doesn't work or if it's already been done. And if the idea doesn't have any flaws and hasn't already been explored, then other researchers could help me perform the research or "fork" the project to go down different paths. I think some platforms come close. There are places to ask questions (e.g. StackExchange) but they don't seem to like "what if" questions and if the idea is good there's no good way to follow up over months or years. Github works for some fields where the idea is tightly coupled with the implementation (e.g. some computer systems fields) but not for others. I guess I would just like a place to discuss ideas. In academia it's common to discuss nascent ideas within your lab, but larger collaboration happens at things like conferences where you're presenting only the ideas that worked out. I think such a platform could make independent research like you're describing much more effective and attractive.
- pdfernhout 9y ago
  When I mentioned your comment to my wife, she suggested that Reddit has some subreddits a bit like that. A starting point: http://www.refinethemind.com/reddit-mind-44-smart-subreddits/ http://www.refinethemind.com/reddit-mind-44-smart-subreddits... That said, you have a great insight here with the idea that some places on the web could replace (or at least supplement) the traditional advisor/advisee relationship with a more peer-to-peer approach -- especially for independent researchers. That issue of how to follow up over months or years seems key as a difference from more casual one-off interactions. Well-run mailing lists or forums may provide some of that continuity -- but maybe there is a social or technical way to go further in that direction? I'm not sure if there ever would be just one place to discuss ideas, but you might want to bring up this general idea of some new platform with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens
greenhatman 9y ago
What do you think of having your research funded through platforms like https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/?
- btrettel 9y ago
  Browsing the projects on the site, I'm amazed by the fraction which have full backing. Much higher than I would have expected. But the total amounts are mostly too small for someone intending to live off them, unless they have a large number of projects at once. From a diversification standpoint I think this should only be one source of one's funding. The bulk of my planned funding is going to come from savings from a job. I have the most control over that, and it's a much larger source. I've also considered working as a lecturer from time to time as engineering lecturers seem to be reasonably well paid (at my university, ~$10K per class). Might as well take advantage of the rise of adjuncts. You can travel to different universities regularly for collaboration this way too. Some more permanent lecturer positions are fairly decently paid from what I understand and may be a decent way to save money while also having opportunities for research. The research is the goal, not the title of "independent researcher". Also, having to solicit funding regularly is something I'd rather not do. It takes away time from research, and I'd like to focus on research which is not so easily funded. To go back to the "low hanging fruit" point mentioned elsewhere in this comment tree, I think there are many research topics which don't sound good to a third party but are actually good. It can be hard to convince people of this. The easiest way to move forward on these research topics is to risk your own money. And with the most easily funded ideas taking priority, I can see many examples of "low hanging fruit" in my own field. The Patreon model could get around the "research not sounding good enough to fund" problem. Pay an individual to do work in general, not specific work. But aside from someone working on topics of popular interest (e.g., gwern), I don't think this would work.
JabavuAdams 9y ago
My whole life, I've wanted to be a "gentleman scientist". Just went back to university to study Physics, with Bio on the side. I'm going to run out of money in 1-2 years unless the trading system works out, or I get another real jorb. Good luck. Keep the dream alive! P.S. 42, with ADHD. Started University at 15, started high school at 11. Great at getting jobs. Not so great at keeping them. :P

overeater 9y ago

I wish you the best, but there's no one to talk to because no one has succeeded doing it. No science is done by independent researchers. You'd be limited to a very tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment. You'd be doing research without the support network of peers in a department, or colleagues at a conference to talk to. We should not advertise this as an option since it might make the gullible think this is feasible to do.

btrettel 9y ago
> I wish you the best, but there's no one to talk to because no one has succeeded doing it. There are many examples. Charles Darwin is the most famous. In my field (fluid dynamics) Robert Kraichnan is also well known and influential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist Of course, plenty of cranks go this route too. It's an option, not a panacea. > You'd be limited to a very tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment. Not a problem for me as a theorist. And I believe that expensive equipment is overused in my field anyway. I also disagree that this is a "tiny sliver" of the research. Computation and theory is roughly half the research in my field, and I suspect this is true for many fields. If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it. > You'd be doing research without the support network of peers in a department, or colleagues at a conference to talk to. I disagree. Collaboration does not require "official" status, and neither does attending a conference. In my field, no one cares what your affiliation is. At worst I could start a consulting company, which I'd probably do anyway. Plenty of consultants attend conferences in my field and collaborate with researchers in government, industry, and academia.
- overeater 9y ago
  > If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it. No need to get overly defensive. I'm responding to your argument that this should be more widely known and accepted. Science gets harder to do every year as the the lowest hanging fruit keeps getting plucked. Your examples aren't convincing -- Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and things were different back then. Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities. But hey, if you end up doing this successfully. Come back and tell us how it went. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue disagreeing with you, that this is a reasonable route to productively conduct research.
  - btrettel 9y ago
    Low hanging fruit is one great example of where independent research can shine. The incentives are different, so what is considered "low hanging fruit" is also different. An independent researcher can focus on projects where the timescale is longer or the project is unlikely to be funded. With independent research being rare, I can see a lot of low hanging fruit for independent researchers which traditional academics would not touch. I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested. > Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities. Kraichnan was an independent researcher from 1962 to 2003, the majority of his career. Yes, he was affiliated with a university at multiple points of his career, but he spent 4 decades as an independent researcher and produced some of his most important work during that time.
    - aldoushuxley001 9y ago
      > I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested. I'd be interested, if possible.
      - 9y ago
brownbat 9y ago
> tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment Like anyone who presents at tech conferences.
- brownbat 9y ago
  I wasn't being dismissive of tech conferences, I genuinely meant there's a lot of valuable research done by small teams. Sure, it's not work with the large hadron collider, but assuming the only thing that advances human knowledge is big budget research is just plainly false. You're on Hacker News for Knuth's sake. The entire premise baked into the word hacker is that enterprising smart people can change the world with just a little determination and hustle. Even the hackers out there not making the next breakthrough technology but emulating and testing some arcane ICS, it's crazy to warn people away from that as risky and possibly not useful. Every career is possibly not groundbreaking, every path has that risk. People should be realistic, sure, but if someone wants to support themselves while they do interesting research, I have no objections to that. Do what you love, this isn't someone whose hopes and dreams are contingent on starring in the next Hollywood blockbuster, it's someone who wants to geek out on their own dime. Great! Amazing! Tell HN how it goes and most of us will love it, world changing or even just something fascinating to you, we have your back.
cge 9y ago
That depends on what you mean by "independent." There is a space between standard faculty and hermit researcher. Depending upon the field, you can do research, publish, go to conferences, have a network of peers, without being standard faculty. I know research professors who have very few of the standard faculty obligations, for example. I also know people who do research entirely on private funding, but this almost always requires significantly more than just savings from retiring early, and they still stay part of the academic community. I agree that it is not something that should be advertised as an option, because it is very rare, but it does exist.
maxander 9y ago
Increasingly, you can simply contract out the physical end of experimentation out to dedicated commercial labs (at least in the biological sciences.) It takes a bit of money (well, a lot, even) but it’s much friendlier to small-scale enterprises, among the other advantages.

gnak 9y ago

I have a similar plan! I think the opportunities in tech are promising towards this end, and would be interested in getting in contact with other people with similar plans. I'm on the "build skills, save money" - phase currently, and probably will be for > 5 years to come. So that is my main focus right now.

btrettel 9y ago
Sounds like we're at a similar place. Feel free to contact me. My email address is in my profile here.

rifung 9y ago

This is something I used to think about too but how do you do research without learning about prior work and how do you learn about prior work without an advisor to guide you?

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
All disciplines have journals, and many are either public access or available on sci-hub. If all else fails you can get a limited JSTOR subscription for only a moderately outrageous sum. Mostly you do reaearch by being interested in something. If you need someone to tell you what to be interested in, a PhD may not be for you. A good supervisor will tell you to be interested in things you may not have considered. But empirically, most supervisors will steer you in the direction of their own interests. These may or may not match your own interests. The mismatch us at least as likely to be a bad thing as a good one. In my own experience, I decided to work independently instead of starting a PhD. There are only a couple of directly relevant journals, and I literally skimmed every issue, reading and taking notes on the papers that counted as prior art. Those papers often quoted other papers outside the immediate domain, so I followed them up - and that’s how you start. I have a pretty good idea of the directions I’d be steered in if I was being supervised, and near certainty that those are not the directions I want to explore.
- rifung 9y ago
  > Mostly you do research by being interested in something. If you need someone to tell you what to be interested in, a PhD may not be for you. Maybe I'm misinterpreting but this comment seems a bit condescending. The thing is, it's not really research unless it's something new, and you can't know if something is new unless you know what already exists. > All disciplines have journals, and many are either public access or available on sci-hub. If all else fails you can get a limited JSTOR subscription for only a moderately outrageous sum. Sure you can have access to journals but how do you even know what you should search for? I suppose this is sufficient if what you want to do research in is something that is currently mainstream?
  - 9y ago

akvadrako 9y ago

This is basically what I do and recommend. After saving up around €100K and continuing to freelance 2 months per year, I spend most of my time on research projects. It's too bad there isn't more of an independent academic community, but it sure beats pressure to publish and writing grant applications.

awelkie 9y ago

I feel like there's an opportunity for a web platform for the collaboration of (independent) researchers. Some place where I could propose an idea and others could tell me why that idea doesn't work or if it's already been done. And if the idea doesn't have any flaws and hasn't already been explored, then other researchers could help me perform the research or "fork" the project to go down different paths. I think some platforms come close. There are places to ask questions (e.g. StackExchange) but they don't seem to like "what if" questions and if the idea is good there's no good way to follow up over months or years. Github works for some fields where the idea is tightly coupled with the implementation (e.g. some computer systems fields) but not for others. I guess I would just like a place to discuss ideas. In academia it's common to discuss nascent ideas within your lab, but larger collaboration happens at things like conferences where you're presenting only the ideas that worked out. I think such a platform could make independent research like you're describing much more effective and attractive.

pdfernhout 9y ago
When I mentioned your comment to my wife, she suggested that Reddit has some subreddits a bit like that. A starting point: http://www.refinethemind.com/reddit-mind-44-smart-subreddits/ http://www.refinethemind.com/reddit-mind-44-smart-subreddits... That said, you have a great insight here with the idea that some places on the web could replace (or at least supplement) the traditional advisor/advisee relationship with a more peer-to-peer approach -- especially for independent researchers. That issue of how to follow up over months or years seems key as a difference from more casual one-off interactions. Well-run mailing lists or forums may provide some of that continuity -- but maybe there is a social or technical way to go further in that direction? I'm not sure if there ever would be just one place to discuss ideas, but you might want to bring up this general idea of some new platform with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens

greenhatman 9y ago

What do you think of having your research funded through platforms like https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/?

btrettel 9y ago
Browsing the projects on the site, I'm amazed by the fraction which have full backing. Much higher than I would have expected. But the total amounts are mostly too small for someone intending to live off them, unless they have a large number of projects at once. From a diversification standpoint I think this should only be one source of one's funding. The bulk of my planned funding is going to come from savings from a job. I have the most control over that, and it's a much larger source. I've also considered working as a lecturer from time to time as engineering lecturers seem to be reasonably well paid (at my university, ~$10K per class). Might as well take advantage of the rise of adjuncts. You can travel to different universities regularly for collaboration this way too. Some more permanent lecturer positions are fairly decently paid from what I understand and may be a decent way to save money while also having opportunities for research. The research is the goal, not the title of "independent researcher". Also, having to solicit funding regularly is something I'd rather not do. It takes away time from research, and I'd like to focus on research which is not so easily funded. To go back to the "low hanging fruit" point mentioned elsewhere in this comment tree, I think there are many research topics which don't sound good to a third party but are actually good. It can be hard to convince people of this. The easiest way to move forward on these research topics is to risk your own money. And with the most easily funded ideas taking priority, I can see many examples of "low hanging fruit" in my own field. The Patreon model could get around the "research not sounding good enough to fund" problem. Pay an individual to do work in general, not specific work. But aside from someone working on topics of popular interest (e.g., gwern), I don't think this would work.

JabavuAdams 9y ago

My whole life, I've wanted to be a "gentleman scientist". Just went back to university to study Physics, with Bio on the side. I'm going to run out of money in 1-2 years unless the trading system works out, or I get another real jorb. Good luck. Keep the dream alive! P.S. 42, with ADHD. Started University at 15, started high school at 11. Great at getting jobs. Not so great at keeping them. :P