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From a previous HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 by dasmoth “If you pay a man a salary

• itcrowd 7y ago
  The quote is part of a speech given by J.J. Thomson in 1916. The speech is partially reproduced (including your part) in the book "The life of Sir J.J. Thomson, O. M. : sometime master of Trinity College Cambridge" by Lord Rayleigh (1942). The original book is on the Internet Archive [1]. The speech is given at pages 198-200 and your quote appears approximately halfway in the quoted part of the speech [see 2]. [1] Full biography: https://archive.org/details/b29932208 https://archive.org/details/b29932208 [2] Screenshot of relevant quote: https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    Thank you so much for finding this. I am so happy to know that this is a real quote and not a mis-attribution to a famous person. "Not all famous quotes are by famous people" - Abraham Lincoln
    • stjohnswarts 7y ago
      "Those who would give up essential control, to purchase a little temporary memory safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" --Ben Franklin
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • mellosouls 7y ago
      JJ Thompson was one of the great scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and certainly famous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson
      • RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
        Completely agree about JJ Thomson. Just happy to hear it was he who said it and not a that it was a quote by someone else falsely attributed to JJ Thomson because he is famous.
        • mellosouls 7y ago
          Ah, I see - thanks for the clarification.
    • dennisgorelik 7y ago
      > "Not all famous quotes are by famous people" Googling this quote points back to RcouF1uZ4gsC as an original author. https://www.google.com/search?q="Not+all+famous+quotes+are+by+famous+people" https://www.google.com/search?q="Not+all+famous+quotes+are+b...
• z3c0 7y ago
  As someone who's currently trying to carry their company into data science (I know, we're late to the party, but homebuilding usually is), this is something that keeps me up at night. I've been hammering the idea into my superiors that if we're going to effectively administer a scientific process, we have to not only change how we manage expectations, but really, throw them out entirely. We have to see the general pursuit of knowledge as it's own ROI, because odds are that tangible value won't come from a data science team for a long time. But having seen how poorly we adopted agile, I'm skeptical this will happen (we devolved to "waterfall w/sprints" due to not properly managing expectations with our users). If we can't get people to move away from hard deadlines for regular releases, how are we going to make them wait for a properly verified hypothesis? One solution I've seen is organizationally "hiding" science teams from users, and only allowing a select few drive the direction of the team. But it still comes down to that select few properly managing everyone else's expectations.
  • gowld 7y ago
    Why is homebuilding company is the right place for basic research? That's an interesting choice to join the echelon of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, and Google X.
    • jcims 7y ago
      What do you mean by 'basic research' and why would any of the organizations that you mention be incentivized to solve the problems that plague the homebuilding industry?
      • srtjstjsj 7y ago
        OP wrote that their mission was "the general pursuit of knowledge", not "solve the problems that plague the homebuilding industry", and that was a source of tension with their management.
• gowld 7y ago
  This quote is better than the whole OP article. However... A flaw in Thomson's idea is that some research is expensive, costing much more than leisure time. Another approach is angel-investing / business-loan style: Give a large grant, wait a long time, and then call in the note -- to return research that justifies the investment, or repayment with interest. Or X-prize style: Give outsize awards for outsize accomplishments, and let the researches take on the risk.
  • dnautics 7y ago
    > Give a large grant, wait a long time, and then call in the note And what are the consequences if the scientist has pittered that money away? How do you decide if a scientist/manager is even deserving of that level of confidence in the fist place
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• kbenson 7y ago
  Taken to an extreme, this is UBI, and I think we would all benefit to some degree from a system like that if we could get from here to there. On the other hand, I imagine there's quite a bit of research that requires expensive tests and/or apparatus to get right, and I'm not sure how you feasibly come to a situation where you have a bunch of hobby physicists on staff and provide them with a particle accelerator, but just for funsies. I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.
  • zdragnar 7y ago
    There are plenty of people passionate about perpetual motion and chemtrails. Until we get to a point where resources are effectively infinite, we still need some form of prioritizing research funding. Even then, playing kerbal space program does not make you a rocket scientist. It requires a certain dedication to master various physics and mathematics disciplines to contribute to even a part of one, which is itself a significant investment that you won't find possible with UBI alone; there will still need to be some form of dedicated funding through either specific government programs or commercial enterprise. Salary also has a bit of a sticky effect; people change fields less than jobs, and spend more time in jobs than in funsies hobbies. A rocket designed by a committee of hobbyists will likely perform much like any other design-by-committee process or product.
  • jimhefferon 7y ago
    > UBI What is that?
    • itcrowd 7y ago
      Universal basic income
• mjklin 7y ago
  The Make-Work Principle: As long as you pay people to do something, they will find something to do. (from the book The Truth About Everything by Matthew Stewart)
• zmmmmm 7y ago
  > The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. heh, am involved currently in exactly the process of constructing such an environment. And we are doing exactly that: there is a high value deliverable that is relatively easy and predictable to achieve (but requires such specialised knowledge that it cannot be attained any other way than through very rare and highly skilled people), and then to attract actual good people, the people themselves are free to take the rest of their job / time and apply it to solving whatever they see as the most valuable contribution they can make on any time scale that is relevant. On the one hand you can look at it as an embarrassing political fig-leaf, on the other, you can actually see it as optimal. I acutally don't think completely detaching people from obligations to reality often works out to be ultimately optimal anyway. You need something to calibrate what you are doing against.
• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I’ve come full circle on this topic through grad school and dissertation and working in product companies. I think “fundamental research” is not a thing, except possibly in mathematical theory. There is only incremental research + good salesmanship. Research results should show up at a predictable regular pace, or else the result of that effort should be better & deeper explanation of a negative result which is also valuable. If you’re sinking 2 years of R&D costs on something and you’re not getting the positive result you wanted and the negative results are not incrementally adding up to a clearer and clearer diff between the state you’re in and the state you’re trying to get to, then it is wasted money and the researcher isn’t being effective in their job. I really think even difficult research tasks need to be rescoped and broken up into a series of incremental challenges, each of which has a known way to address it. You must treat it with reductionist dogma and eventually you’ll keep breaking it down into constituent parts that have known solutions until you hit on the novel problems to solve and it will be at a level of scope small enough that you can infer the solution from existing methods. That’s all there is in the world. There’s no miracle cure for cancer or climate change or aging or social inequality. Let alone random business problems. There’s just a big bunch of little tiny problems with boring solutions that get all glued together into bigger messes that are hard to figure out. You can try smashing with a hammer or basically scaling the hammer up or down, that’s about it. edits: fixed typos
  • ssivark 7y ago
    > That’s all there is in [the] world. That seems like a blanket assertion. It certainly seems like the most "manageable" mode of operating, but looking back at human history it seems like the "big breakthroughs" rarely happened that way. The model of scientific research as harvesting the tail events (low probability & massive payoff) seems quite incompatible with what you've said. That said, you probably think the way you do because of your experiences. Can you articulate that better? > Research results should show up at a predictable regular pace, or else the result of that effort should be better & deeper explanation of a negative result which is also valuable. To make a slightly more provocative claim, I think that this fetish for predictable/steady research progress is one of the primary causes of the problem discussed in the article. While papers can be generated steadily, piling on details doesn't necessarily make insight. (To quote Alan Kay: "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points") PS: There's an apt SMBC comic (Aaargh, I'm unable to find right now!) where researchers keep digging a tunnel linearly, and declare the field dead, while there is a big gold mine slightly off to the side.
• 8bitsrule 7y ago
  A fine example of this is Jansky's discovery of stellar radio emissions in the early 1930s. He found them while he was working for Bell Labs. Neither Bell Labs (of all places) nor astronomers were interested in further investigation. That discovery would lead to radio astronomy ... no thanks to established interests.
  • repolfx 7y ago
    But Bell Labs is remembered for things like the transistor, which had huge impact. There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtuous, for research funding to be disconnected from application. Bell Labs funded the transistor and not radio astronomy because apart from making cool TV documentaries, radio astronomy isn't actually useful for much. If we knew how to travel faster than light and explore the universe it'd be extremely useful, but we don't, so learning things about what a remote corner of the galaxy looked like a few billion years ago is easily argued to be a rather absurd waste of limited research dollars. It's exactly what this op-ed in the Scientific American is talking about: a research field optimised to produce papers independent of any concrete economic utility function. In a world where such things get funded, what exactly should scientists be measured by? They can't be measured by market success because nobody cares or has any use for their output: their work is pure academic navel/star-gazing. So they pretty much have to be measured by volume of output or respect of their peers, both of which are closed and circular systems of measurement. In my view the right fix for the science crisis is not to pay scientists to research whatever the hell they like with no success measurement at all: that really is directly equivalent to just firing them all and putting them on social security (or "UBI" as HNers like to call it). The right thing to do would probably be to just slash academic funding dramatically and reduce corporation taxes so corporate research can be given more funding. The net result would still be a drop in the amount of science done, but as Bayer's study makes clear, "not enough science" is not the world's problem right now.
    • 8bitsrule 7y ago
      Thanks for the reply. Yes indeed, Bell was famous for its many discoveries and applications. It was also famous (among science and engineering pros of its time) for granting its employees lots of time to spend on their own projects. Why they dropped-the-ball on Jansky's find is probably complicated. The person that did lead the way to the (now enormous) field of radio astronomy was Grote Reber. He had a BSEE degree. It was his life-long passion, in his free time, at his own expense, and he had to struggle to get anyone to pay attention. He personally discovered Cygnus A in 1939 (and lots more). But he didn't get the physics Nobel in 1974. Instructive story:. http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS13/cs13p14.htm http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS13/cs13p14.htm
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  This doesn't work for funding things besides the person's salary. If I want to buy a fancy new microscope or build a collider or even just buy materials, and I don't want to pay for it myself, I'm gonna need funding above and beyond "leisure." The LHC and ISS aren't leisure projects. Even equipment with a less insane scale is super expensive.