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I've spent most of my career working, chatting and hanging out with what might be best described as "passionate weirdos" in various quantitative areas of resear

I've spent most of my career working, chatting and hanging out with what might be best described as "passionate weirdos" in various quantitative areas of research. I say "weirdos" because they're people driven by an obsession with a topic, but don't always fit the mold by having the ideal combination of background, credentials and personality to land them on a big tech company research team. The other day I was spending some time with a researcher from Deep Mind and I was surprised to find that while they were sharp and curious to an extent, nearly every ounce of energy they expended on research was strategic. They didn't write about research they were fascinated by, they wrote and researched on topics they strategically felt had the highest probability getting into a major conference in a short period of time to earn them a promotion. While I was a bit disappointed, I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game. This person probably earns more than many rooms of smart, passionate people I've been in, and that money isn't for smarts alone; it's for appealing to the interests of people with the money. You can see this very clearly by comparing the work being done in the LLM space to that being done in the Image/Video diffusion model space. There's much more money in LLMs right now, and the field is flooded with papers on any random topic. If you dive in, most of them are not reproducible or make very questionable conclusions based on the data they present, but that's not of very much concern so long as the paper can be added to a CV. In the stable diffusion world it's mostly people driven by personal interest (usually very non-commericial personal interests) and you see tons of innovation in that field but almost no papers. In fact, if you really want to understand a lot of the most novel work coming out of the image generation world you often need to dig into PRs made by an anonymous users with anime themed profile pic. The bummer of course is that there are very hard limits on what any researcher can do with a home GPU training setup. It does lead to creative solutions to problems, but I can't help but wonder what the world would look like if more of these people had even a fraction of the resources available exclusively to people playing the game.

smokel 1y ago
> I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game. Please do judge them for being parasitical. They might seem successful by certain measures, like the amount of money they make, but I for one simply dislike it when people only think about themselves. As a society, we should be more cautious about narcissism and similar behaviors. Also, in the long run, this kind of behaviour makes them an annoying person at parties.
- szundi 1y ago
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- what-the-grump 1y ago
  But this is in itself selfish right? You dislike them because they don’t benefit you indirectly by benefiting society at large. The incentive structure is wrong, incentivizing things that benefit society would be the solution not judging those that exist in the current system by pretending altruism is somehow not part of the same game.
  - smokel 1y ago
    I agree that the system itself is dysfunctional, and I understand the argument that individuals are shaped or even constrained by it. However, in this case, we are talking about people who are both exceptionally intelligent and materially secure. I think it's reasonable to expect such individuals to feel some moral responsibility to use their abilities for broader good. As for whether that expectation is "selfish" on my part, I think that question has been debated for centuries in ethics, and I'm quite comfortable landing on the side that says not all disapproval is self-interest. In my own case, I'm not benefiting much either :)
    - what-the-grump 1y ago
      I just don't think so, these exceptionally intelligent people are masters at pattern recognition, logic, hyper-focus, task completion in a field. Every single thing will tell them don't go against the flow, don't stick your neck out, don't be a hero, don't take on risk. Or you will end up nailed to a cross. To me this is an insane position to take or to expect from anyone, its some just world fallacy thing perpetuated by too much Hollywood. I am going to flip the script for a minute. I am a killer, driver, pilot, mechanic one the best ones out there, I beat the game, I won. So let me just stop and change the world, for what?
      - godelski 1y ago
kcexn 1y ago
This is such a nuanced problem. Like any creative endeavour, the most powerful and significant research is driven by an innate joy of learning, creating, and sharing ideas with others. How far the research can be taken is then shaped by resource constraints. The more money you throw at the researchers, the more results they can get. But there seems to be a diminishing returns kind of effect as individual contributors become less able to produce results independently. The research narrative also gets distorted by who has the most money and influence, and not always for the better (as recent events in Alzheimer's research has shown). The problem is once people's livelihoods depend on their research output rather than the research process, the whole research process becomes steadily distorted to optimise for being able to reliably produce outputs. Anyone who has invested a great deal of time and effort into solving a hard problem knows that the 'eureka' moment is not really something that you can force. So people end up spending less time working on problems that would contribute to 'breakthroughs' and more time working on problems that will publish.
RataNova 1y ago
The tragedy is exactly what you said: all that energy, creativity, and deep domain obsession locked out of impact because it’s not institutionally “strategic.”

smokel 1y ago

> I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game. Please do judge them for being parasitical. They might seem successful by certain measures, like the amount of money they make, but I for one simply dislike it when people only think about themselves. As a society, we should be more cautious about narcissism and similar behaviors. Also, in the long run, this kind of behaviour makes them an annoying person at parties.

szundi 1y ago
[dead]
what-the-grump 1y ago
But this is in itself selfish right? You dislike them because they don’t benefit you indirectly by benefiting society at large. The incentive structure is wrong, incentivizing things that benefit society would be the solution not judging those that exist in the current system by pretending altruism is somehow not part of the same game.
- smokel 1y ago
  I agree that the system itself is dysfunctional, and I understand the argument that individuals are shaped or even constrained by it. However, in this case, we are talking about people who are both exceptionally intelligent and materially secure. I think it's reasonable to expect such individuals to feel some moral responsibility to use their abilities for broader good. As for whether that expectation is "selfish" on my part, I think that question has been debated for centuries in ethics, and I'm quite comfortable landing on the side that says not all disapproval is self-interest. In my own case, I'm not benefiting much either :)
  - what-the-grump 1y ago
    I just don't think so, these exceptionally intelligent people are masters at pattern recognition, logic, hyper-focus, task completion in a field. Every single thing will tell them don't go against the flow, don't stick your neck out, don't be a hero, don't take on risk. Or you will end up nailed to a cross. To me this is an insane position to take or to expect from anyone, its some just world fallacy thing perpetuated by too much Hollywood. I am going to flip the script for a minute. I am a killer, driver, pilot, mechanic one the best ones out there, I beat the game, I won. So let me just stop and change the world, for what?
    - godelski 1y ago

kcexn 1y ago

This is such a nuanced problem. Like any creative endeavour, the most powerful and significant research is driven by an innate joy of learning, creating, and sharing ideas with others. How far the research can be taken is then shaped by resource constraints. The more money you throw at the researchers, the more results they can get. But there seems to be a diminishing returns kind of effect as individual contributors become less able to produce results independently. The research narrative also gets distorted by who has the most money and influence, and not always for the better (as recent events in Alzheimer's research has shown). The problem is once people's livelihoods depend on their research output rather than the research process, the whole research process becomes steadily distorted to optimise for being able to reliably produce outputs. Anyone who has invested a great deal of time and effort into solving a hard problem knows that the 'eureka' moment is not really something that you can force. So people end up spending less time working on problems that would contribute to 'breakthroughs' and more time working on problems that will publish.

RataNova 1y ago

The tragedy is exactly what you said: all that energy, creativity, and deep domain obsession locked out of impact because it’s not institutionally “strategic.”