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This reminds me of a quote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and your research" ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of a

This reminds me of a quote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and your research" ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
My favorite part of that talk is where he highlights the value of creating to solve a class of problems vs. a unique instance. Build in a way that others can build off of your work. Recently, I built an automated Skinner box that has the ability to run most of the protocols of classical behavioral research. It allows the mouse to be head fixed, enabling brain readings while the experiment is running^. We could have built just what we needed, but instead, we are going to open source this general solution in a methods paper soon. I am unsure if this would have happened if I had not read Hamming's talk. ^The hope is that this will reduce the amount of this type of research done with monkeys, enable reductions of costs/time, and enhancing the ability to learn more due to the huge genetic catalogs for mice.