3 ms·
> but we are almost never performing fundamental research to achieve our ends "Fundamental research" is a matter of perspective. If a developer does not know R
by jared314 13y ago
> but we are almost never performing fundamental research to achieve our ends
"Fundamental research" is a matter of perspective. If a developer does not know Rails, he must perform fundamental research into building a new blog engine. While the unknowns, and variability, are significantly smaller, they are still unknown until he does the research. If she were to trod off the beaten path, even slightly, he could run into a community known, but developer unknown, roadblock/design flaw that didn't show up in basic research. (ex. A Rails blog engine vs a multi-threaded Rails blog engine)
- jacques_chester 13y agoWhile all estimates are relative to the context, I disagree that fundamental research is. Fundamental research is about discovering or inventing something nobody has ever done before. What will be discovered or invented is an unknown; it may be unknown that it is unknown. Research is basically an open-ended search process. There's no foreseable end-state to base an estimate on -- though there are terminating conditions we can use to end research (ran out of money, made amazing discovery that will be passed to engineers to commercialise, gathered sufficient data to write publishable paper etc). Take the linked post's example of AIDS research. How long will it take to cure AIDS? There is simply no way to know. We can produce estimates, but because it is a research problem, any such estimate would have to have wildly broad ranges to be accurate ("somewhere between 10 and 100 years"). In cases of pure research, you can't estimate the end-goal. Until it's over you may not even know that there were new end-goals you were unaware of (eg. 3M's Post It notes).