Appreciate your comment! I probably won’t be able to give my whole theory of change in a comment :P but if I were to say a silly version of it, it might look like:
“Just do the thing”
So, what are the constituent parts of making scientific progress? Off the cuff, maybe something like:
You need to know what questions are worth asking / problems are worth solving
You need to know how to decompose these questions in sub-questions iteratively until a subset are answerable from the state of current knowledge
You need to have good research project management skills, to figure out what order it makes sense to tackle these sub-questions and most quickly make progress toward the goal which is where all the impact is
You need people to have smart ideas to guess the answers to sub-questions and generate hypotheses
You need people to do or build things, like run experiments, code, or fab physical objects
You need operations and logistics to turn money into materials and people, and to coordinate the materials and people
You need managers to foster productive environments and maintain healthy relationships
You need advisors to hold you accountable to the actual goal
You often need feedback loops with the actual goal, in case you’ve decomposed the problem incorrectly or something else in the system has gone awry.
You need money
I’m making this up, but do you see what I mean?
Then my advice would be to figure out which subset of these are so constraining that you can’t start the business of doing the thing, and to solve those constraints e.g. by cultivating instrumental resources like research ability. Otherwise, set yourself up with the set of 1-10 which maximize your likelihood of succeeding at the thing, and start doing the thing. Figure the rest out as you go.
It’s totally conceivable that an academic lab is the best place available to you. But I would want you to come to that conclusion after having thought hard about it, working backward from the actual goal.
Assuming the aspects of 1-10 which are research skills are covered, my object level sense is that academia goes wrong on 1,3,5,6,7,8,9.
All told my algorithm might be something like:
What other existing entities/ groups look good on these inputs to the scientific progress machine? These might be existing companies, labs, random people on the internet, non-profits, whatever. Would also include looking for academic opportunities that look better on the above. Don’t think about made up categories like “non-profit” when doing this. Just figure out what it would look like to work at/with this entity to accomplish the goal.
What levers do I have to tweak things such that my list of existing places looks even better?
What would it look like for me to make my own enterprise to directly do the thing? What resources am I missing?
What opportunities do I have to pursue instrumental goods/ resources that don’t look like doing the thing?
With bias toward doing the thing, see which of working with existing collections of people, pushing existing collections of people to be different in some way, starting your own thing, and gathering instrumental resources you are missing looks like it will lead to the best outcomes.
Do that thing. Periodically reevaluate.
This probably isn’t very helpful, but I don’t know of any tricks! I could say more stuff about “industry” vs. “academia” but for the most part I think those conversations are missing the point unless you can drill way more into the specifics of a situation.
Good luck :) remember that lots of other people are trying to figure the same kind of thing out. In my experience they are the best people to learn from
Appreciate your comment! I probably won’t be able to give my whole theory of change in a comment :P but if I were to say a silly version of it, it might look like: “Just do the thing”
So, what are the constituent parts of making scientific progress? Off the cuff, maybe something like:
You need to know what questions are worth asking / problems are worth solving
You need to know how to decompose these questions in sub-questions iteratively until a subset are answerable from the state of current knowledge
You need to have good research project management skills, to figure out what order it makes sense to tackle these sub-questions and most quickly make progress toward the goal which is where all the impact is
You need people to have smart ideas to guess the answers to sub-questions and generate hypotheses
You need people to do or build things, like run experiments, code, or fab physical objects
You need operations and logistics to turn money into materials and people, and to coordinate the materials and people
You need managers to foster productive environments and maintain healthy relationships
You need advisors to hold you accountable to the actual goal
You often need feedback loops with the actual goal, in case you’ve decomposed the problem incorrectly or something else in the system has gone awry.
You need money
I’m making this up, but do you see what I mean?
Then my advice would be to figure out which subset of these are so constraining that you can’t start the business of doing the thing, and to solve those constraints e.g. by cultivating instrumental resources like research ability. Otherwise, set yourself up with the set of 1-10 which maximize your likelihood of succeeding at the thing, and start doing the thing. Figure the rest out as you go.
It’s totally conceivable that an academic lab is the best place available to you. But I would want you to come to that conclusion after having thought hard about it, working backward from the actual goal.
Assuming the aspects of 1-10 which are research skills are covered, my object level sense is that academia goes wrong on 1,3,5,6,7,8,9.
All told my algorithm might be something like:
What other existing entities/ groups look good on these inputs to the scientific progress machine? These might be existing companies, labs, random people on the internet, non-profits, whatever. Would also include looking for academic opportunities that look better on the above. Don’t think about made up categories like “non-profit” when doing this. Just figure out what it would look like to work at/with this entity to accomplish the goal.
What levers do I have to tweak things such that my list of existing places looks even better?
What would it look like for me to make my own enterprise to directly do the thing? What resources am I missing?
What opportunities do I have to pursue instrumental goods/ resources that don’t look like doing the thing?
With bias toward doing the thing, see which of working with existing collections of people, pushing existing collections of people to be different in some way, starting your own thing, and gathering instrumental resources you are missing looks like it will lead to the best outcomes.
Do that thing. Periodically reevaluate.
This probably isn’t very helpful, but I don’t know of any tricks! I could say more stuff about “industry” vs. “academia” but for the most part I think those conversations are missing the point unless you can drill way more into the specifics of a situation.
Good luck :) remember that lots of other people are trying to figure the same kind of thing out. In my experience they are the best people to learn from