Comment by linguae
1 year ago
During my teenage and college years in the 2000s, I was inspired by what I’ve read about Bell Labs, and I wanted to work as a computer science researcher in industry. I’ve also been inspired by Xerox PARC’s 1970s and 1980s researchers. I pursued that goal, and I’ve worked for a few industrial research labs before I switched careers to full-time community college teaching a few months ago.
One thing I lament is the decline of long-term, unfettered research across the industry. I’ve witnessed more companies switching to research management models where management exerts more control over the research directions of their employees, where research directions can abruptly change due to management decisions, and where there is an increased focus on profitability. I feel this short-term approach will cost society in the long term, since current funding models promote evolutionary work rather than riskier, potentially revolutionary work.
As someone who wanted to become a researcher out of curiosity and exploration, I feel alienated in this world where industry researchers are harangued about “delivering value,” and where academic researchers are pressured to raise grant money and to publish. I quit and switched to a full teaching career at a community college. I enjoy teaching, and while I miss the day-to-day lifestyle of research, I still plan to do research during my summer and winter breaks out of curiosity and not for career advancement.
It would be great if there were more opportunities for researchers to pursue their interests. Sadly, though, barring a cultural change, the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven researchers are becoming independently wealthy, living like a monk, or finding a job with ample free time. I’m fortunate to have the latter situation where I have 16 weeks per year that I could devote outside my job.
Back in 1963, I had the privilege of participating in a program the summer before my senior year of high school. This was at the research lab of GE in Schenectady. I was working (not very productively) on a project involving platinum catalyst of hydrocarbons – what eventually became catalytic converters. The kid who tutored me in calculus (and later won a MacArthur grant and founded his own think tank) worked on what was then called nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR. Now it’s the guts or MRI machines (they left off the “nuclear” for PR reasons. I wonder how many kids these days have the chance to do shit like that, and if there are any labs where long-term research like that is funded.
> the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven researchers are becoming independently wealthy, living like a monk
I came to the same conclusion. This is the path I'm following (trying to set up a company and lean FIRE). It's sad in a way because those efforts and years could have been directed to research but we have to adapt.
That was mostly how the big scientific breakthroughs came in the 1800-1900s .. independent wealth.
That’s what a “scholar” is and Universities provided the perfect environment for that to thrive, which is no longer the case.
In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, maybe…
In post WW2 America though there was increased funding from the state, large research universities, institutes and national labs could be created. In the era where all that was really working at full speed, the “big scientific breakthrough” came at such a pace that it became hard to see what was big or not.
Edison's research lab was funded by companies wanting specific inventions developed.
I think that this was Paul Graham's original ambition for YC, really: a hope that some at least of the successful founders would choose to take their winnings and implement the next Lisp Machine and similar projects. Unfortunately, as with other things, winning the SV VC game just seems to incline people to either keep climbing that same greasy pole, or to do unstrenuous rich-guy things, or some combination of those two.
I've seen that many times over by now, sort of done it myself. It doesn't really work. You end up replacing one problem for another. There is also a heavy dose of procrastination and escapism related to it. Think about how many could, and does, do it and but how few results there are.
All it took was one bored patent clerk spending idle time thinking about something that he couldn't just let go and now we have General Relativity and black holes.
I was going to make a snarky remark like “Researchers are just going to have to write on Substack”.
Then I read this: http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/interesting-opi...
I think the alt-economy that you describe may turn up soon. at least the one that I’m imagining that doesn’t involve registering for Substack.
> Our economy promotes short-term gains and not long-term initiatives; I blame over 30 years of artificially-low interest rates for this.
Don't low interest rates promote long-term thinking, perhaps to an absurd degree (e.g. the "it's okay that we hemorrhage money price dumping for 10 years as long as we develop a monopoly" playbook)? Bigger interest rate = bigger discount for present value of a future reward.
I'm guessing that they're referring to the practice of investors borrowing with low interest rates to buy large amounts of stock in a company, then milking the company of all its value for short term gains. Unless there's a significant plan in place, many companies can't really get away with long term playbooks if they are responsible to shareholders using ownership for short term gains (so they can quickly move to the next money making asset).
The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very rich monopoly.
Bell labs came about when AT&T was the monopoly telephone provider in the US.
PARC happened when Xerox had a very lucrative monopoly on copy machines.
I have come to realize that over the years, though I still believe that wealthier companies like Apple, NVIDIA, Facebook, and the like could fund curiosity-driven research, even if it’s not at the scale of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
On a smaller scale, there is The Institute for Advanced Study where curiosity-driven research is encouraged, and there is the MacArthur Fellowship where fellows are granted $150,000 annual stipends for five years for them to pursue their visions with no strings attached. Other than these, though, I’m unaware of any other institutions or grants that truly promote curiosity-driven research.
I’ve resigned myself to the situation and have thus switched careers to teaching, where at least I have 4 months of the year “off the clock” instead of the standard 3-4 weeks of PTO most companies give in America.
If Zuck's obsession with VR isn't curiosity driven research than nothing is.
10 billion yearly losses for something that by all accounts isn't close to magically becoming profitable. It honestly just seems like something he thinks is cool and therefore dumps money in.
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Maybe it's rare to do curiosity driven research.
But from the days of Bell Labs, haven't we greatly improved our ability to connect between some research concept to the idea of doing something useful, somewhere ?
And once you have that you can be connected to grants or some pre-VC funding, which might suffice, given the tools we have for conceptual development of preliminary ideas(simulation, for ex.) is far better than what they had at Bell?
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I thought I had read somewhere that 2 weeks vacation is more common in USA, at least for software companies, before things like "unlimited vacation". which is right, 3-4 or 2 weeks?
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What makes you think they don't fund it ?
This is not the mindset of monopolies, cutting research for the sake of short term profits is the mindset of Wallstreet's modern monopoly.
I agree with you that the modern corporate world seems to be allergic to anything that doesn't promise immediate profits. It takes more than a monopoly to have something like Bell Labs. To be more precise, monopolies tend to have the resources to create Bell Labs-style research labs, but it also takes another type of driving factor to create such a research lab, whether it is pleasing government regulators (I believe this is what motivated the founding of Bell Labs), staying ahead of existential threats (a major theme of 1970's-era Xerox PARC was the idea of a "paperless office," as Xerox saw the paperless office as an existential threat to their photocopier monopoly), or for purely giving back to society.
In short, Bell Labs-style institutions not only require consistent sources of funding that only monopolies can commit to, but they also require stakeholders to believe that funding such institutions is beneficial. We don't have those stakeholders today, though.
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That's my conclusion as well since now the closest we have to Bell Labs is the Google R&D where it has a virtual monopoly on Internet search and it's able to hire excellent well paid researchers [1].
[1] US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784599
Bell Labs was also funded by a massive monopoly.
>The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very rich monopoly.
A classification which includes government funding, note.
I hope that the #DeSci movement wlll help with this. ResearchHub is the closest so far in the soce to putting a financially sustainable crowdsourced research ecosystem together, but its early days.
I think Fang companies have a lot of curiosity driven research, just the output is open source software instead of physical products. AI especially.
I lament the decline also. Hopefully all of that lost energy has been put into good use on side projects.
On a tangent, but think it's related, the curiosity, exploration and research by the kids maybe stalling too.
Just a thought.