I’m a little confused about the purpose of this post, and maybe this is why it’s had a couple of downvotes and hardly any comments. It seems you’re presenting some research questions of interest to you, but in topic areas you haven’t been able to explore in much depth. I think you’ve done yourself a disservice by presenting them as a big, unrelated list without explanation or justification, and even more so by admitting these are casual interests of yours not worth much of your own time. Several topics on your list have generated interesting discussion on LW in the past, but the style of the OP doesn’t really leave room for others to engage.
I also wondered about the way you framed the post overall. If you wait until 7 years post-PhD to begin pursuing topics of your choice, you may find it extremely difficult to attain “an academic rank of some standing”, or having done so, to secure funding for a project in an area in which you have no track record. It’s also not clear from your post: do you intend to do a PhD (and subsequent research) on topics that do not interest you? This too seems potentially problematic: getting a PhD can be a major challenge even for students who have an all-consuming interest in their topic.
A more typical trajectory (at least in my experience, in cognitive psychology and allied disciplines) is to start building collaborations and doing work in areas of interest at least in the later stages of the PhD, and definitely in a first postdoctoral position. Or, traditional academia is not the only avenue to pursue interesting research: private sector research is not to be sneered at.
I’m a little confused about the purpose of this post, and maybe this is why it’s had a couple of downvotes and hardly any comments. It seems you’re presenting some research questions of interest to you, but in topic areas you haven’t been able to explore in much depth. I think you’ve done yourself a disservice by presenting them as a big, unrelated list without explanation or justification, and even more so by admitting these are casual interests of yours not worth much of your own time. Several topics on your list have generated interesting discussion on LW in the past, but the style of the OP doesn’t really leave room for others to engage.
I also wondered about the way you framed the post overall. If you wait until 7 years post-PhD to begin pursuing topics of your choice, you may find it extremely difficult to attain “an academic rank of some standing”, or having done so, to secure funding for a project in an area in which you have no track record. It’s also not clear from your post: do you intend to do a PhD (and subsequent research) on topics that do not interest you? This too seems potentially problematic: getting a PhD can be a major challenge even for students who have an all-consuming interest in their topic.
A more typical trajectory (at least in my experience, in cognitive psychology and allied disciplines) is to start building collaborations and doing work in areas of interest at least in the later stages of the PhD, and definitely in a first postdoctoral position. Or, traditional academia is not the only avenue to pursue interesting research: private sector research is not to be sneered at.