The trick in academia is to find a low-hanging fruit other people in academia care about. And if they do not care about it yet, to do a good enough sales job to make them care.
Yes. But at a fundamental level you should start caring about it too. This may be easier than it sounds because most fields in academia have very good taste and most problems I come across have very interesting structure.
Another trade-off I’ve noticed: when do you work on a problem suited to your thinking toolkit and when do you try to figure out the basic skeletons of a problem you are not comfortable with but you would be very interested in once you understand the language and structure of the problem. I’m interested in ways in which I can build my thinking tools to be highly generalizable and broadly applicable, but at the same time powerful enough to be able to use it to attain specific useful results. Any suggestions people?
The trick in academia is to find a low-hanging fruit other people in academia care about. And if they do not care about it yet, to do a good enough sales job to make them care.
Yes. But at a fundamental level you should start caring about it too. This may be easier than it sounds because most fields in academia have very good taste and most problems I come across have very interesting structure.
Another trade-off I’ve noticed: when do you work on a problem suited to your thinking toolkit and when do you try to figure out the basic skeletons of a problem you are not comfortable with but you would be very interested in once you understand the language and structure of the problem. I’m interested in ways in which I can build my thinking tools to be highly generalizable and broadly applicable, but at the same time powerful enough to be able to use it to attain specific useful results. Any suggestions people?