Make a point of not engaging in the standard academic research performances, and figure out how to cure cancer anyway.
I hear this a lot, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective for people who do genuinely want to improve the world in tangible ways through academic research. The direction in fields like math and physics seems to be overwhelmingly in the direction of massive collaboration, and Symbols can be effective ways of organizing collective action on a hard problem. People joke about spending hundreds of dollars going to conferences just to spend the whole time falling asleep at talks and having coffee with strangers—but everyone also has a story about the great collaboration that came out of a random hallway conversation at a conference.
That being said, there are some high-profile researchers who choose to communicate outside of papers and conferences. Chris Olah’s blog and Grant Sanderson’s YouTube channel come to mind. However, these all seem to be people for whom changing the way academics communicate is part of their core mission. For someone who just wants to do genuinely impactful research, I don’t know if I can recommend “Fuck The Symbols.”
The direction in fields like math and physics seems to be overwhelmingly in the direction of massive collaboration, and Symbols can be effective ways of organizing collective action on a hard problem.
Counterargument: both of these fields seem to have started producing actually-useful things at a much slower rate around the same time the shift toward large collaborations happened. Some people claim that the problems became harder in a way which required more people, but this does not seem more likely than theories in which the causal arrow goes the other way or is thoroughly confounded. There does seem to have been a more general cultural shift involved, and it’s not clear that the large collaborations are actually better for progress as opposed to better for publishing high-profile papers.
I hear this a lot, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective for people who do genuinely want to improve the world in tangible ways through academic research. The direction in fields like math and physics seems to be overwhelmingly in the direction of massive collaboration, and Symbols can be effective ways of organizing collective action on a hard problem. People joke about spending hundreds of dollars going to conferences just to spend the whole time falling asleep at talks and having coffee with strangers—but everyone also has a story about the great collaboration that came out of a random hallway conversation at a conference.
That being said, there are some high-profile researchers who choose to communicate outside of papers and conferences. Chris Olah’s blog and Grant Sanderson’s YouTube channel come to mind. However, these all seem to be people for whom changing the way academics communicate is part of their core mission. For someone who just wants to do genuinely impactful research, I don’t know if I can recommend “Fuck The Symbols.”
Counterargument: both of these fields seem to have started producing actually-useful things at a much slower rate around the same time the shift toward large collaborations happened. Some people claim that the problems became harder in a way which required more people, but this does not seem more likely than theories in which the causal arrow goes the other way or is thoroughly confounded. There does seem to have been a more general cultural shift involved, and it’s not clear that the large collaborations are actually better for progress as opposed to better for publishing high-profile papers.