As a counterpoint to the “go off into the woods” strategy, Richard Hamming said the following in “You and Your Research”, describing his experience at Bell Labs:
Thus what you consider to be good working conditions may not be good for you! There are many illustrations of this point. For example, working with one’s door closed lets you get more work done per year than if you had an open door, but I have observed repeatedly that later those with the closed doors, while working just as hard as others, seem to work on slightly the wrong problems, while those who have let their door stay open get less work done but tend to work on the right problems! I cannot prove the cause-and-effect relationship; I can only observed the correlation. I suspect the open mind leads to the open door, and the open door tends to lead to the open mind; they reinforce each other.
Bell Labs certainly produced a lot of counterfactual research, Shannon’s information theory being the prime example. I suppose Bell Labs might have been well-described as a group that could maintain its own attention, though.
Bell Labs is actually my go-to example of a much-hyped research institution whose work was mostly not counterfactual; see e.g. here. Shannon’s information theory is the only major example I know of highly counterfactual research at Bell Labs. Most of the other commonly-cited advances, like e.g. transistors or communication satellites or cell phones, were clearly not highly counterfactual when we look at the relevant history: there were other groups racing to make the transistor, and the communication satellite and cell phones were both old ideas waiting on the underlying technology to make them practical.
That said, Hamming did sit right next to Shannon during the information theory days IIRC, so his words do carry substantial weight here.
As a counterpoint to the “go off into the woods” strategy, Richard Hamming said the following in “You and Your Research”, describing his experience at Bell Labs:
Bell Labs certainly produced a lot of counterfactual research, Shannon’s information theory being the prime example. I suppose Bell Labs might have been well-described as a group that could maintain its own attention, though.
Bell Labs is actually my go-to example of a much-hyped research institution whose work was mostly not counterfactual; see e.g. here. Shannon’s information theory is the only major example I know of highly counterfactual research at Bell Labs. Most of the other commonly-cited advances, like e.g. transistors or communication satellites or cell phones, were clearly not highly counterfactual when we look at the relevant history: there were other groups racing to make the transistor, and the communication satellite and cell phones were both old ideas waiting on the underlying technology to make them practical.
That said, Hamming did sit right next to Shannon during the information theory days IIRC, so his words do carry substantial weight here.