I view "independent researcher" as a probably transitional-title. If the work is good, it'll probably be better to institutionalize.
Why not start a startup? Doesn't make sense to optimize for growth.
Why not be an academic? Some big misalignments with my adjacent field (HCI).
Crowdfunding has been a surprisingly successful route for sustainable independent research. It's pretty clear that my experiences depend on lots of accumulated career capital, but I suspect other experienced tech people could crowdfund weird work like mine.
"Working with the garage door up" has been a rewarding source of weird inbounds—a great metric for work like mine! Creates an interesting challenge, though: others will most easily grasp the most familiar bits in nascent ideas, so replies may reinforce regression to the mean.
It's been quite difficult to do both good research work and good implementation work! The essay also elaborates some of the implications of this thread:
"Is it enough to just come up with the ideas, or do you have to be the one to deploy and scale them?" I've enjoyed this framing in reply: build ideas enough that they become "obvious" to others. Fun to watch my quick public notes design show up in half a dozen products this year.
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Omar's thinking about interfaces is consistently striking and unusual, in the best possible way. I'm delighted to have a chance to support a kindred weirdo independent researcher!
Interesting to see the tensions implied by a funder drive like this one. It's centered around a specific project, and focus/utility surely brings in extra donors… but that emphasizes maintenance and roadmaps ("funding a project") over open-ended research ("funding a person").
FWIW, Omar, if you had a research-centric funding thing up ("fund me to keep working on and writing about my weird ideas"), I'd be a happy sponsor! I'm not a heavy tab user, so TabFS isn't the draw for me—just the ideas. 🔮❤️
This essay catalogues techniques and mental models for writing good spaced repetition prompts—not just to remember stuff but as a method for creating understanding.
I've been working with authors to extend the mnemonic medium beyond Quantum Country, and prompt-writing has been a consistent challenge—even for experienced authors. So I wrote this guide to distill what I've learned through my own practice and my work with @michael_nielsen.
It's a mnemonic essay, exemplifying its own advice by weaving prompts about the content into the text.
But it's very different from Quantum Country. These are fuzzy heuristics, not laws of nature. How does the medium support reading non-technical material? This is an experiment.
I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu…
One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
I’ve heard the argument that maybe one can support book-writing by writing a weekly newsletter *while* writing a book. Ideally the newsletter might be exhaust from research or book-drafting sessions. I think @antonhowes is trying this! I’d love to see success stories here.
Note that this approach is the opposite of a common practice: write a blog for a few years; get popular; staple posts together into a book. I like some of those books, but they usually seemed just as good as blog posts: they don’t seem to be accessing new depths as books.
When teaching, it feels natural to center on powerful ideas or techniques. But it’s usually better to center on *questions*—ideas and techniques can follow. Ideally, they’re deep, meaningful questions with no “right” answer, an active object for experts in the discipline.
e.g. If you're studying history, details are important, but usually in service of broad, enduring questions like "when and how do individuals make a difference?"
Wiggins & McTighe call these "essential questions" in Understanding by Design, a great text on instructional design.
I love this idea but often forget it when I'm writing or giving a talk. Institutionalized education sets a bad cultural norm: a teacher's supposed to know the answers and tell them to you… not ask impossible questions! Obviously, I don't *believe* this, but it sneakily seeps in.
!! Celebration day for food nerds: new Keller cookbook!
The first French Laundry cookbook (from ’99) was a revelation to me. Cooking through it taught me more than any other resource has. I was shocked how makeable it was in a home kitchen—very few unusual supplies needed.
The follow-up, Under Pressure, included dishes from Per Se. The style was barely recognizable! The dishes now included many modernist techniques and daring flairs. Fascinating to read, but much less suitable for home cooking: the components didn’t generalize very well.
I’m so happy that this book looks like it’s landed somewhere in between. Under Pressure was explicitly centered around technique (sous vide), but this one’s not; and a decade’s passed, so the enthusiasm for whiz-bang modernism has faded a bit.
An unintuitive secret of reading books on computers: reading PDFs with original typesetting is much better than reading ebooks, which treat text like a 4chan shitposter and have impoverished reading software.
But… where to get the PDFs?! A survey & suggestions for future work:
Google Play:
👍 ~smooth workflow; clean pages
👎 PDFs lack text layer, so they're not searchable or selectable; only recent books available in PDF
archive.org:
👍 has many older books Play lacks; includes OCR'd text layer
👎 OCR errors; photo noise; clunkier workflow
Z-Library:
👍 occasionally has clean PDFs for books which others lack
👎 PDFs are often EPUB->PDF conversions (the worst!); more illegal