1/ 20, I am pleased to officially announce the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, along with a draft of the pilot study that led to it, The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols (TUSoP), which I've been working on with a bunch of collaborators for the last 3 months. 2/ The program will be primarily virtual, and run for 18 weeks from May-August. It will fund a set of full-time Core Researchers and part-time Affiliate Researchers (primarily in the second half) to think broadly and creatively about protocols. summerofprotocols.com

The larger the pile of money the dumber it is

If you have only $10 it is probably really smart money because you’re going to think hard and object level about spending it

If you have $10B, it’s being deployed mostly in > $250m chunks via org charts with 7 levels of bs theories The largest object level thing you might ever buy even as a billionaire is probably like a car. Anything bigger, you’re actually buying a theory of ownership with multiple levels of abstraction each with assumptions.

Over the last 3 years with the @yak_collective I’ve really come to appreciate the power of committing a small amount of weekly time over a long period. If you have 10 hours to spare for me, I’ll pretty much always pick an hour a week for 10 weeks over 10 hours in 1 day . Lifestyles tend to be stable for 3-5y at a time. If you commit 1 hour/wk indefinitely, that’s implicitly 150-250 hours if it sticks. Equal to 4-6 weeks of full-time, but that’s harder to use 🤔

An hour is optimal. Can’t do much with 15-30min, but >1h calls for too much org/prep.

I've been noodling on an idea for a while that I've been reluctant to do a thread on for... reasons that will become obvious, but let's yolo it. I call the idea "charismatic epistemologies." Aka... how successful people explain the world, and how those explanations fail. I've been reluctant to do this thread because it runs the risk of specific successful people I know thinking I'm subtweeting them, which is ironic, because a big feature of charismatic epistemology is believing things are about you when they are not.

Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it.

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195789557465153536

On one extreme you can think UBI, which is roughly ~ early grad student level $.

On the other extreme, you could think of early career faculty grants.

An NSF CAREER grant is 100k/year for 5 yrs, and in 2018, about 150 million was disbursed or about 300.

I was briefly calling myself an independent researcher: somebody who self-funds spec R&D on their own ideas. In theory it’s something like indie-research : academic research :: blogging/self-publishing : traditional publishing.

But the idea doesn’t really work. Unlike the market for general interest writing, the market for R&D is almost entirely institutional, and they don’t really “buy” indie R&D. It’s 99.9% crackpot inventors, 0.1% black swan stuff.

99% of the questions people ask in their 20s and early 30s are roughly the same seemingly “important” ones everybody has always asked at those ages. And 99% come up with roughly the same answers ranging from pretty dumb to reasonably smart regardless of effort. The 1% different answers people come up with might make them somewhat more famous/rich, but are rarely different enough to change much beyond their own lives. The age-old questions are age old because the answers are in our collective diminishing marginal returns zone.