Depending upon the field, you can do research, publish, go to conferences, have a network of peers, without being standard faculty. I know research professors who have very few of the standard faculty obligations, for example. I also know people who do research entirely on private funding, but this almost always requires significantly more than just savings from retiring early, and they still stay part of the academic community.
I agree that it is not something that should be advertised as an option, because it is very rare, but it does exist.
There are many examples. Charles Darwin is the most famous. In my field (fluid dynamics) Robert Kraichnan is also well known and influential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist
Of course, plenty of cranks go this route too. It's an option, not a panacea.
> You'd be limited to a very tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment.
Not a problem for me as a theorist. And I believe that expensive equipment is overused in my field anyway.
I also disagree that this is a "tiny sliver" of the research. Computation and theory is roughly half the research in my field, and I suspect this is true for many fields.
If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it.
> You'd be doing research without the support network of peers in a department, or colleagues at a conference to talk to.
I disagree. Collaboration does not require "official" status, and neither does attending a conference. In my field, no one cares what your affiliation is. At worst I could start a consulting company, which I'd probably do anyway. Plenty of consultants attend conferences in my field and collaborate with researchers in government, industry, and academia.
No need to get overly defensive. I'm responding to your argument that this should be more widely known and accepted. Science gets harder to do every year as the the lowest hanging fruit keeps getting plucked. Your examples aren't convincing -- Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and things were different back then. Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities.
But hey, if you end up doing this successfully. Come back and tell us how it went. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue disagreeing with you, that this is a reasonable route to productively conduct research.
I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested.
> Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities.
Kraichnan was an independent researcher from 1962 to 2003, the majority of his career. Yes, he was affiliated with a university at multiple points of his career, but he spent 4 decades as an independent researcher and produced some of his most important work during that time.
I'd be interested, if possible.
Traditional academics have the "publish or perish" incentive. In practice this means that they prioritize "quick wins" over "slow wins", e.g., given a choice between publishing 1 paper after 1 year (quick win) or publishing 5 papers after 5 years (with no publications before then) (slow win), they'll choose 1 paper after 1 year. If an academic goes too long without a publication, that will be counted against them. The low hanging fruit for quick wins has been taken due to this incentive, but I see no shortage of slow wins. (The scenario I describe is an extreme case, but the same incentive still exists in less extreme cases.)
There's also the problem that what can get funded is not necessarily what's most important. Norbert Wiener discusses this at length in his 1950s book "Invention". Wiener notes that despite the obvious political differences between the USSR and US, research funding is allocated similarly: by people too far removed from the actual research, who are often not in a good position to evaluate its merit. It doesn't matter if these people are managers, bureaucrats, or fellow scientists. There's generally an asymmetry in information between the scientists requesting funding and those able to provide. (Having more time to learn about each proposal could help, but the trend I imagine is that time available to review each proposal has decreased over the years.) This ignores the lottery like nature of the entire funding process.
To get more specific, both of these problems are would disincentivize a traditional academic from publishing this paper I recently submitted to a conference:
In principle, a traditional academic could have written this paper. It's possible, but I think less likely because of "publish or perish" incentives. (To be clear, I am a PhD student right now, and most of the time I was doing the research in the paper I was a TA. I don't have the "publish or perish" incentives that make this research less likely. If I stayed in academia longer I would.)
My advisor and I tried to get funding for this project, but our grant proposal (I wrote the vast majority of it) was rejected for reasons beyond our control (which I have no problem with). We received positive comments on the proposal, and it served as a draft my PhD proposal.
Without going into detail, the paper develops a simple mathematical model of a certain physical process. The theory and its validation would not have been possible unless I did two things that traditional academics seem to think are a waste of time:
1. Very comprehensive literature review.
2. Very comprehensive data compilation.
Now, I think most people would believe these two are just what academics do. But apparently not. Traditional academics are incentivized to do the bare minimum to get another publication. There's an epidemic of copying of citations and merely paraphrasing review sections of papers without reading the original papers, and I think this is caused partly because of these incentives.
The literature review I did (not all of which made it into the short conference paper) was considerably more comprehensive than any I've seen published in the field before, and I was able to synthesize past theories and improve upon them by recognizing some of their flaws.
How do I know I was more comprehensive? One way is by the excellent papers I found which few seem to be aware of. In the paper I mention, papers 3 through 8 have very few citations. Some of them have not been cited at all in the past 40 years to the best of my knowledge. Someone could say that these papers are just unimportant, but they're not. In my view they're "sleeping beauties":
https://www.nature.com/news/sleeping-beauty-papers-slumber-f...
Further, I spent a year or two alone digging deeper and deeper into the literature in this problem. There were several times when I thought I probably had at least touched everything, but a few weeks later I found yet another area that I had missed. Being comprehensive is difficult and time consuming. If you just want the minimum to publish, you won't bother.
I also benefited from certain heuristics which allowed me to identify important neglected research. For example, I spent a lot of time tracking down foreign language papers and books because I recognized that this research was avoided because it was written in a different language, not because it was bad. The entry costs to foreign language literature have dropped greatly over the past decade with options like Google Translate. I've translated around 10 full papers into English right now, and produced many more partial translations. These papers have provided critical insights that were necessary towards writing this paper. At this point some people I know use the fact that I like reading foreign language papers as a joke. Traditional academics think this is absurd, but I see that there's value, just that it takes time to be realized.
It was through my comprehensive literature review that I got the idea behind my data compilation. By taking advantage of the properties of a special case, I was able to get information that most researchers in this field seem to believe is extremely difficult and expensive to obtain. I did not come up with the idea myself. I was translating a 1960s Russian language paper into English when I realized based on what was written in one paragraph that I could use the properties of a special case to get some hard to obtain information. The author was actually leading into this. The next paragraph explicitly said the author was taking advantage of the properties of a special case. So it wasn't very original on my part. The 1960s Russian researcher didn't have a lot of data to use, but there's a lot now 50 years later.
So I started compiling data. I get the impression that few academics would have compiled even half as much as I did, or have been even half as careful as I have about it. I was very careful to select only the least ambiguous data sources. Out of over 100 candidate data sources, there were only around 20 which were acceptable. I then took the time to carefully transcribe all of the relevant data from these sources, and develop a computational framework to handle this data (based on Python and Pandas). It was probably at least 6 months of work, but I can produce several papers based on it, so it's worthwhile in my view. My advisor was not initially enthusiastic about compiling this data, by the way. He's a successful traditional academic, however, and his intuitions are calibrated differently than mine are.
I clicked on that link and I noticed that Darwin and Kraichnan both had institutional affiliations.
Maybe possible if you're paying your own way. Lots of newly-minted professors need those small grants to get their research going. Find one who can see you as a colleague and not as an ATM.
Like anyone who presents at tech conferences.
You're on Hacker News for Knuth's sake. The entire premise baked into the word hacker is that enterprising smart people can change the world with just a little determination and hustle.
Even the hackers out there not making the next breakthrough technology but emulating and testing some arcane ICS, it's crazy to warn people away from that as risky and possibly not useful.
Every career is possibly not groundbreaking, every path has that risk. People should be realistic, sure, but if someone wants to support themselves while they do interesting research, I have no objections to that.
Do what you love, this isn't someone whose hopes and dreams are contingent on starring in the next Hollywood blockbuster, it's someone who wants to geek out on their own dime. Great! Amazing! Tell HN how it goes and most of us will love it, world changing or even just something fascinating to you, we have your back.
I think the opportunities in tech are promising towards this end, and would be interested in getting in contact with other people with similar plans.
I'm on the "build skills, save money" - phase currently, and probably will be for > 5 years to come. So that is my main focus right now.
I think some platforms come close. There are places to ask questions (e.g. StackExchange) but they don't seem to like "what if" questions and if the idea is good there's no good way to follow up over months or years. Github works for some fields where the idea is tightly coupled with the implementation (e.g. some computer systems fields) but not for others.
I guess I would just like a place to discuss ideas. In academia it's common to discuss nascent ideas within your lab, but larger collaboration happens at things like conferences where you're presenting only the ideas that worked out. I think such a platform could make independent research like you're describing much more effective and attractive.
That said, you have a great insight here with the idea that some places on the web could replace (or at least supplement) the traditional advisor/advisee relationship with a more peer-to-peer approach -- especially for independent researchers.
That issue of how to follow up over months or years seems key as a difference from more casual one-off interactions. Well-run mailing lists or forums may provide some of that continuity -- but maybe there is a social or technical way to go further in that direction?
I'm not sure if there ever would be just one place to discuss ideas, but you might want to bring up this general idea of some new platform with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens
P.S. 42, with ADHD. Started University at 15, started high school at 11. Great at getting jobs. Not so great at keeping them. :P
From a diversification standpoint I think this should only be one source of one's funding. The bulk of my planned funding is going to come from savings from a job. I have the most control over that, and it's a much larger source. I've also considered working as a lecturer from time to time as engineering lecturers seem to be reasonably well paid (at my university, ~$10K per class). Might as well take advantage of the rise of adjuncts. You can travel to different universities regularly for collaboration this way too. Some more permanent lecturer positions are fairly decently paid from what I understand and may be a decent way to save money while also having opportunities for research. The research is the goal, not the title of "independent researcher".
Also, having to solicit funding regularly is something I'd rather not do. It takes away time from research, and I'd like to focus on research which is not so easily funded. To go back to the "low hanging fruit" point mentioned elsewhere in this comment tree, I think there are many research topics which don't sound good to a third party but are actually good. It can be hard to convince people of this. The easiest way to move forward on these research topics is to risk your own money. And with the most easily funded ideas taking priority, I can see many examples of "low hanging fruit" in my own field.
The Patreon model could get around the "research not sounding good enough to fund" problem. Pay an individual to do work in general, not specific work. But aside from someone working on topics of popular interest (e.g., gwern), I don't think this would work.
It's too bad there isn't more of an independent academic community, but it sure beats pressure to publish and writing grant applications.
Then look up some of the references and referencees or stuff from the same author. Keep doing this one tactic and you'll easily find years worth of reading to do.
Besides finding the abstracts you'll need access to the research. This used to be an issue but luckily now we have sci-hub.tw and paperdownloader.cf
Mostly you do reaearch by being interested in something. If you need someone to tell you what to be interested in, a PhD may not be for you.
A good supervisor will tell you to be interested in things you may not have considered. But empirically, most supervisors will steer you in the direction of their own interests.
These may or may not match your own interests. The mismatch us at least as likely to be a bad thing as a good one.
In my own experience, I decided to work independently instead of starting a PhD. There are only a couple of directly relevant journals, and I literally skimmed every issue, reading and taking notes on the papers that counted as prior art.
Those papers often quoted other papers outside the immediate domain, so I followed them up - and that’s how you start.
I have a pretty good idea of the directions I’d be steered in if I was being supervised, and near certainty that those are not the directions I want to explore.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting but this comment seems a bit condescending.
The thing is, it's not really research unless it's something new, and you can't know if something is new unless you know what already exists.
> All disciplines have journals, and many are either public access or available on sci-hub. If all else fails you can get a limited JSTOR subscription for only a moderately outrageous sum.
Sure you can have access to journals but how do you even know what you should search for? I suppose this is sufficient if what you want to do research in is something that is currently mainstream?
I "research" stuff all the time, do a google search for some term and find an interesting paper then go through the references that seem interesting. Works better than you'd imagine, I was looking up CESK machines and down through the rabbit hole I eventually found the original paper with the non-obvious name of The Calculi of λ-v-CS Conversion: A Syntactic Theory of Control and State in Imperative Higher-Order Programming Languages. Honestly, those math-heavy CS papers tend to make my head hurt though.
Don't think there's a whole lot of people who would claim lambda calculus is mainstream but I can spend hours upon hours finding stuff to read about and most of (or all) the papers are easily downloaded off the author's website.
Which is more or less my plan. Some details here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610362
> My plan right now is to save money, retire early, and then do whatever research I want that fits my budget. This avoids many of the problems with the current system, but is not possible for many.
> This would allow me to pursue more risky research (in the sense that the research may fail to produce useful results) than an assistant professor trying to get tenure could. I also wouldn't have to raise funds, so I could focus on projects I believe are important, not just what can get funded.
I wish this option was more known and accepted. Some people seem to think I'm insane to intentionally pursue this, but as far as I can tell they don't see that the ship they are on (academia/government research/etc.) is sinking. It would be nice to talk with other independent researchers of this variety, exchange best practices, etc.