I don't think this is true for all R&D. Or even most? I often start working in a new area that I can begin with a subset of options, then need some larger very complete set of info to get complete coverage. Filling in all those tables takes a lot of time.

Having someone help do that, or ideally just do it all, vastly increases my cadence.

It does require someone who can understand and deliver clear objectives. And then wrangle lots of messy info from messy and random sources into a clear standardized form, so it's immediately usable.

Another area, is someone to put a new tool through a lot of sanity checks. This takes someone with some creativity, to come up with lots of interesting oddball toy problems, and ensure the new tools work smoothly for every crazy idea. Fast and prompt ad hoc testing can jumpstart an unusually thorough test suite (as well as catch problems very early).

I personally run out of steam a bit when it comes to testing all corner cases. When ever I run out of steam on some repetitive or exhaustive task, it is a good time for some secondary help.

I expect there are many such high time cost, repeatable, semi-regular tasks. You still need good worker fit.

As with any valuable work, we each should spend our time where our hours are most valuable. A tendency to do it all, may mask a poor ability to organize, communicate and delegate (or just a poor budget for getting help).

Can confirm; for some reason I keep getting pulled in to product development at my company because my opinion is somehow valuable. For context, the rest of these attendees are all engineers. I'm just a wrench. I don't think I've ever contributed anything aside from a head nod and a confirmation that I can build what's on the print (which always has errors anyway, so answering yes or no is irrelevant since I don't have a choice but to try and build what they tell me to). But, they still pay me, so I show up.

Source: I am a medium intelligence person.

They probably can't lead the project but they can definitely contribute.

I'm not quite sure what "intelligence" is - some people have strange personalities that make them hard to classify - but you don't need to be exceptionally good at anything to contribute to research (or R&D).

> They probably can't lead the project but they can definitely contribute.

This has been the case all throughout humanity.

For example, I imagine humanity learned a lot things from people of all different intelligences like:

"Is this snake venomous?"

"Are these mushrooms poisonous?"

"Are these animals friendly?"

etc..

I'm in R&D and am constantly reminded by other coders around me that I'm not very smart, but these smarter people are constantly doing predictable and suboptimal things in their very complicated ways and getting poor results, over and over and over.

I think I've got suckered into a clickbait substack and a circular discussion on HN to cause various people to respond each in their own silos, asserting their own worth either as self-assigned intelligent or self-assigned stupid people.

I'm a stupid person (not least for falling for that) but I get paid to think uncommon things, which turns out to be not only marketable but productive. Some of what the substack invokes is perfectly true: I get by on determination and crunch, to the point that I have to watch it (right now I'm experiencing health issues which I think trace back to the amount of crunch I can't resist doing, out of fear.)

I daresay there's usefulness in reminding people not to just pursue the 'highest intelligence' path. From where I'm standing that's a ridiculous mistake. Higher intelligence can quite easily give rise to high rationalization and rigid thinking. This is probably why some tech folks go in for self-destructive behaviors like getting wacked out on ketamine in the belief that it will increase their brain plasticity. I don't get to do that stuff with drug abuse so I have to go about it in simpler, experiential ways.

It's a 'right tool for the right job' situation. It's not broadly useful to be hyper intelligent or hyper plastic. Willingness to try and ability to care about the situation go a long, long way, and that's very much the purview of this substack post. Not a bad summary, I'd say.

IDK, working on research experiments has a lot of required effort that can be done by pretty much everyone, I'd estimate that about 80% of our total person-hours is spent on all kinds of "glorified plumbing", wrangling data, etc. And for other domains, if you get a chance, ask a biochem researcher about how much of the contribution required for some discovery involved really thoroughly cleaning glassware.