Best career models for doing research?

I believe that most people hoping to do independent academic research vastly underestimate both the amount of prior work done in their field of interest, and the advantages of working with other very smart and knowledgeable people. Note that it isn't just about working with other people, but with other very smart people. That is, there is a difference between "working at a university / research institute" and "working at a top university / research institute". (For instance, if you want to do AI research in the U.S., you probably want to be at MIT, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, CalTech, or UC Berkeley. I don't know about other countries.)

Unfortunately, my general impression is that most people on LessWrong are mostly unaware of the progress made in statistical machine learning (presumably the brand of AI that most LWers care about) and cognitive science in the last 20 years (I mention these two fields because I assume they are the most popular on LW, and also because I know the most about them). And I'm not talking about impressive-looking results that dodge around the real issues, I'm talking about fundamental progress towards resolving the key problems in artificial intelligence. Anyone planning to do AI research should probably at least understand these first, and what the remaining obstacles are.

You aren't going to understand this without doing a lot of reading, and by the time you've done that reading, you'll probably have identified a research group whose work clearly reflects your personal research goals. At this point it seems like the obvious next step is to apply to work with that group as a graduate student / post doc. This circumvents the problem of having to work on research you aren't interested in. As for other annoyances, while teaching can potentially be a time-sink, the rest of "wasted" time seems to be about publishing your work; I really find it hard to justify not publishing your work, since (a) other people need to know about it, and (b) writing up your results formally oftentimes leads to a noticeably deeper understanding than otherwise. Of course, you can waste time trying to make your results look better than they are, but this certainly isn't a requirement and has obvious ethical issues.

EDIT: There is the eventual problem that senior professors spend more and more of their time on administrative work / providing guidance to their lab, rather than doing research themselves. But this isn't going to be an issue until you get tenure, which is, if you do a post-doc, something like 10-15 years out from starting graduate school.

After several years as a post-doc I am facing a similar choice.

If I understand correctly you have no research experience so far. I'd strongly suggest completing a doctorate because:

• you can use that time to network and establish a publication record
• most advisors will allow you as much freedom as you can handle, particularly if you can obtain a scholarship so you are not sucking their grant money. Choose your advisor carefully.
• you may well get financial support that allows you to work full time on your research for at least 4 years with minimal accountability
• if you want, you can practice teaching and grant applications to taste how onerous they would really be
• once you have a doctorate and some publications, it probably won't be hard to persuade a professor to offer you an honorary (unpaid) position which gives you an institutional affiliation, library access, and maybe even a desk. Then you can go ahead with freelancing, without most of the disadvantages you cite.

You may also be able to continue as a post-doc with almost the same freedom. I have done this for 5 years. It cannot last forever, though, and the longer you go on, the more people will expect you to devote yourself to grant applications, teaching and management. That is why I'm quitting.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a future Less Wrong post about the overwhelming desirability of casually working in Australia for 1-2 years vs "whatever you were planning on doing instead". It's designed for intelligent people who want to earn more money, have more free time, and have a better life than they would realistically be able to get in the US or any other 1st world nation without a six-figure, part-time career... something which doesn't exist. My world saving article was actually just a prelim for this.

Whats frustrating is I would have had no idea it was deleted- and just assumed it wasn't interesting to anyone, had I not checked after reading the above. I'd much rather be told to delete the relevant portions of the comment- lets at least have precise censorship!

Wow. Even the people being censored don't know it. That's kinda creepy!

his comment led me to discover that quite a long comment I made a little bit ago had been deleted entirely.

How did you work out that it had been deleted? Just by logging out, looking and trying to remember where you had stuff posted?

Consider taking a job as a database/web developer at a university department. This gets you around journal paywalls, and is a low-stress job (assuming you have or can obtain above-average coding skills) that leaves you plenty of time to do your research. (My wife has such a job.) I'm not familiar with freelance journalism at all, but I'd still guess that going the software development route is lower risk.

Some comments on your list of advantages/disadvantages:

• Harder to network effectively. - I guess this depends on what kind of research you want to do. For the areas I've been interested in, networking does not seem to matter much (unless you count participating in online forums as networking :).
• Journals might be biased against freelance researchers. - I publish my results online, informally, and somehow they've usually found an interested audience. Also, the journals I'm familiar with require anonymous submissions. Is this not universal?
• Harder to combat akrasia. - Actually, might be easier.

A couple other advantages of the non-traditional path:

• If you get bored you can switch topics easily.
• I think it's crazy to base one's income on making research progress. How do you stay objective when you depend on your ideas being accepted as correct for food and shelter? Also, you'd be forced to pick research goals that have high probability of success (so you can publish and keep your job) instead of high expected benefit for humanity (or for your intellectual interests).

Well I guess this is our true point of disagreement. I went to the effort of finding out a lot, went to SIAI and Oxford to learn even more, and in the end I am left seriously disappointed by all this knowedge. In the end it all boils down to:

"most people are irrational, hypocritical and selfish, if you try and tell them they shoot the messenger, and if you try and do anything you bear all the costs, internalize only tiny fractions of the value created if you succeed, and you almost certainly fail to have an effect anyway. And by the way the future is an impending train wreck"

I feel quite strongly that this knowledge is not a worthy thing to have sunk 5 years of my life into getting. I don't know, XiXiDu, you might prize such knowledge, including all the specifics of how that works out exactly.

If you really strongly value the specifics of this, then yes you probably would on net benefit from the censored knowledge, the knowledge that was never censored because I never posted it, and the knowledge that I never posted because I was never trusted with it anyway. But you still probably won't get it, because those who hold it correctly infer that the expected value of releasing it is strongly negative from an altruist's perspective.

The largest disadvantage to not having, essentially, an apprenticeship is the stuff you don't learn.

Now, if you want to research something where all you need is a keen wit, and there's not a ton of knowledge for you to pick up before you start... sure, go ahead. But those topics are few and far between. (EDIT: oh, LW-ish stuff. Meh. Sure, then, I guess. I thought you meant researching something hard >:DDDDD

No, but really, if smart people have been doing research there for 50 years and we don't have AI, that means that "seems easy to make progress" is a dirty lie. It may mean that other people haven't learned much to teach you, though - you should put some actual effort (get responses from at least two experts) finding out of this is the case)

Usually, an apprenticeship will teach you:

• What needs to be done in your field.

• How to write, publicize and present your work. The communication protocols of the community. How to access the knowledge of the community.

• How to use all the necessary equipment, including the equipment that builds other equipment.

• How to be properly rigorous - a hard one in most fields, you have to make it instinctual rather than just known.

• The subtle tricks an experienced researcher uses to actually do research - all sorts of things you might not have noticed on your own.

• And more!

Another idea is the "Bostrom Solution", i.e. be so brilliant that you can find a rich guy to just pay for you to have your own institute at Oxford University.

Then there's the "Reverse Bostrom Solution": realize that you aren't Bostrom-level brilliant, but that you could accrue enough money to pay for an institute for somebody else who is even smarter and would work on what you would have worked on. (FHI costs $400k/year, which isn't such a huge amount as to be unattainable by Kaj or a few Kaj-like entities collaborating)

Most people wouldn't dispute the first half of your comment. What they might take issue with is this:

Yes, that means we have to trust Eliezer.

The problem is that we have to defer to Eliezer's (and, by extension, SIAI's) judgment on such issues. Many of the commenters here think that this is not only bad PR for them, but also a questionable policy for a "community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality."

An important academic option: get tenure at a less reputable school. In the States at least there are tons of universities that don't really have huge research responsibilities (so you won't need to worry about pushing out worthless papers, preparing for conferences, peer reviewing, etc), and also don't have huge teaching loads. Once you get tenure you can cruise while focusing on research you think matters.

The down side is that you won't be able to network quite as effectively as if you were at a more prestigious university and the pay isn't quite as good.

I pointed out to Roko by PM that his comment couldn't be doing his cause any favors, but did not ask him to delete it, and would have discouraged him from doing so.

But for the most part the system seems to be set up so that you first spend a long time working for someone else and research their ideas, after which you can lead your own group, but then most of your time will be spent on applying for grants and other administrative trivia rather than actually researching the interesting stuff. Also, in Finland at least, all professors need to also spend time doing teaching, so that's another time sink.

This depends on the field, university, and maybe country. In many cases, doing your own research is the main focus from graduate school on. At research universities in the US, at least, doing research is a professor's main job - although they do also have to do some teaching, apply for grants, and so on, professors are primarily judged by their publication record. In graduate school, many students get to work on their own research projects. A common model is: a professor who has some areas of interest & expertise gets graduate students who are interested in doing research in those areas. At first the students might work primarily on the professor's projects, especially if they don't have research ideas of their own yet, but during their time at grad school a student is expected to develop their own research ideas (within the same general area) and do their own projects, with guidance from the professor so that they can learn to do it well.

I think the academic route should work pretty well if you're interested in topics that are an established part of an academic field. If you're interested in an unusual topic that is not so well established, then you need to look and see if you'll be able to make academia work. Will you be able to get articles about that topic published in academic journals? Can you find a grad school, and then a university job, where they will support & encourage your research on that topic?

If you can find any published articles related to the topic then that's a starting point. Then I'd make a list of every researcher in the field who is interested in the topic, starting with the authors of published articles. Then look into all the grad students who have worked with those researchers, follow citation paths, and so on. You can get a decent sense of what academia might be like for you based on publicly available info (those researchers' websites, their lists of publications, and so on), and then you can contact them for more info. If you do go to grad school, you might go to one of their universities, or to a university that they recommended.

I would choose that knowledge if there was the chance that it wouldn't find out about it. As far as I understand your knowledge of the dangerous truth, it just increases the likelihood of suffering, it doesn't make it guaranteed.

I don't understand your reasoning here -- bad events don't get a "flawless victory" badness bonus for being guaranteed. A 100% chance of something bad isn't much worse than a 90% chance.

One big disadvantage is that you won't be interacting with other researchers from whom you can learn.

Research seems to be an insiders' game. You only ever really see the current state of research in informal settings like seminars and lab visits. Conference papers and journal articles tend to give strange, skewed, out-of-context projections of what's really going on, and books summarise important findings long after the fact.

The compelling argument for me is that knowing about bad things is useful to the extent that you can do something about them, and it turns out that people who don't know anything (call them "non-cogniscenti") will probably free-ride their way to any benefits of action on the collective-action-problem that is the at issue here, whilst avoiding drawing any particular attention to themselves ==> avoiding the risks.

Vladimir Nesov doubts this prima facie, i.e. he asks "how do you know that the strategy of being a completely inert player is best?".

-- to which I answer, "if you want to be the first monkey shot into space, then good luck" ;D

Being in a similar position (also as far as aversion to moving to e.g. US is concerned), I decided to work part time (roughly 1/5 of the time of even less) in software industry and spend the remainder of the day studying relevant literature, leveling up etc. for working on the FAI problem. Since I'm not quite out of the university system yet, I'm also trying to build some connections with our AI lab staff and a few other interested people in the academia, but with no intention to actually join their show. It would eat away almost all my time, so I could work on some AI-ish bio-informatics software or something similarly irrelevant FAI-wise.

There are of course some benefits in joining the academia, as you mentioned, but it seems to me that you can reap quite a bit of them by just befriending an assistant professor or two.

Kaj, why don't you add the option of getting rich in your 20s by working in finance, then paying your way into research groups in your late 30s? PalmPilot guy, uh Jeff Hawkins essentially did this. Except he was an entrepreneur.

This thread raises the question about how many biologists and medical researchers are on here. Due to our specific cluster I expect a strong learning towards the IT people. So AI research gets over proportional recognition, while medical research including direct life extension falls on the wayside.

Speaking as someone who is in grad school now, even with prior research, the formal track of grad school is very helpful. I am doing research that I'm interested in. I don' t know if I'm a representative sample in that regard. It may be that people have more flexibility in math than in other areas. Certainly my anecdotal impression is that people in some areas such as biology don't have this degree of freedom. I'm also learning more about how to research and how to present my results. Those seem to be the largest advantages. Incidentally, my impression is that for grad school at least in many areas, taking a semester or two off if very stressed isn't treated that badly if one is otherwise doing productive research.

The above deleted comment referenced some details of the banned post. With those details removed, it said:

(Note, this comment reacts to this thread generally, and other discussion of the banning)

The essential problem is that with the (spectacular) deletion of the Forbidden Post, LessWrong turned into the sort of place where posts get disappeared.

I realize that you are describing how people generally react to this sort of thing, but this knee jerk stupid reaction is one of the misapplied heurestics we ought to be able notice and overcome.

So far, one post has been forbidden (not counting spam).

It was not forbidden because it criticized SIAI, other posts have criticized SIAI and were not banned.

It was not forbidden because it discussed torture, other posts have discussed torture and were not banned.

It was not forbidden for being inflammatory, other posts have been inflammatory and where not banned.

It was forbidden for being a Langford Basilisk.

(I would have liked to reply to the deleted comment, but you can't reply to deleted comments so I'll reply to the repost.)

• EDIT: Roko reveals that he was actually never asked to delete his comment! Disregard parts of the rest of this comment accordingly.

I don't think Roko should have been requested to delete his comment. I don't think Roko should have conceded to deleting his comment.

The correct reaction when someone posts something scandalous like

I was once criticized by a senior singinst member for not being prepared to be tortured or raped for the cause

is not to attempt to erase it, even if that was possible, but to reveal the context. The context, supposedly, would make it seem less scandalous - for example, maybe it was a private dicussion about philosophical hypotheticals. If it wouldn't, that's a bad sign about SIAI.

The fact that that erasure was the reaction suggests that there is no redeeming context!

That someone asked Roko to erase his comment isn't a very bad sign, since it's enough that one person didn't understand the reasoning above for that to happen. That fact that Roko conceded is a bad sign, though.

Now SIAI should save face not by asking a moderator to delete wfg's reposts, but by revealing the redeeming context in which the scandalous remarks that Roko alluded to were made.

Depending on what you're planning to research, lack of access to university facilities could also be a major obstacle. If you have a reputation for credible research, you might be able to collaborate with people within the university system, but I suspect that making the original break in would be pretty difficult.

For those curious: we do agree, but he went to quite a bit more effort in showing that than I did (and is similarly more convincing).

No, the rationale for deletion was not based on the possibility that his exact, FAI-based scenario could actually happen.

No, I think you're nitpicking to dodge the question, and looking for a more convenient world.

I think at this point it's clear that you really can't be expected to give a straight answer. Well done, you win!

While it's not geared specifically towards individuals trying to do research, the (Virtual) Employment Open Thread has relevant advice for making money with little work.

If you had a paper that was good enough to get published if you were a professor then the SIAI could probably find a professor to co-author with you.

Google Scholar has greatly reduced the benefit of having access to a college library.

What (dis)advantages does this have compared to the traditional model?

I think this thread perfectly illustrates one disadvantage of doing research in an unstructured environment. It is so easy to become distracted from the original question by irrelevant, but bright and shiny distractions. Having a good academic adviser cracking the whip helps to keep you on track.

855 comments so far, with no sign of slowing down!

you have to be very clever to come up with a truly dangerous thought -- and if you do, and still decide to share it, he'll delete your comments

This is a good summary.

Of course, what he actually did was not delete the thread

Eh what? He did and that's what the whole scandal was about. If you mean that he did not succesfully delete the thread from the whole internet, then yes.

Also see my other comment.

Yeah, I thought about that as well. Trying to suppress it made it much more popular and gave it a lot of credibility. If they decided to act in such a way deliberately, that be fascinating. But that sounds like one crazy conspiracy theory to me.

See, that doesn't make sense to me. It sounds more like an initiation rite or something... not a thought experiment about quantum billionaires...

I can't picture EY picking up the phone and saying "delete that comment! wouldn't you willingly be tortured to decrease existential risk?"

... but maybe that's a fact about my imagination, and not about the world :p

I am doing something similar, except working as a freelance software developer. My mental model is that in both the traditional academic path and the freelance path, you are effectively spending a lot of your time working for money. In academia, the "dirty work" is stuff like teaching, making PowerPoint presentations (ugh), keeping your supervisor happy, jumping through random formatting hoops to get papers published, and then going to conferences to present the papers. For me, the decisive factor is that software development is actually quite fun, while academic money work is brain-numbing.

How hard is it to live off the dole in Finland? Also, non-academic research positions in think tanks and the like (including, of course, SIAI).