[HN Gopher] Where Do Research Problems Come From?
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Where Do Research Problems Come From?
Author : ltratt
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-05-01 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| amelius wrote:
| > You can probably imagine my astonishment when I realised that
| in some communities there is a widely accepted list of "the next
| problems to work upon".
|
| It would be nice if there was some curated list of problems to
| work on, where the items on the list are obtained and sorted
| through some consensus mechanism. I know HN is secretly obsessed
| with To-do lists, so perhaps this "Super To-do list" is something
| someone finds interesting to build.
|
| Related question: where do startup ideas come from?
| ourmandave wrote:
| When a mommy DARPA Grant and daddy Defense Contractor love each
| other very much...
| amelius wrote:
| My rule: is your research idea likely to bring money to the table
| in 10 years or less? Don't research it! There is enough of this
| kind of research going on already.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I've worked in industry supporting UK govt research by helping to
| define research programmes. This might involve doing horizon
| scanning to identify tech that could address a customer
| requirement and then defining risk reduction tasks that would
| raise the technology readiness level (TRL). Industry could then
| bid to execute these risk reduction tasks, which would then
| involve a mix of engineers and academics as required.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| So are you are a corporate spook for QinetiQ then?
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| That's all a bunch of corporate speak that I, as a researcher,
| am unable to understand, and cannot see why that would be
| attractive to me in terms of defining my research direction.
| Qem wrote:
| Regarding "scouting mode", one time proven trick is assembling a
| large stable of grad students to do the heavy lifting and tackle
| the boring parts of research, while one spends most time
| scouting. The downside is senior researchers tend to devolve into
| managers. One inspiring thing about the likes of Feynman is it
| seems they were able to keep tackling problems and doing a lot of
| the heavy lifting themselves, even late in their careers.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| After devolving into managers, the most senior/successful
| people reach a point where they can contract-out their
| management functions and return to doing actual research
| themselves. Or they are just so great from day one that they
| tell their bosses they don't want to administer grad
| students/junior researchers.
| Qem wrote:
| Even the particularly successful/well known ones must take
| care to not fall victim of the Carl Sagan effect. See
| https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/36/7/2077.full.pdf
|
| TLDR: Some current Einsteins may be hiding, in case their
| peers think they are slacking by wasting time making their
| discoveries well know by laypeople, and becoming famous,
| instead of doing their job.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > one time proven trick is assembling a large stable of grad
| students
|
| Not likely to be able to achieve that in the UK!
| larsrc wrote:
| How is that even a problem? Ideas bubble into my head much faster
| than I have the time or ability to work on them. Granted, most of
| them are crap, but that's because most of them are outside of my
| field of expertise.
|
| As for usefulness, I seem to remember that it was the father of
| category theory who on his deathbed said, "I can die happy,
| knowing that my research will never have any practical
| applications". Now it's the basis for most type systems.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| One of the hardest parts of doing good research is figuring out
| what a good question is. "Good" here encompasses a lot of
| things, such as
|
| * is this an interesting problem to me?
|
| * is this an interesting problem for my students?
|
| * is this an interesting problem for the community?
|
| * codes my team have the skill set to solve this problem?
|
| * is this problem even within the reach of existing techniques?
|
| * if not, what are the intermediate steps required to get
| there?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Granted, most of them are crap
|
| Well lol there you go. He probably wants good ideas not crap
| ones.
| [deleted]
| gkuan wrote:
| > The final approach I've encountered is where research problems
| come from an external body.
|
| For a good helping of the government research organizations, they
| hire academics and practitioners as Program Managers (PMs) who
| gather the experts in the field to come up with research
| programs, agendas, and seedling programs. Of course, the PMs have
| to sell areas to their higher ups too, but it does have some
| degree of dynamism and alignment with academia. The amount of
| resources that could be brought to bear on a problem is
| impressive.
|
| I do wonder about this whole notion of "success" of research.
| Hundreds of years ago, wealth patrons sponsor the "researchers"
| of their times. Creative people found problems that interested
| them which sometimes led to unexpected results and new areas. I
| don't think serendipity should be discounted.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Creative people found problems that interested them which
| sometimes led to unexpected results and new areas. I don't
| think serendipity should be discounted.
|
| From my own experience as a researcher, when conferences and
| meetings are online (as they have been for most of the
| pandemic), you lose a lot of opportunities to make unexpected
| connections with new people and ideas. Serendipity helps jostle
| you out of a local optimum.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Definitely. Before Covid, I routinely returned from the major
| conferences with a notebook full of potential ideas, some of
| which I could explore, some of which I handed out like candy
| in the local environment to colleagues and students, and some
| of which become very relevant years later.
|
| The virtual conferences during the last two years were
| useless in retrospect. I saw the presentations of the papers
| I was interested in and that's it, I don't even remember
| anything specific from any of them, somehow the format was so
| routine. I'm glad that this is ending and we're having proper
| conferences again. I understand that researchers in the
| 'global south' had a different perspective with remote
| conferences being more accessible, but I've come to a
| conclusion that for me virtual conferences are a waste of
| time - I'd rather just read the published papers
| asynchronously at my convenience instead of framing it as an
| event; if you don't want a conference for some reason, make
| it a journal instead.
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