“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it."
-- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)
The quote is part of a speech given by J.J. Thomson in 1916. The speech is partially reproduced (including your part) in the book "The life of Sir J.J. Thomson, O. M. : sometime master of Trinity College Cambridge" by Lord Rayleigh (1942). The original book is on the Internet Archive [1]. The speech is given at pages 198-200 and your quote appears approximately halfway in the quoted part of the speech [see 2].
Completely agree about JJ Thomson. Just happy to hear it was he who said it and not a that it was a quote by someone else falsely attributed to JJ Thomson because he is famous.
Taken to an extreme, this is UBI, and I think we would all benefit to some degree from a system like that if we could get from here to there. On the other hand, I imagine there's quite a bit of research that requires expensive tests and/or apparatus to get right, and I'm not sure how you feasibly come to a situation where you have a bunch of hobby physicists on staff and provide them with a particle accelerator, but just for funsies.
I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.
There are plenty of people passionate about perpetual motion and chemtrails. Until we get to a point where resources are effectively infinite, we still need some form of prioritizing research funding.
Even then, playing kerbal space program does not make you a rocket scientist. It requires a certain dedication to master various physics and mathematics disciplines to contribute to even a part of one, which is itself a significant investment that you won't find possible with UBI alone; there will still need to be some form of dedicated funding through either specific government programs or commercial enterprise.
Salary also has a bit of a sticky effect; people change fields less than jobs, and spend more time in jobs than in funsies hobbies. A rocket designed by a committee of hobbyists will likely perform much like any other design-by-committee process or product.
Well, taken to another extreme, it's Philip Glass working as a plumber and taxi driver (as he did) between compositions.
ROBERT Hughes, the Australian art critic, filmmaker and writer, wandered into the kitchen of his fashionable loft home in New York’s SoHo to see how the plumber was going, setting up his new dishwasher.
On his knees grappling with the machine, the plumber heard a noise and looked up.
Hughes gasped: “My god, you’re Philip Glass. I can’t believe it. What are you doing here?”
Glass, one of the world’s most famous composers, said afterwards: “It was obvious that I was installing his new dishwasher, and I told him I would soon be finished.”
“But you are an artist,” Hughes protested.
Glass said: “I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well, and that he should go away and let me finish.”
There have been suggestions that doing science funding via lottery (with some caveats) would be more effective and more efficient than our current grant proposal based system.
There should first be a good base of teaching assistant funding with enough free time to do research work. A lottery for extra PhD grants would indeed work well on top of this. Often the key is simply top-k grades now for those grants.
> The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.
heh, am involved currently in exactly the process of
constructing such an environment. And we are doing exactly that: there is a high value deliverable that is relatively easy and predictable to achieve (but requires such specialised knowledge that it cannot be attained any other way than through very rare and highly skilled people), and then to attract actual good people, the people themselves are free to take the rest of their job / time and apply it to solving whatever they see as the most valuable contribution they can make on any time scale that is relevant.
On the one hand you can look at it as an embarrassing political fig-leaf, on the other, you can actually see it as optimal. I acutally don't think completely detaching people from obligations to reality often works out to be ultimately optimal anyway. You need something to calibrate what you are doing against.
As someone who's currently trying to carry their company into data science (I know, we're late to the party, but homebuilding usually is), this is something that keeps me up at night. I've been hammering the idea into my superiors that if we're going to effectively administer a scientific process, we have to not only change how we manage expectations, but really, throw them out entirely. We have to see the general pursuit of knowledge as it's own ROI, because odds are that tangible value won't come from a data science team for a long time.
But having seen how poorly we adopted agile, I'm skeptical this will happen (we devolved to "waterfall w/sprints" due to not properly managing expectations with our users). If we can't get people to move away from hard deadlines for regular releases, how are we going to make them wait for a properly verified hypothesis?
One solution I've seen is organizationally "hiding" science teams from users, and only allowing a select few drive the direction of the team. But it still comes down to that select few properly managing everyone else's expectations.
Why is homebuilding company is the right place for basic research? That's an interesting choice to join the echelon of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, and Google X.
What do you mean by 'basic research' and why would any of the organizations that you mention be incentivized to solve the problems that plague the homebuilding industry?
OP wrote that their mission was "the general pursuit of knowledge", not "solve the problems that plague the homebuilding industry", and that was a source of tension with their management.
This doesn't work for funding things besides the person's salary. If I want to buy a fancy new microscope or build a collider or even just buy materials, and I don't want to pay for it myself, I'm gonna need funding above and beyond "leisure." The LHC and ISS aren't leisure projects. Even equipment with a less insane scale is super expensive.
I’ve come full circle on this topic through grad school and dissertation and working in product companies.
I think “fundamental research” is not a thing, except possibly in mathematical theory. There is only incremental research + good salesmanship.
Research results should show up at a predictable regular pace, or else the result of that effort should be better & deeper explanation of a negative result which is also valuable.
If you’re sinking 2 years of R&D costs on something and you’re not getting the positive result you wanted and the negative results are not incrementally adding up to a clearer and clearer diff between the state you’re in and the state you’re trying to get to, then it is wasted money and the researcher isn’t being effective in their job.
I really think even difficult research tasks need to be rescoped and broken up into a series of incremental challenges, each of which has a known way to address it. You must treat it with reductionist dogma and eventually you’ll keep breaking it down into constituent parts that have known solutions until you hit on the novel problems to solve and it will be at a level of scope small enough that you can infer the solution from existing methods.
That’s all there is in the world. There’s no miracle cure for cancer or climate change or aging or social inequality. Let alone random business problems. There’s just a big bunch of little tiny problems with boring solutions that get all glued together into bigger messes that are hard to figure out. You can try smashing with a hammer or basically scaling the hammer up or down, that’s about it.
That seems like a blanket assertion. It certainly seems like the most "manageable" mode of operating, but looking back at human history it seems like the "big breakthroughs" rarely happened that way.
The model of scientific research as harvesting the tail events (low probability & massive payoff) seems quite incompatible with what you've said.
That said, you probably think the way you do because of your experiences. Can you articulate that better?
> Research results should show up at a predictable regular pace, or else the result of that effort should be better & deeper explanation of a negative result which is also valuable.
To make a slightly more provocative claim, I think that this fetish for predictable/steady research progress is one of the primary causes of the problem discussed in the article. While papers can be generated steadily, piling on details doesn't necessarily make insight. (To quote Alan Kay: "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points")
PS: There's an apt SMBC comic (Aaargh, I'm unable to find right now!) where researchers keep digging a tunnel linearly, and declare the field dead, while there is a big gold mine slightly off to the side.
I disagree. The perception that you need big discrete jumps forward in progress is what leads to the problem of the article. If instead you directly incentivize breaking a problem up into incremental goals from the start, and never pursue giant jumps of progress at all, then you can get it.
The problem is when people have been wasting time on big leaps of progress and then feel pressured to deliver something when they haven’t been pursuing incremental progress all along.
I disagree. In order to make real scientific Breakthrough it is necessary to take a leap in thinking.
Think special theory of relativity or quantum mechanics kind.
On the other hand:
> The problem is when people have been wasting time on big leaps of progress and then feel pressured to deliver something when they haven’t been pursuing incremental progress all along.
That’s why the most upvoted comment with Thompson’s quote is so true. You need to pay gifted people to do simple, predictably realisable things but give them lots of leisure time to pursue big leaps.
Many problems with the universities and academic system comes from the fact that granting system etc. sweats the small stuff not leaving enough leisure time to pursue big ideas.
Why do you think special relativity or quantum mechanics are “big leap” things? Those are huge systems of theories comprised of thousands of different experiments and mathematical results driven by thousands of different researchers, almost all of whom were pursuing very small scope, narrowly defined incremental gains of knowledge. Even modern quantum computing follows this pattern. People are not solving it with lots of leisure time. They are solving it within private companies as full time researchers or via industry grants, federal grants, university pipelines of incremental experiments, and focus on very straightforward scalability of known existing systems and so on.
If anything, examples like these highlight why the Thompson quote _is wrong_.
> Why do you think special relativity or quantum mechanics are “big leap” things?
It has been more than 90 years since they were invented. At the time they were proposed they've been unexpected and quite unwelcome.
I definitely agree that right now the progress is more linear, distributed and steady, but I wouldn't exactly call quantum computing (application of theory that has been created ~90 years ago) "big leap". I would rather compare it to development of hear engine from thermodynamics.
By big leaps I meant "paradigm-shifting" kind of things. These things cannot be expected to come from steady pipelines and projects with expected outcomes with anticipated results.
I have not seen an example of a singular thing that is “paradigm shifting.” Even with relativity, the overall set of concepts and results is paradigm shifting, but every individual contributor, including Einstein, pursued small specific incremental pieces and various postulations whose significance wasn’t determined until years latee through incremental experiments.
However...
A flaw in Thomson's idea is that some research is expensive, costing much more than leisure time.
Another approach is angel-investing / business-loan style: Give a large grant, wait a long time, and then call in the note -- to return research that justifies the investment, or repayment with interest.
Or X-prize style: Give outsize awards for outsize accomplishments, and let the researches take on the risk.
> Give a large grant, wait a long time, and then call in the note
And what are the consequences if the scientist has pittered that money away? How do you decide if a scientist/manager is even deserving of that level of confidence in the fist place
A fine example of this is Jansky's discovery of stellar radio emissions in the early 1930s. He found them while he was working for Bell Labs. Neither Bell Labs (of all places) nor astronomers were interested in further investigation.
That discovery would lead to radio astronomy ... no thanks to established interests.
But Bell Labs is remembered for things like the transistor, which had huge impact.
There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtuous, for research funding to be disconnected from application.
Bell Labs funded the transistor and not radio astronomy because apart from making cool TV documentaries, radio astronomy isn't actually useful for much. If we knew how to travel faster than light and explore the universe it'd be extremely useful, but we don't, so learning things about what a remote corner of the galaxy looked like a few billion years ago is easily argued to be a rather absurd waste of limited research dollars.
It's exactly what this op-ed in the Scientific American is talking about: a research field optimised to produce papers independent of any concrete economic utility function. In a world where such things get funded, what exactly should scientists be measured by? They can't be measured by market success because nobody cares or has any use for their output: their work is pure academic navel/star-gazing. So they pretty much have to be measured by volume of output or respect of their peers, both of which are closed and circular systems of measurement.
In my view the right fix for the science crisis is not to pay scientists to research whatever the hell they like with no success measurement at all: that really is directly equivalent to just firing them all and putting them on social security (or "UBI" as HNers like to call it). The right thing to do would probably be to just slash academic funding dramatically and reduce corporation taxes so corporate research can be given more funding. The net result would still be a drop in the amount of science done, but as Bayer's study makes clear, "not enough science" is not the world's problem right now.
Thanks for the reply. Yes indeed, Bell was famous for its many discoveries and applications. It was also famous (among science and engineering pros of its time) for granting its employees lots of time to spend on their own projects. Why they dropped-the-ball on Jansky's find is probably complicated.
The person that did lead the way to the (now enormous) field of radio astronomy was Grote Reber. He had a BSEE degree. It was his life-long passion, in his free time, at his own expense, and he had to struggle to get anyone to pay attention. He personally discovered Cygnus A in 1939 (and lots more). But he didn't get the physics Nobel in 1974. Instructive story:.
“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it."
-- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)