alt Hacker News"There was a risk that such a single-minded pursuit of so difficult a problem could hurt her academic career, but Späth dedicated all her time to it anyway."
I feel like this sentence is in every article for a reason. Thank goodness there are such obsessive people and here's a toast to those counter-factuals that never get mentioned.
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I want financial independence for the sole reason that I can work on interesting problems like this without any outside nagging or funding issues from anyone else (there might still be some judgment, but I can ignore that).
Personally I think governments should fund more moonshot solo or small team efforts because high risk / high reward pays off when you reduce the variance by spreading it out over so many people. But it looks like we’re going headstrong the other direction in terms of funding in the U.S. right now, so I’m not optimistic.
I worked at a pro audio company where one guy spent 5 years on a power supply. It succeeded, and I always appreciated the management for supporting him.
And you can thank this guy for the LEDs that made it possible for you to even read about it on a screen https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M
There are tens of millions of people doing a repetitive work every day, instead of being entrepreneurs. Just let them be, not everybody needs to dedicate their existence to maximizing their career opportunities, at any level.
Unfortunately the average persons hatred of autistic or nerdy people implies that many believe the world would be a better place if “obsessive types” didn’t exist.
Hans Asperger could only save his Austic children from nazi death camps by convincing the nazis that they had value to produce rockets and bombs.
It’s quite remarkable that the USA is so advanced given how deep and ruthless our anti-intellectualism goes.
I think we do a lot of disservice by dismissing the role of the dark horses. They are necessary. Like you suggest, there are many that fail, probably most do. But considering the impact, even just a small percentage succeeding warrants significant encouragement. Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. In research, most things fail. But the only real failure is the ones you don't learn from (currently it is very hard to publish negative results. Resulting it not even being attempted. The system encourages "safe" research, which by its nature, can only be incremental. Fine, we want this, but it's ironic considering how many works get rejected due to "lack of novelty")