On the Use of a Life
I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. I have had far more opportunity to do seriously novel work on hard hitting problems in industry than I could ever accomplish in academia. And I have an academic appointment. Which, in pandemic land, pretty much means I have a .edu email address that I also have to attend to.<p>On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started.<p>The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business.<p>And, have a read of Rickover: <a href="http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf</a><p>Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.