[HN Gopher] You and Your Research (1986)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       You and Your Research (1986)
        
       Author : ftxbro
       Score  : 111 points
       Date   : 2023-05-01 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cs.virginia.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.virginia.edu)
        
       | scsteps wrote:
       | I've always had trouble balancing between working on things that
       | I consider to be important vs things that I am excited about. In
       | my experience I've always gotten good results from the things I'm
       | excited about and not what I consider to be important.
       | 
       | Should I consider what I feel excited to be important?
       | Personally, sure, but objectively speaking the world might not
       | think that way.
        
         | umutisik wrote:
         | What makes you excited about something in the case when it's
         | not important?
        
       | jzelinskie wrote:
       | Here's a recording from '95 entitled the same:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
       | 
       | I also highly recommend reading the Stripe Press book also with
       | the same name: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732265178
        
         | teddyh wrote:
         | Better video quality, same source material:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...
        
         | netcraft wrote:
         | I came to also recommend the book. The last half is about
         | specific engineering topics, but the first half is packed with
         | great ideas and thoughts that anyone will find valuable.
         | 
         | Its also a beautiful and well made book.
        
       | 6451937099 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | 6451937099 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | mathisfun123 wrote:
       | There's a part of this that's never ever commented on
       | 
       | >I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of
       | neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect
       | things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no
       | question about this.
       | 
       | As someone that got married during their PhD and is now finishing
       | up and reflecting: it isn't worth it. Neglecting the people in
       | your life that love you in the pursuit of "science" is no
       | different than neglecting them because you have a drug habit or
       | because you're an inveterate gambler _or because you 're chasing
       | fame and fortune_. The science will get done regardless and the
       | only thing you accomplish is ensuring your own interests. Suffice
       | it to say I'm taking steps make sure my next gig has more room.
        
         | JHonaker wrote:
         | It really isn't talked about enough. I am contemplating leaving
         | my PhD despite being ABD with the majority of the interesting
         | work done simply because the neglect it inflicts on my family
         | is the cause of the overwhelming majority of conflicts in my
         | life.
         | 
         | I truly love working on the problem, investing time in research
         | papers, and experimenting, but I have no desire to stay in
         | academia. Plus, I have a well-paying full-time job (that I took
         | during the pandemic to save my wife from having to shoulder our
         | living expenses basically single-handedly while growing our
         | child inside of her).
         | 
         | > Suffice it to say I'm taking steps make sure my next gig has
         | more room.
         | 
         | I hear you. It's crazy how mentally abusive a lot of people's
         | relationship with their PhD is. I'm convinced it's one of the
         | reasons so many people with PhDs marry other PhDs. They're the
         | only ones that "understand" the level of single-minded devotion
         | you have to have to be an early career researcher.
        
         | nunuvit wrote:
         | Higher education isn't made for people with a family life.
         | There's no real reason for this, but there's no pressure to
         | change it because there's always someone else in line ready to
         | take your place.
        
         | BlandDuck wrote:
         | I am a reasonably successful researcher, and I admit to
         | neglecting my wife sometimes, especially in my early career.
         | 
         | However, I would venture that being successful in any career
         | --- be it research, business, politics, arts --- requires a
         | certain amount of focus and neglect of your family and friends.
         | 
         | But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make
         | it worth it for them as well.
        
           | ke88y wrote:
           | _> However, I would venture that being successful in any
           | career --- be it research, business, politics, arts ---
           | requires a certain amount of focus and neglect of your family
           | and friends._
           | 
           | A warning for the younger readers in our midst: this is _NOT_
           | how most relationships work. You normally don 't get to
           | mismanage a relationship and then "make up for it" later.
           | When you do, there are almost always lasting scars.
           | 
           | That said: this might be true for business and politics. But
           | academics? LOL. Becoming a professor, even at a top
           | university, is a pretty pathetic definition of "success". A
           | professor is a mid-level manager position that pays about the
           | same as an entry-level position at a top tech or finance
           | firm. Most people involved in allocating budget / selecting
           | projects understand that the work being managed is mostly not
           | valuable; that's why they don't mind telling you that you
           | need to pay your subordinates about what they'd make at
           | McDonald's.
           | 
           | It's a first line management job where pay is not enough to
           | "make up" for the lost years and the work almost always
           | literally doesn't matter.
           | 
           |  _> But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and
           | make it worth it for them as well._
           | 
           | This might be true in business and politics, and to some
           | extent in arts, but it's not true in academia. And to the
           | extent that it is true, it's enabled by pushing shit down the
           | hill.
           | 
           | Which is why I'm a lapsed academic. I turned down my TT
           | offers because I realized that I couldn't, in good
           | conscience, build a career out of abusing junior labor. And
           | universities put hard constraints on how you pay and manage
           | PhD students, so avoiding at least financial abuse is mostly
           | impossible.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | andrepd wrote:
             | Have you considered some people might not conflate
             | "success" with "net worth"? Wealth = success is a very
             | tired trope, I thought everybody realised what a sham that
             | way of thinking is.
             | 
             | Who cares if they make more or less than a techbro? If
             | they're happy with their job and they earn enough to pay
             | for things they want (house, vacations, whatever), then
             | they should chase the rat-race of the "ladder of success"
             | because...?
        
               | ke88y wrote:
               | Where do I make such a conflation?
               | 
               | We aren't talking about nurses or school teachers. We are
               | talking about professors at large research universities.
               | 
               | Your sibling comment speaks of working "nights and
               | weekends" with frequent travel. That puts an enormous
               | amount of work and stress on their partner, and faculty
               | usually don't make enough money to offset those
               | contributions.
               | 
               | Deciding not to optimize for wealth is perfectly fine.
               | Doing to do so while working nights and weekends with
               | frequent travel isn't. Optimizing for "prestige" is
               | infinitely worse than optimizing for "wealth", because at
               | least the latter can be shared and has utility beyond
               | pure ego.
        
               | andrepd wrote:
               | Again, it's not about prestige, it's about love of
               | science and research. But yes, you do have a point about
               | working nights and weekends. It's not as if "the grind"
               | is not something which is glorified in the tech industry,
               | though :)
        
               | ke88y wrote:
               | I don't think there is any problem with loving science
               | and research.
               | 
               | Deciding to sacrifice your nights, weekends, and
               | financial life to work on science and research is okay.
               | But it's also enormously selfish. Other people who spend
               | time doing "what they love" -- ski bums, for example --
               | at least recognize their selfishness as such.
               | 
               | Being selfish can be okay. But it's probably not great to
               | be selfish and try to build a life-long partnership.
               | Especially if you don't realize you are being selfish.
               | 
               | I won't tell anyone not to ski bum or not to do a PhD.
               | But I will gut check people when they get confused about
               | the difference between selfish and selfless dedication to
               | a craft. An academic career -- the type where you spend
               | nights and weekends without at least contributing a
               | modicum of financial comfort to those around you -- is
               | selfish.
               | 
               | At the end of the day, most grant-funded projects are
               | _born_ useless. There isn 't as much of a difference
               | between ski bumming and PhDing as professors like to
               | pretend.
        
             | BlandDuck wrote:
             | I am sorry that you feel that way. I know this is a
             | widespread opinion. My own experience is different.
             | 
             | I am at now a point as a researcher where I am financially
             | secure, work on interesting problems, and have time for my
             | wife and children. My colleagues, junior as well as senior,
             | seem to be in similar situations.
             | 
             | To be clear, in my case "focus and neglect" meant working
             | weekends and evenings and lots of travel for some years
             | before we had children. I see successful people in other
             | careers doing the same.
             | 
             | My current situation does not involve anything remotely
             | like "pushing shit" or "abusing junior labor". I have no
             | "hard constraints" and I see no "financial abuse" at my
             | university.
        
               | ke88y wrote:
               | If your university has a PhD program, we simply have
               | different definitions of financial abuse.
               | 
               | I couldn't accept the job and look myself in the mirror
               | while knowing that not only do my direct reports struggle
               | to get by and can't save tax-deferred for retirement, but
               | that I'm one of the only employers in the country who
               | doesn't even pay FICA taxes.
        
           | s5300 wrote:
           | >>But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and
           | make it worth it for them as well.
           | 
           | Just incase anybody is unaware - this is _really_ not how
           | interpersonal relationships work. Especially romantic
           | interests. You may one day find yourself with a lot of money
           | /power but nobody who truly loves you (or enjoys your
           | company) for who you are - or with not much to show for your
           | years of tunnel visioned neuroticism, symptoms of complete
           | burnout, & also nobody who loves you.
           | 
           | I'm not trying to say there's something wrong with dedicating
           | a large chunk of your life to a pursuit like they've
           | mentioned - I'm just saying don't be surprised when people
           | you've neglected have moved on to greener pastures in that
           | time.
        
         | abhayhegde wrote:
         | I agree that this issue has never been talked enough. I am
         | doing PhD now and recently went through a breakup which mostly
         | happened because I could not give enough time for the
         | relationship.
        
         | ke88y wrote:
         | As a PhD, I now believe that pursuing a career in science is an
         | enormously selfish and entitled life choice for anyone who
         | doesn't have a trust fund.
         | 
         | It's not just neglect during the PhD. Even a non-neglectful
         | academic is asking _a lot_ of their partner. Stipends are low.
         | Post-docs require chasing term-limited positions around the
         | country, often with little to no savings, for up the half a
         | decade. Building wealth is impossible, having a family is just
         | barely possible, and the process takes you well into mid-life
         | depriving your partner of a career and a real relationship.
         | 
         | I have seen more divorces during post-docs than during PhDs.
         | 
         | Everyone I know who made it through PhDs and post-docs without
         | scars fell into one of two categories: unmarried or wealthy. I
         | think academia's biggest open secret is that a HUGE number of
         | academics -- especially in and around large metros or in nice
         | climates -- are chasing a prestigious and comfortable job
         | because their trust funds allow them to not care about the
         | money and their upbringing makes it difficult for them to deal
         | with having a manager.
        
           | anonymouskimmer wrote:
           | > As a PhD, I now believe that pursuing a career in science
           | is an enormously selfish and entitled life choice for anyone
           | who doesn't have a trust fund.
           | 
           | This is because the career was originally set up for those
           | who were independently wealthy, or at least rich enough to
           | have a spouse who didn't work. All of this stuff happened
           | within the last 150 years, and it was made worse in recent
           | years following the massive increase of skilled people in the
           | discipline.
           | 
           | A career in science also differs based on whether you're an
           | academic or in industry. On whether you're out their seeking
           | grants, or out making products to sell.
           | 
           | These are all decisions being made based on what people
           | demonstrate that they will tolerate. No different than the
           | Japanese Karoshi-culture. If your Ph.D. or Post-Doc
           | supervisor won't allow you to have a life outside of science,
           | then dump them. Leave them up the creek without a paddle.
           | They are not your only option.
           | 
           | At its absolute worse, the hours involved in an academic
           | Ph.D./Post-Doc aren't significantly worse than a chronic
           | precariat worker. I had two jobs during a particular semester
           | when finishing up my A.S., and averaged 3.5 hours of sleep
           | per night (outside of the weekends). I've read about a guy
           | who spent _years_ walking and taking transit for 8 hours each
           | day from his house to his 8-hour a day job. 16 hours per day
           | just dedicated to work. Ultimately his job and /or co-workers
           | pitched in to buy him a car.
           | 
           | The harsh hours in scientific academia is ultimately a
           | choice. And the choice is not between science and a life. The
           | choice is between science _with this particular supervisor_
           | and a life.
        
       | reachtarunhere wrote:
       | One of the points of the talk is emphasis on working on
       | "important" problems. It does make sense to not work on
       | incremental things for merely publications so it is definitely
       | good advice. However once you decide to do so what is "important"
       | becomes a difficult question.
       | 
       | I like this article from Daniel Lemire which explores this
       | further
       | 
       | https://lemire.me/blog/2010/03/22/so-you-know-whats-importan...
        
         | Swizec wrote:
         | The way I've always interpreted this is that if even you don't
         | think it's important, why are you doing it?
         | 
         | Sure you can't accurately predict what will and won't be
         | important long term, but _you_ should think your work is
         | important. Whether you're right or wrong time will tell.
        
           | reachtarunhere wrote:
           | Yes my interpretation is that this is more an advice on what
           | not to do - frivolous stuff you don't believe in
        
         | emrah wrote:
         | > It does make sense to not work on incremental things for
         | merely publications so it is definitely good advice.
         | 
         | True but unfortunately this is how funding works based on what
         | I saw during my time working at various labs.
         | 
         | You need to provide enough evidence that what you are after is
         | going to "work". Most of the brand new ideas get resources by
         | repurposing data from existing funded projects. If you don't
         | have what you need, you finangle the funded project to produce
         | the data the new idea needs.
         | 
         | I'm all for not syncing resources into crazy ideas that will
         | never work but current state of affairs (it's getting worse) is
         | too conservative
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | It is important to point out that on his speech (and the book)
         | he tells people to work on important problems (always on the
         | plural), and that he never say not to work on non-important
         | ones.
         | 
         | In fact, I remember the book having a very clear assumption
         | that you can't work on important things all the time anyway.
         | But well, there has been some time since I've read it. But it
         | is a very sensible and nuanced advice for highly ambitious
         | people.
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | I heard him give this talk at Ames back in the 80s. The advice
       | and perspective are worth following even if you don't plan to be
       | a research scientist.
        
       | pighive wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing this, I came across the same material in a
       | different format (either slides or may be a video couple of years
       | back, can't exactly remember). What stuck to me is "If you are
       | not working on an important problem, your work is not important".
       | I tried to take a positive spin from this statement by
       | considering whatever work I am currently doing is important
       | enough to solve an important problem but it's really hard to
       | convince yourself after some time when it is clearly not.
       | Needless to say, I am still looking for that important problem.
        
       | shae wrote:
       | Get the book! It's packed with great content.
        
       | ssn wrote:
       | Any recommendations on similar materials? I.e. advice on how to
       | manage research.
        
         | Sevan777 wrote:
         | Currently reading The Sciences of the Artificial? by Herbert A.
         | Simon
        
         | rg111 wrote:
         | "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sanke Ahrens.
         | 
         | Even if you decide not to use the Zettelkasten method, this
         | book is still a great read.
        
       | Calavar wrote:
       | I think there is an enormous survivorship bias here. Research
       | advances come in alternating of periods torrents and droughts,
       | not in a steady trickle. Hamming, Shannon, and their
       | contemporaries worked at a time of revolution in computer
       | science.
       | 
       | Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here name
       | a single academic in any other subfield of computer science who
       | had a string of groundbreaking research works where every one of
       | those works is from 1980 or after? I can't. And that's almost
       | half a century that we're working with. Many people who defended
       | their PhDs in the 1980s are already retired.
       | 
       | This applies to plenty of other fields as well. Medicine, for
       | instance: There were surgeons in the 1960s and 1970s who have
       | half a dozen new surgical techniques to their name. (If you want
       | some examples, look up Michael DeBakey, Mark Coventry, and Thomas
       | Starzl.) You will not find a single academic surgeon today who
       | comes even close to that, and at least in my opinion it's not
       | because modern surgeons lack drive or creativity or the ambition
       | to tackle big problems.
       | 
       | Hamming is probably right that the role of luck in the sense of
       | serendipity is overblown, but he ignores role of luck in the
       | sense of structural factors that are out of your control. Because
       | he and his colleagues largely operated in a context where all
       | those structural factors were completely optimized.
       | 
       | If you decide to start a PhD in a field 10 years before that
       | field is destined to hit a multi-decade rut, if your advisor
       | fails to make tenure partway through your PhD and your lab is
       | shut down, if you get your first academic appointment in an
       | environment where research funding is trending down and
       | regulatory burdens are trending up, these are all factors that
       | are by and large out of your control that can significantly alter
       | the trajectory of your career.
        
         | kragen wrote:
         | i agree! hamming even talks about this a bit in his talk
         | 
         | your chances of doing great research are slim if you're born in
         | kenya in the 01940s, no matter how much drive and creativity
         | you have, but that's not because 'research advances' have
         | 'droughts', it's because you're not being allowed to do great
         | research, even if plenty of research advances are happening out
         | of your reach
         | 
         | (unless you're richard leakey)
         | 
         | that's what's happened to modern surgeons, nuclear engineers,
         | aeronautical engineers, chemists, etc. the usa and eu today
         | have mostly become the kenya of the 01940s, where only the
         | occasional richard leakey is allowed to excel, and thus we have
         | entered the so-called great stagnation
         | 
         | but restrictions are much looser in computer science than in
         | most fields. we still have:
         | 
         | - oleg kiselyov (sxml, probabilistic programming, relational
         | programming and thence the reasoned schemer, type checking as
         | small-step abstract evaluation, tagless staged interpreters,
         | stream processing without runtime overhead)
         | 
         | - dan bernstein (twisted edwards curves including curve25519,
         | breaking aes with cache timing attacks, nacl, tweetnacl, qmail,
         | salsa, poly1305, striking down usa export controls, organizing
         | the pqc conferences)
         | 
         | - fabrice bellard (qemu, ffmpeg, tcc, lzexe, and bellard's
         | formula, aside from nncp, which is deep learning)
         | 
         | - jeff dean and sanjay ghemawat (epi info, leveldb, tensorflow,
         | bigtable, mapreduce, spanner, 'the google cluster
         | architecture', lots of internal google stuff, and again a bunch
         | of deep learning stuff)
         | 
         | - raph levien (io, advogato, the gnome canvas, libart)
         | 
         | - graydon hoare (monotone and thence git, rust), and
         | 
         | - rob pike (blit, utf-8, much of plan9, sawzall, and golang)
         | 
         | - wouter van oortmerssen (cube/sauerbraten, flatbuffers, amiga
         | e, false and thus more or less the field of esolangs, lobster,
         | bla with first-class environments, aardappel, fisheye quake)
         | 
         | i've left out the people i personally know well
        
         | pbadams wrote:
         | > Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here
         | name a single academic in any other subfield of computer
         | science who had a string of groundbreaking research works where
         | every one of those works is from 1980 or after?
         | 
         | Shafi Goldwasser (Probabilistic encryption, zero-knowledge
         | proofs, etc.) got her PhD in 1984.
         | 
         | Leslie Lamport is just a bit before your deadline, his 'Time,
         | Clocks' paper came out in 1978, but the bulk of his work was
         | after 1980, including paxos.
         | 
         | While there's definitely some truth to your Kuhnian view of
         | 'times of revolution' in a field, I think it's hard to apply
         | that to recent progress because it may just be that it's not
         | clear which research works were groundbreaking without the
         | benefit of hindsight. To me, the revolutionary period of CS
         | research is still ongoing.
        
           | pclmulqdq wrote:
           | Almost every breakthrough in distributed systems is more
           | recent. LZW is 1980s. Most data storage systems used today
           | had their guts invented in the last 40 years, with only the
           | top layer being older than that.
           | 
           | If you look at "Computer science" as the narrowly-defined
           | field of data structure and algorithm design in a vacuum,
           | maybe things slowed down after 1980, but that's because
           | problems with different constraints just became more
           | interesting.
        
         | Upvoter33 wrote:
         | "Can anyone here name a single academic in any other subfield
         | of computer science who had a string of groundbreaking research
         | works where every one of those works is from 1980"
         | 
         | Hennessy and Patterson for their work on RISC Patterson for
         | RAID Dean and Ghemawat for MapReduce
         | 
         | That's without thinking. There have been a lot of very
         | important works since the 1980s.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | linguae wrote:
         | Indeed. The fact of the matter is that today's environment for
         | researchers is completely different from what it was like in
         | 1986 when this talk was given, though I mention it not to take
         | anything away from this talk. The days of places like Xerox
         | PARC and Bell Labs where researchers had considerable freedom
         | and autonomy are over and have been for quite some time now.
         | Many industry labs promote business-driven research instead of
         | purely curiosity-driven work and expect their researchers to
         | produce a regular flow of research results that can be
         | productized, lest they be shown the door. Academia these days
         | isn't exactly a bastion of freedom, either, with its "publish-
         | or-perish" pressures needed to secure tenure and remain in good
         | standing, as well as the need to raise grant money, both of
         | which require pleasing external reviewers. Thus, successful
         | researchers under this environment must find a way to manage
         | the inevitable uncertainties of research while also producing
         | enough output to make their evaluators happy. I find these
         | "productivity" metrics stifling, but if I want to continue as a
         | researcher, it's either play the game successfully or find
         | another way to make a living.
         | 
         | I've been thinking long and hard about this for years. Perhaps
         | researchers who value freedom of inquiry and freedom from
         | "publish-or-perish" pressures could work independently, perhaps
         | being funded by fellowships (like the MacArthur Grant), from
         | part-time work, or from a side business.
        
         | jltsiren wrote:
         | > Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here
         | name a single academic in any other subfield of computer
         | science who had a string of groundbreaking research works where
         | every one of those works is from 1980 or after?
         | 
         | That's because of the nature of the field. CS researchers are
         | kind of like NPCs or bureaucrats. The technical stuff we do is
         | not interesting to the general public, but it enables other
         | people to do more interesting stuff.
         | 
         | You mention deep learning as an exception. I, as a researcher
         | in another CS subfield, cannot name a single person who has
         | done fundamental work in it.
         | 
         | The "tragedy" of CS is that it's too relevant in the short
         | term. If someone makes a breakthrough, other people will
         | probably commercialize it in a decade or two. Afterwards,
         | history books won't remember the person who discovered the
         | thing but the company that commercialized it or the product
         | launched by the company.
        
         | asdfman123 wrote:
         | Related: I'm annoyed by programmers who implore others to study
         | "worthwhile things."
         | 
         | I'm guessing most of us were obsessed with computers in our
         | teens, and the job market just happened to align with one of
         | our hobbies.
         | 
         | Kids who are fascinated with classical piano or performance art
         | don't stumble into lucrative careers unless they're in the top
         | 0.1%.
        
         | dblhumbucker wrote:
         | I disagree with this sentiment.
         | 
         | Although I'm not familiar with today's groundbreaking research,
         | I think dismissing an entire branch of research simply because
         | it goes against one's argument is a little funny. However,
         | Hamming specifically states in his lecture that this could be
         | applied to engineers starting companies, and there are numerous
         | examples of founders who have started multiple successful
         | businesses in this area.
         | 
         | In the lecture series, Hamming explicitly emphasizes the
         | importance of dedicating time to predicting what the next big
         | step in one's field would be. He dedicated half of every Friday
         | to trying to predict the future of computer science. One of the
         | major points he drives home is that the next breakthrough in
         | any field will not be what he or anyone else has worked on in
         | the past. That is why it is worth striving to work on the right
         | things.
        
           | Calavar wrote:
           | > I think dismissing an entire branch of research simply
           | because it goes against one's argument is a little funny
           | 
           | I don't think it goes against my argument at all. Deep
           | learning is a place where many structural factors are
           | currently optimized, so it has a glut of prominent
           | researchers. The big names in deep learning like Hinton,
           | LeCunn, Bengio took their first post PhD appointments 30 to
           | 40 years ago. All three put out some good work between 1985
           | and 2010, but all three became an order of magnitude more
           | productive after 2010. They went from being members of a
           | mostly irrelevant and overlooked research niche (neural
           | networks were considered a dead end in ML) to being heads of
           | research at multi-billion dollar companies. If it is really
           | all about the individual, why weren't they that productive
           | from the start? What changed? Well, the number of GPU cores
           | hit an inflection point. Technologies for GP-GPU programming
           | like cuda reached maturity.
           | 
           | As I said, there is truth to what Hamming said too. The 1920s
           | were primed for a revolution in physics, but there were
           | thousands of physicists contemporary to Einstein, de Broglie,
           | Heisenberg, and Bohr who didn't do anything of note. So what
           | set the ones who won Nobel prizes apart from the rest? That's
           | where Hamming's advice comes in.
           | 
           | In other words, I can be convinced that Einstein or de
           | Broglie would have reached the tops of their fields in any
           | time or place and in nearly any field. But you cannot
           | convince me that they would have made the history books if
           | they were marine biologists in the 1990s. It doesn't matter
           | how hard you think about where the next revolution in your
           | field will be if there is no revolution to be had.
        
       | lambdaloop wrote:
       | It's funny, I was just thinking about this article this morning.
       | When I first read it over 10 years ago, this quote really struck
       | with me:
       | 
       | > Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in
       | this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the
       | early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison
       | Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in
       | western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things.
       | I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other
       | people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for
       | your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to
       | myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad
       | time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this.
       | When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but
       | they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't
       | mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt
       | somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I
       | wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I
       | going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it
       | steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I
       | going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an
       | effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got
       | much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get
       | better service than other people.
       | 
       | > Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little
       | twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He
       | expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to
       | tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree;
       | somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who
       | changes the system or the person who does first-class science?
       | Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight
       | the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to
       | go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting
       | the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get
       | on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have
       | the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class
       | scientist.
       | 
       | I tried to live that way for a couple years. Frankly, I think
       | this way of living is unnecessarily restrictive. So what if you
       | get slightly worse service? The clothes you wear and your
       | expressions highlight your history and your culture. By self-
       | censoring yourself, you end up just perpetuating the censorship
       | of other views in the workplace. This goes double for scientists,
       | as we are rather public facing and have room for wearing
       | nontraditional clothes within our jobs.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | A perennial. Here are the threads with comments (if anyone finds
       | others, please let me know!):
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research (1986)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31796353 - June 2022 (33
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research - Richard Hamming_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451360 - June 2021 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242617 - Nov 2020 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24171820 - Aug 2020 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research - A talk by Richard W. Hamming [pdf]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23558974 - June 2020 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (1995) [video]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18505884 - Nov 2018 (10
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research (1986)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18014209 - Sept 2018 (10
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and your research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179317 - April 2017 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280198 - Sept 2015 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9279585 - March 2015 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Hamming, "You and Your Research" (1995) [video]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7683711 - May 2014 (25
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Video of Hamming 's "You and Your Research" (1995)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567448 - April 2013 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349 - Oct 2012 (27
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Richard Hamming: You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3142978 - Oct 2011 (7
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 - Nov 2009 (5
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Richard Hamming - You and your research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 - Sept 2009 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625857 - May 2009 (13
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research (1986)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542023 - April 2009 (4
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524856 - March 2009 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Richard Hamming: You and Your Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 - June 2008 (7
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so
       | many are forgotten in the long run? - "You and Your Research"_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52337 - Sept 2007 (11
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _You and Your (Great) Research_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218 - April 2007 (6
       | comments)
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Note for anyone wondering: reposts are ok after a year or so
       | (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'll play the "or
       | so" card and call this one ok. In addition to it being good for
       | curiosity to revisit perennials sometimes (just not too often),
       | HN is also a place for junior users to have the pleasure of
       | encountering the classics for the first time--an important
       | function of the site!
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | On video:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...
        
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