

Antimarket opportunities - rhema
http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=15938

======
dnautics
aren't these opportunities still in a 'market' of their own? If someone else
thinks that what you are doing has value (even in the long range), there is a
market for that to be done and you will get paid. If you are only doing it for
yourself, it is just a solipsistic exercise, and it won't get done unless
you're mega-rich, so you better get cracking on the marketing of your
opportunity to people who 1) will agree with you and 2) are willing to pay you
for the effort.

~~~
HillRat
There are plenty of research opportunities that are speculative, or niche,
enough that they wouldn't overcome the net present value of any third-party
commercial investment. Of these, a not-insignificant number are likely to
become keystone technologies at some point in the future, but rarely will it
make economic sense to put cash in it early, rather than invest elsewhere and
later use the returns on _that_ to get a position in any future market.

Some companies -- Google, obviously, or Bell Labs back in the day, or
companies run by well-heeled visionaries like Musk -- are willing to sink cash
into high-risk research, but in general Google is going to see more returns
out of incrementally improving AdWords rather than developing self-driving
cars.

The other thing to think about is that R&D doesn't just "skate to where the
puck will be," it actually places the puck on the ice. It takes fundamental
and/or high-risk research to create these kinds of opportunities, which means
that, in a world where markets solely dictate research objectives, a lot of
potential advancements will be left on the table as long as companies have
other, profitable, avenues of investment. Which is why we need government
funding, though not government control, of research -- but that's probably a
discussion for another time.

~~~
dnautics
"Which is why we need government funding, though not government control, of
research"

Without accountability (which is what you mean by 'government control'), all
you will have is crony funding, and a downward-spiraling quality of work as
effort goes toward scientific rent-seeking instead of real scientific product.
This problem is inextricable. In order to have accountability, you have to
have benchmarks, which really means that the only type of science funding the
government is consistently good at is translational, with defined goals. A
good example is the moonshot.

If your claim is that government will politicize science, well then, the
problem is with demanding that government fund science in the first place. It
is a ridiculous position of entitlement to demand money, obtained from
taxpayers who have little choice to comply, with nothing in exchange.

For an excellent counterexample to your assertion, consider Peter Mitchell. He
created an private, nonprofit science research organization very much
dedicated to a 'basic science' question and solved a fundamental question in
biochemistry: How does the cell generate energy? Although there is no way that
industry would have funded this, there was also no way that government would
have funded it either. He won a Nobel Prize for his work.

Do not make the mistake of conflating 'private' with 'for-profit'. This is a
false dichotomy that overlooks important social efforts, such as the Polio
Vaccines.

------
alexashka
Can somebody give a quick rundown of how university research works?

What's the motivation to work on a potentially big idea rather than something
you personally find great interest in?

Wouldn't it be best to just work on whatever interests you most, or is there
such a wealth of branches you could go off into, that one feels the need to
narrow it down and this is one of the ways to do that?

~~~
kragen
I think I know this, because even though I haven’t personally graduated from
so much as high school, a lot of my friends and family are academics.

Let’s start with your career as a doctoral student. If you personally find
great interest in your research, but nobody else does, then you will find it
very hard to get published (except in bullshit fake conferences and fake
journals that accept any author who pays the fee) and you will not be able to
persuade your committee to accept your dissertation, so you will not get a
doctorate and will not graduate. Also, if no PIs at your institution think
your research is interesting, you will not get funded as an RA, and you will
have to devote a lot of your time to teaching instead of research, or you will
have to pay tuition. If your research is in a field that requires access to
equipment (e.g. chemicals, supercomputers, nuclear reactors, oscilloscopes,
pencils) then not getting funded as an RA also likely means you don’t get
access to the university’s equipment, so you have to buy your own, which may
completely stop your research or just slightly annoy you, depending. If your
research involves experimentation on animals or humans, the IRB or AEC is not
going to approve your application just because you personally find great
interest in the research; you have to convince them that it’s worth the
potential harm to the experimental subjects. Finally, and perhaps worst of
all, if you personally find great interest in your research, but nobody else
does, then only your ideas are going to go into it; nobody else will
contribute, and so you will progress maybe 1% as fast as if you were
surrounded by a community of like-minded peers.

But suppose you work on stuff your advisor likes until you graduate in seven
years, and then another four years in postdocs, and then you publish a bunch
of papers as an assistant professor (on subjects that referees find so
interesting that they recommend publication) and lots of other people find
your ideas so interesting that they cite your papers so much that you are
eligible for tenure, and then you actually get tenure because you didn’t grab
any students’ asses or fail to actually physically be present when you were
suppposed to be teaching or anything like that. So now, after 7+4+6=17 years
of working on ideas that other people thought were interesting, you have
tenure and you can, if you so choose, work only on things that you personally
find great interest in.

At least in theory, and modulo the concerns about IRBs and AECs above. But
your department is going to be a lot happier with you if you are working on
things that you can find funding for, and if your ideas are attracting
brilliant applicants to the department’s doctoral program, so that they can
then admit those applicants and coerce them into working on the ideas _they_
(your colleagues) find great interest in, in exchange for a lottery ticket
that might pay off with tenure. In practice, though, tenured faculty tend to
spend a great deal of time writing grant applications to persuade grantmakers
that they will work on ideas that the grantmakers find interesting, giving
talks to persuade their colleagues to be interested in their work, and
teaching classes with at least the ostensible objective of persuading students
to be interested in their work. Also, sometimes you have to ask grantmakers
and grantmaker-like agencies not only for money but also for permission;
nuclear research in the US, for example, requires that your research reactor
be overseen by the DoE.

So, those are some of the structural incentives in the US academic system to
work on things that other people in your field think are potentially big
ideas, instead of just things you personally find great interest in. You know
all this bullshit about how the web is an “attention economy”? Academics have
been desperately struggling for attention for centuries.

And, yes, you need to be interested in what you’re investigating, too; not
least because, if you aren’t, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting
anybody else to pay attention, and you almost certainly aren’t going to make
it through grad school.

~~~
alexashka
Thank you for the response, very informative.

------
CamperBob2
Think backward. What _could_ you have started working on twenty years ago that
would make you fabulously wealthy now?

I can't think of much, offhand. It's even harder to skate where the proverbial
puck will be twenty years in the future.

~~~
ericabiz
The biggest tech market opportunity 20 years ago, with hindsight, was probably
one of the simplest: .com domain names. Generic ones...no reason to mess with
trademarked names. Many of those simple, "dictionary word" .com names have
fetched well into 8 figures.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_n...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_names)

~~~
kragen
If you’re going to eliminate ethics as a consideration (and you are, by
advocating domainsquatting) there were a wealth of other opportunities out
there. Spammers, for example, made a lot of money for a while. DoubleClick
cashed out for US$3B, which makes “well into 8 figures” sound pretty small.
Maybe you could run literal extortion rackets, the kind where you threaten
people with violence, but it’s hard to know how much money the biggest people
made in that business: was it US$1M or US$10B? Or you could go lower and found
a patent troll, or a law firm catering to patent trolls.

~~~
lmm
None of those are where the market is going to be in 20 years, that's where
the market is now. Spamming is AIUI very competitive; likewise literal
extortion and patent trolling.

~~~
kragen
I was talking about 20 years ago, when spamming, like the domain-name
extortion Erica was advocating, was restrained by norms of behavior that
considered it antisocial. I don’t know enough about the private-violence
extortion market to comment intelligently, but patent trolling isn’t
competitive at all — except in very unusual circumstances, the extortion
victims do not have the option of buying protection from you from a competing
patent troll.

~~~
lmm
The practising entities selling the patents to you have plenty of trolls to
choose from though.

~~~
kragen
20 years ago they didn’t, but I’m not sure it matters that much, because you
have plenty of fire-sale worthless patents to choose from among the various
bankruptcies and then file frivolous lawsuits over.

~~~
lmm
Presumably if it's a profitable business then the bankruptcy auction prices
for patents will rise to the point that they're only barely profitable.

20 years ago they didn't, but the more interesting question is what's the
thing that's available cheaply today that people will be buying in 20 years.
If you have some ideas for this in the unethical space I am genuinely
interested.

~~~
kragen
I do, but I’d prefer not to tell people whose interest in them is too genuine.
:)

------
rdlecler1
Ya, I sort of did this, but my option was a 10 year post doc, making a little
over $32,000/year working 80 hour weeks.

------
e2e4
Very nice observations. I was offered an RA position in the mid 90's to work
on a document oriented database. In retrospect, I wish I would have taken it.
Although I haven't seen any of the people involved anywhere near the Forbes
Richest list :(

~~~
kragen
Maybe that’s only because they lacked the contributions you would have made?

~~~
e2e4
In academia providing concrete implementation is often not valued highly;
hence I would have probably fallen into the same trap (which I did anyways,
but in a different area).

p.s. thanks for the vote of confidence though :)

