Is there enough research to go round all who would like to do it? A quote attributed to Dirac in various forms, speaking of the early days of quantum mechanics, says, “It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.”
It is easy to list the big problems one might work on. Which of them offer opportunities for all of the first-class people to do first-rate work on them — opportunities that look promising for actually solving them, rather than merely working on solving them?
To me the world looks like there are many problems on which can be worked productively. Most of them are not in the prime focus of the existing academic communities.
I’m sometimes even surprised that problems that seem easily approachable don’t get studied. Scott wrote in his latest Melatonin post that there are good reasons to expect it to be useful to take Melatonin right after waking up for people who wake up to early.
You don’t need a first-rate scientist to run a study to investigate that phenomena.
The current evidence base suggests that taking Zinc on the first day of developing common flue reduce the length of the flue. However nobody went around to run studies to determine the correct amount of zinc that should be taken for that purpose.
Given the anecdotal evidence we have that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning instead of the evening is better for sleep it would be very useful if someone would run a study to investigate the phenomena.
Eliezer’s idea of treating SAD with a higher amount of daylight lamps isn’t studied by any scientist.
Those four problems can easily be approached by second-rate scientists and would all have the potential of significant positive impact.
I don’t know about physics, which is a rather mature field, but it’s my understanding that in fields like psychology most established researchers have way more research ideas than time to pursue them all.
Is there enough research to go round all who would like to do it? A quote attributed to Dirac in various forms, speaking of the early days of quantum mechanics, says, “It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.”
It is easy to list the big problems one might work on. Which of them offer opportunities for all of the first-class people to do first-rate work on them — opportunities that look promising for actually solving them, rather than merely working on solving them?
To me the world looks like there are many problems on which can be worked productively. Most of them are not in the prime focus of the existing academic communities.
I’m sometimes even surprised that problems that seem easily approachable don’t get studied. Scott wrote in his latest Melatonin post that there are good reasons to expect it to be useful to take Melatonin right after waking up for people who wake up to early.
You don’t need a first-rate scientist to run a study to investigate that phenomena.
The current evidence base suggests that taking Zinc on the first day of developing common flue reduce the length of the flue. However nobody went around to run studies to determine the correct amount of zinc that should be taken for that purpose.
Given the anecdotal evidence we have that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning instead of the evening is better for sleep it would be very useful if someone would run a study to investigate the phenomena.
Eliezer’s idea of treating SAD with a higher amount of daylight lamps isn’t studied by any scientist.
Those four problems can easily be approached by second-rate scientists and would all have the potential of significant positive impact.
I don’t know about physics, which is a rather mature field, but it’s my understanding that in fields like psychology most established researchers have way more research ideas than time to pursue them all.