If you are a smart person I suggest working in domains where the regulators have not yet shut down progress. In many domains, if you want to make progress most of your obstacles are going to be other humans. It is refreshingly easy to make progress if you only have to face the ice.
That’s ambitious without an ambition. Switching domains stops your progress in the original domain completely, so doesn’t make it easier to make progress. Unless domain doesn’t matter, only fungible “progress”.
“Progress” can be a terminal goal, and many people might be much happier if they treated it as such. I love the fact that there are fields I can work in that are both practical and unregulated, but if I had to choose between e.g. medical researcher and video-game pro, I’m close to certain I’d be happier as the latter. I know many people which basically ruined their lives by choosing the wrong answer and going into dead-end fields that superficially seem open to progress (or to non-political work).
Furthermore, fields bleed into each other. Machine learning might well not be the optimal paradigm in which to treat <gestures towards everything interesting going on in the world>, but it’s the one that works for cultural reasons, and it will likely converge to some of the same good ideas that would have come about had other professions been less political.
Also, to some extent, the problem is one of “culture” not regulation. EoD someone could have always sold a covid vaccine as a supplement, but who’d have bought it? Anyone is free to make their own research into anything, but who’ll take them seriously?… etc
It only assumes there are a lot of domains in which you would be happy to make progress. In addition success is at least somewhat fungible across domains. And it is much easier to cut red tape once you already resources and a track record (possibly in a different domain).
Don’t start out in a red-tape domain unless you are ready to fight off the people trying to slow you down. This requires a lot of money, connections, and lawyers and you still might lose. Put your talents to work in an easier domain, at least to start.
If you are a smart person I suggest working in domains where the regulators have not yet shut down progress. In many domains, if you want to make progress most of your obstacles are going to be other humans. It is refreshingly easy to make progress if you only have to face the ice.
That’s ambitious without an ambition. Switching domains stops your progress in the original domain completely, so doesn’t make it easier to make progress. Unless domain doesn’t matter, only fungible “progress”.
“Progress” can be a terminal goal, and many people might be much happier if they treated it as such. I love the fact that there are fields I can work in that are both practical and unregulated, but if I had to choose between e.g. medical researcher and video-game pro, I’m close to certain I’d be happier as the latter. I know many people which basically ruined their lives by choosing the wrong answer and going into dead-end fields that superficially seem open to progress (or to non-political work).
Furthermore, fields bleed into each other. Machine learning might well not be the optimal paradigm in which to treat <gestures towards everything interesting going on in the world>, but it’s the one that works for cultural reasons, and it will likely converge to some of the same good ideas that would have come about had other professions been less political.
Also, to some extent, the problem is one of “culture” not regulation. EoD someone could have always sold a covid vaccine as a supplement, but who’d have bought it? Anyone is free to make their own research into anything, but who’ll take them seriously?… etc
No, the FDA would very likely have shut them down. You can’t simply evade the FDA by saying that you are selling a supplement.
It only assumes there are a lot of domains in which you would be happy to make progress. In addition success is at least somewhat fungible across domains. And it is much easier to cut red tape once you already resources and a track record (possibly in a different domain).
Don’t start out in a red-tape domain unless you are ready to fight off the people trying to slow you down. This requires a lot of money, connections, and lawyers and you still might lose. Put your talents to work in an easier domain, at least to start.