That sounds plausible; hiring people with good taste and high ability is also a good way to filter out the exponentially-vast number of useless research directions (assuming that one can recognize such people). That said, I wouldn’t label that a point in favor of slack, so much as another way of filtering. It’s still mainly solving the problem of “which direction to go” rather than “can we get over the hill”.
If you can’t recognize who’s already done some good work autonomously, how can you reasonably hope to extract good work from people who haven’t been selected for that?
Alan Key of Xerox Parc makes the argument that hiring great people and giving them freedom is a key to get good innovation and that’s the principle on which Parc worked.
The funders are only supposed to provide a vision but not goals which are supposed to be picked by individual researchers.
This shows why I don’t trust the categories. The ability to let talented people go in whatever direction seems best will almost always be felt as freedom from pressure.
That sounds plausible; hiring people with good taste and high ability is also a good way to filter out the exponentially-vast number of useless research directions (assuming that one can recognize such people). That said, I wouldn’t label that a point in favor of slack, so much as another way of filtering. It’s still mainly solving the problem of “which direction to go” rather than “can we get over the hill”.
If you can’t recognize who’s already done some good work autonomously, how can you reasonably hope to extract good work from people who haven’t been selected for that?
Alan Key of Xerox Parc makes the argument that hiring great people and giving them freedom is a key to get good innovation and that’s the principle on which Parc worked.
The funders are only supposed to provide a vision but not goals which are supposed to be picked by individual researchers.
This shows why I don’t trust the categories. The ability to let talented people go in whatever direction seems best will almost always be felt as freedom from pressure.