Catalyzing research within India
By Niraj Zade | 2025 Aug 25 | tags: research 1 meta 2
This note will take a few years to mature.
This is a collection of resources aimed towards a long term goal that cropped up sometime near 2019 end, when I gave a lift to a retired ICMR scientist while going to my then unsatisfying SWE job. Ended up leaving the job and going autodidact full-time for the next 3 years when the overall idea matured.
I've spent too long thinking (and too little doing). But my current opinion is that in the explore-exploit spectrum, research is too much to the left and business is too much to the right. There are some industrial labs, but that research only works when some piece of research on the far left of the spectrum (explore) becomes viable for a problem.
There is going to be a tremendous amount of research that will be useless, or forgotten/lost by the time a problem appears that makes it useful.
And societally, research is extremely taxing - it is resource-intensive, and it also consumes the best and/or the most dedicated brains within the group.
In the short term, doing research is a luxury. In the long term, doing research is an essentiality.
Articles
- Shifting the impossible to the inevitable A Private ARPA user manual by Benjamin Reinhardt
- Too many words in my opinion. But it is a good article regardless.
- We need a career path for invention by Jason Crawford