[gkuan]

> The final approach I've encountered is where research problems come from an external body.

For a good helping of the government research organizations, they hire academics and practitioners as Program Managers (PMs) who gather the experts in the field to come up with research programs, agendas, and seedling programs. Of course, the PMs have to sell areas to their higher ups too, but it does have some degree of dynamism and alignment with academia. The amount of resources that could be brought to bear on a problem is impressive.

I do wonder about this whole notion of “success” of research. Hundreds of years ago, wealth patrons sponsor the “researchers” of their times. Creative people found problems that interested them which sometimes led to unexpected results and new areas. I don’t think serendipity should be discounted.

[the_snooze]

>Creative people found problems that interested them which sometimes led to unexpected results and new areas. I don’t think serendipity should be discounted.

From my own experience as a researcher, when conferences and meetings are online (as they have been for most of the pandemic), you lose a lot of opportunities to make unexpected connections with new people and ideas. Serendipity helps jostle you out of a local optimum.

[PeterisP]

Definitely. Before Covid, I routinely returned from the major conferences with a notebook full of potential ideas, some of which I could explore, some of which I handed out like candy in the local environment to colleagues and students, and some of which become very relevant years later.

The virtual conferences during the last two years were useless in retrospect. I saw the presentations of the papers I was interested in and that's it, I don't even remember anything specific from any of them, somehow the format was so routine. I'm glad that this is ending and we're having proper conferences again. I understand that researchers in the 'global south' had a different perspective with remote conferences being more accessible, but I've come to a conclusion that for me virtual conferences are a waste of time - I'd rather just read the published papers asynchronously at my convenience instead of framing it as an event; if you don't want a conference for some reason, make it a journal instead.