### Project discovery [There are highly skilled people that are capable of independent science](https://substack.com/home/post/p-168415873). But, the biggest problem is that they don't know where to find problems, don't know where the frontier is, or how to find supervisors to guide them. I found problems by cold emailing and networking with hundreds of people, but this is **inefficient**. To fix this, here are some ideas. **A maintained, interactive, big list of open research problems amenable to independent researchers.** This could be done by one person full time. To get a better idea: - [I have a prototype here](https://euclia.vercel.app/discovery), which has been used by the discord. I am really keen to get open problems from other universities, ARIA, and other research organisations on here. - The target audience should be people with degrees, some research experience, but didn't want to go into full time PhDs / post-docs. - Each item list should be 'sponsored' by an active supervisor in a sufficiently 'prestigious' institution, to give the list legitimacy, get people talking about it, and critical mass. - The job would involve continuously speaking to universities, FROs and other research organisations to contribute problems to a big board of projects. - Our community discord, FROs, RenPhil, and ARIA would all be a great source for open source problems. - Independent research problems also need to be filtered such that they are amenable to 'decomposition' where independent researchers can contribute separate chunks. This can be hard because problems often have a large degree of entanglement. - The problems should also aggressively be selected based on how active the supervisors are, having famous academics who are too busy to help new researchers is a failure mode. - There needs to be technology to ensure a strong user experience, such that we can match people's interest and skill to appropriate projects. I think LLMs would be great for this. - The items in this big list ideally should be more than a list. It should be interactive, such that supervisors can set 'tests' for prospective collaborators, like a math challenge. It should also contain ways for people to 'bid for supervisors' by submitting tests of skills. - There should be interactive tests so that supervisors can chose promising candidates to work with. - Some projects that I think are amenable to independent science are the following. But we should have a systematic way to identify many others. - Physics / Math formalisation projects like Lean and PhysLean - Mass collaborative math problems like busy beaver - Better infrastructure for scientific computing - Mass paper replication / community peer review - why not outsource paper replication to bored independent scientists. - DIY methods to set up home labs - can we make a $80 scanning electron microscope? - 'Field translation documents' - we all know humans have made progress mixing different fields together, but its often hard to learn the language of one field efficiently. **Mechanisms to get people to do 'small things'** People struggle to find enough activation energy to start with projects, and so there should be a way for people to find 'minimal steps' to get warmed up starting a project. From the discord, blogging worked well, and something we were wondering about was 'minimal experiment' replication from papers. **Tools for supervisors to be highly engaged with independent researchers** - The main reason I have stayed motivated was because Jonathan at Nottingham was literally able to respond to me quickly every time on email. Is there a toolkit / website that we could make for supervisors to manage large amounts of collaborators with strong feedback? - Communicating, and asking feedback with a supervisor is hard if you're an independnet. Superhuman has made it a bit easier to manage email, but I am wondering if there are easier ways of communicating that supervisors are willing to do. I asked collaborators to moved to discord but they said no. - I would like to interview supervisors and ask what is hard about them ## Key metrics - The number and span of problems that are in this respository - currently we have 3. - The number of active collaborations. ## Things Like This - https://www.gap-map.org/?sort=rank by Convergent Research - I think this is cool but it's very hard to get started on any one of these problems - They also don't have a clear contact for getting started - It's also hard to see what prerequisites you need for getting started - It's not geared towards independent researchers - No in-built collaboration or messaging platform