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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

If you're doing something as a hobbyist you think is legitimate, hitting up your local university and asking to run it by an expert should probably be step 2 and at that point you have your endorsement.

You can just email them or even hijack office hours if they don't respond.

Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me. Meeting the next Srinivasa Ramanujan is a dream like winning the lotto.

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Sure, but there's a huge difference between the targeted "hey I read your latest paper and I had a few questions about section 2.4" and "Dear Entire Physics Department: Einstein is Wrong! Here's my book". I honestly don't think I've ever received the former from a non-scientist (I'm not famous, so go figure) but we definitely got a lot of the later.

We also had some of the later case dropping into our seminars. For the most part people found them kind of entertaining.

of course. Unfortunately many decent people don't feel welcome. Pre-covid I used to attend many academic seminars out of sheer curiosity for the subject material. I didn't have any pet project or theories, just a quest for academic rigor in a subject. I of course had questions, but I guess that's the differentiation between crank and non-crank: the crank believes they know the answers and the non-crank isn't even confident they really know the question. I will readily accept that I'm some rare outlier ... I didn't really meet anyone like myself.

Yeah it's too bad if people don't feel welcome, attending academic seminars outside your field can be so much fun, all the more so if you ask some questions! People look at you funny when you ask e.g. "what is an M-class star?" in an astronomy lecture, but as long as you have a friend who can say "oh, he's just a physicist" they get over it.

> Sure, but there's a huge difference between the targeted "hey I read your latest paper and I had a few questions about section 2.4" and "Dear Entire Physics Department: Einstein is Wrong! Here's my book". I honestly don't think I've ever received the former from a non-scientist (I'm not famous, so go figure) but we definitely got a lot of the later.

Well, I know quite some people who left academia because they became victims of academic politics, or just had enormous difficulties getting their employment contracts extended, despite doing great research. I get research papers from this kind of people somewhat regularly. All of them look at least very plausible to me.

When I was still in academia, I honestly only know these "crackpot stories" from narrations (dark fairy tales); I never got any "crackpot papers", even though the particular research area is said to be prone to crackpots (perhaps the reason was that crackpots need some basic knowledge about the respective research area to realize that the colleagues of the institute actually do research in an area that is very related to their crackpot papers, so they never sent their crackpot papers to my colleagues).

I'd also imagine it depends on where you're stationed. Physics at Princeton probably would see more of this than physics at, say UIUC

Both excellent academic institutions but one is you know, mentioned in James Bond and superhero movies.

Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me.

I will say this: I've never asked for an arXiv endorsement before, but I have cold emailed professors before to inquire about certain aspects of their work. Not often mind you, but once or twice. And I've told this story here before at some point, but the response I got the first time around was overwhelmingly positive. I'm pretty sure the guy was thrilled that anybody was interested enough to read his book and send a question about it. He sent the data I was looking for, a pre-print of another related forthcoming paper from his group, and a standing invitation to reach out with additional queries in the future.

So based on that n=1 anecdote, I feel pretty good that at least some academic types would be happy to provide an arXiv endorsement to somebody doing work related to theirs. It's no guarantee of course, but my hunch is that if one is doing non-crank work, they can probably find an endorser with some effort.

I've done this multiple times to great results.

People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.

I was a research associate about 15 years ago. The top tier CS researcher at that leading university payscale was something like $70k, that was the cap out.

> People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.

It's pretty good in the US. I just looked up a randomly chosen assistant professor at a public university and they make $200k. I only looked up one person's salary so this isn't cherry picked.

I'm not saying that they're in it for the money. I'm only disagreeing with the part where you said that the pay is garbage.

It's not an infinite amount of money and it's less than industry, but it seems not garbage considering job prestige, job benefits, etc.

That's legit. Nobody in my CS lab made money like that. Maybe they stopped paying terrible because when I left that lab I made double the salary at half the effort

I'm sorry at what university was this assistant professor getting 200k? I clearly need to find better universities :)

You can look up all the UC positions here:

https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

A lot of professors are making over 200k, but most that I knew were around 150k.

(You can also find all the 5M positions, usually head coach)

This was a professor at UCLA.

When I was a grad student, I'd get exactly the kind of inquiries you are talking about just because my email was on the website. Professors got even more. One emeritus collected the most colorful work and stored it on a shelf in the institute's hallway and labeled it "black physics" [1].

These kind of requests have an extremely low signal to noise ratio (as in: I never heard once coming something out of this) and no one wastes their time with this. I also think it's basically impossible to contribute to my former field, theoretical physics, without a formal education. Sorry, I know it's not fair.

If you're a just a curious layman with an honest question that doesn't imply you solved the world's most difficult problems, you may get a few pointers to ressources, but I wouldn't expect a research collaboration.

[1] https://www.rnz.de/region/heidelberg_artikel,-Uni-Heidelberg... (sadly paywalled now)

You're in theoretical physics, that's quack central. The level of advanced math you need mastery over to make contributions in that field is practically unachievable for people without formal training.

I'd imagine the kind of outside inquiry that would be possible is if someone found a new computation model for some raw data that successfully passed rigorous tests and then did new feature X.

Good point, we should really differentiate the field. And at least for me it was a real fucking challenge even with formal training, I can tell you that.

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