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Comment by casualscience | Hacker News Reader

Much of the foundational science we learn about in the history books was done by bored rich people. Becoming a bored rich person is still a great strategy if you want to do foundational research. The risks you need to take in order to do that kind of work are too onerous for someone who needs a job to put food on the table.

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That's why I have high hopes for humanity once we get closer to post scarcity (if we ever get close). Sure..some people will just watch TV all day, but I'd expect I'd start sitting down with math books and eventually finally learn the stuff I never had the time for when trying to put food on the table.

The rich person life back in the day was having personal tutors at a young age teaching you Latin, Greek, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and so on. Then if you were really good you'd just work on whatever problems you fancied, while the rest of the family probably took care of the fortune. That's my very limited understanding for how it worked for some anyway. They would correspond with other scientists, but mostly focus on their work. There's some advantage to the university system, but the administrative beauracracy is intense. Writing government grants or proposals and so on is an enormous time suck. If you didn't need money, you could focus 100% on whatever you want.

I love sitting down an reading math books. Problem is, it's hard to do after a long day's work where I've been exercising my brain a lot. Especially when I have far more important and time sensitive things to do like cooking, eating, and cleaning up the messes I've made in the day. Sure, that doesn't take all the time, but between that and some time to be human, there's often not enough time + energy left. I think it is clear why so many people get so much knowledge when they're in school. Because your job is to learn. Why you can do so much in a PhD (sometimes, maybe not the best example) because you spend all day doing this. Now just imagine what OSS projects would be if people were doing it full time and not in addition to their jobs? Would the xz incident have happened? Would xz only have "two" maintainers?

The only person I know who successfully employed the "Bored rich person" strategy is Stephan Wolfram.

I very much doubt that Stephen Wolfram is bored.

Has he done any foundational science either ?

Yes.

Why is this downvoted? I agree: Yes. His Wiki page[1] says:

    > Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers. Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.

And:

    > In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.

As I understand, IAS is all about fundamental physics research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

You should watch his "live CEO'ing" videos for Mathematica. They're pretty good. He'll be personally testing something out for an upcoming release, something will break and he'll call up whoever was in charge of that function or module and start asking a bunch of questions.

hmm, I think the entire FIRE movement is basically about this, no? Some people want to just do gardening or whatever, but if your hobby is science, that's totally fine too. Not every kind of science can be done on the cheap, but basically any theoretical work can be.

Someone who needs a job to put food on the table is going to take 4-5 years off to do a PhD?

That doesn’t make sense. PhD salaries in most places can barely support one person , if that.

I think you and your parent comment are saying the same thing.

Well, if it is any help, the guy who made this forum once published a book with a collection of his essays. Various topics, including how to become a rich person, in what ways graduate studies are helpful in creating software. Might make sense of putting worldly things in this perspective.

I did so after college, had no money, parents were immigrants with no money but always told me to "follow my dreams". PhD payed enough to eat and live a decent life as a 20-something with no dependents. As I got older, I realized the financial burden I was taking, saw my family get into more and more financial trouble and I felt like a helpless selfish brat "chasing dreams" while my parents were trapped and fighting a losing battle... I finished as fast as I could and got a job in tech.

Those who are actually desperate to put food on the table are not going to spend extra years to finish as fast they can, they just leave. Or they don’t start in the first place.

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