The independent researcher (2018)

I clean offices for three hours a day to pay for my research. Beats using my brain for something somebody else is interested in, but I am not! Each time somebody buys my book [1], I convert it mentally into hours of cleaning :-)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abstractionlogic.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abstractionlogic.com</a>

While I dream of unshackling my research programs from the bureaucracy of the institutions they’re tied to, I do very much enjoy having an actual budget, paycheck, and health insurance. With all the chaos currently befalling the academic research community, I’m curious what alternative models exist, or could potentially emerge, to support independent research at the $500k - $5m level.

I am an independent researcher currently funded by a part-time job and a very supportive spouse. I play with algorithms and have discovered a new fast Fourier transform and a neural network growth+training algorithm that doesn&#x27;t use gradient descent. Ideally, some benefactor would pay me to publish my findings and code, for the good of public knowledge, but my attempts to find such funding have fallen flat. Kind of funny that researchers can get funding for future work (without guarantees) but I can&#x27;t find funding for an interesting discovery that is already done (there are issues with verification of the work, but it seems like a short-term NDA would take care of that).<p>I have resorted to partnering with a law firm, who, for a large cut of any revenue, will do all the IP work and &quot;marketing&quot; (i.e. contacting legal departments at companies that might be interested in the algorithm). This is not ideal, but is so far the only path presented that may help me recoup wages lost by not working full-time for several years. I figure if I retain control of the IP (and make money through licensing), I can make sure scientists and researchers have free usage rights.<p>If the IP thing works, I can hopefully continue independent research. If it works well, I hope to self-fund more research without the IP shenanigans. Otherwise, it is back to full-time employment.

Suppose an independent researcher with a background in linguistics solves P vs NP. Unlikely but not impossible. Who on earth is going to take a look at their paper? No one credible, that’s for sure.<p>So even if someone has the funding and the will for independent research, the problem remains of confirming the validity of their research. This is a research problem in its own right. Ideally we have a system of peer review to validate research, but in practice we use a weak form of argument by authority as a loose proxy for reproducibility. This works better for some fields than others. I know I immediately go Scott Aaronson’s blog to determine whether some new “quantum breakthrough” is actually plausible. It’s a decent proxy in this field for correctness. But psychology? Much more difficult to find a good proxy.<p>Luckily I think mathematics is already moving in a direction that will eliminate the validation problem. Think you’ve solved the Collatz conjecture? Submit your Lean proof to an automated proof checking system hosted on a university website and if it validates, someone famous is going to take a look at your proof even if you never finished high school. We’re not at that point yet, but it’s inching closer. The group that proved the value of BB(5) received a lot of serious consideration of their work despite their unconventional backgrounds due to having a formally validated proof on hand. Without that proof? Hard to say whether the claim would have been reviewed.

Here&#x27;s the downside of being an experimental particle physicist, while our theorist colleagues famously just need paper, pencil and a trash can (and perhaps not even the latter), it is hard to be a gentleman experimentalist without very involved lab equipment.

This is the dream. But the author even mentions the reality<p>&gt;Having tried this both ways, I can say that having a steady salary (and health insurance!) allows me to do much better work than when I was worried about my next source of funding.<p>So yes, there are, in theory, no gates of knowledge or funding. But overall this reads as a lucky person passionately encouraging those considering the same path, but from a very lucky position of survivorship bias.

It&#x27;s funny how this was written in 2018 but thanks to AI in 2025 this is becoming increasingly accessible.<p>In fields like AI research, tools such as Cursor and Claude&#x2F;GPT are effectively mini-research assistants that help refine hypotheses and accelerate coding experiments.<p>While fields requiring expensive experimental resources (psychology, medicine, physics) remain challenging, even these areas benefit from AI-powered analysis of observational data.<p>The barriers to meaningful contribution are lower than ever.

&gt; Speaking from my own experience, funding opportunities are often hiding in plain sight, or can be cobbled together from a number of places. I funded my initial research with a grant from the Ford Foundation, without any prior connections or RFPs. We found each other through someone I’d cold emailed. The grants weren’t big, but they were enough, carrying me through the following year until I joined GitHub.<p>I&#x27;m curious about others&#x27; experiences with research funding. My company has participated in grants that stemmed from the broader economic impact of crypto. While crypto isn&#x27;t generally viewed positively on HN, it has contributed to cryptography research, supporting topics like homomorphic encryption and ZK.

I want to try to become an independent researcher, when the funding for my PhD position runs out.<p>My idea for financing this is finding a few companies who pay a retainer fee to not only get direct easy access to my expertise when they need it, but are also interested in the results of the kind of work I&#x27;m doing when they don&#x27;t need anything specific from me.<p>I work on supply chain security with systems like Nix, and recently put up a first version of a website: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groundry.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groundry.org&#x2F;</a>

Another example I’m reminded of:<p>David Silver sold his video game company, made a good amount of money and then decided to do a PhD in Alberta in Reinforcement Learning under Rich Sutton way before it was cool to work in RL.<p>If people have other modern examples, please share them!