Research, as a discipline, is a valuable public service. If you’re interested in pursuing a question that nobody else has answered to your satisfaction, I encourage you to give it a shot. I think a lot of people are discouraged from doing this because it doesn’t fit into a clear career path outside of academia. But there’s no shortage of... See more

The world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response. ... let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.