Johanna

On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today. For many research questions, it requires far more skills, expensive equipment, and a large team to make progress today.

For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain... See more

You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your... See more

Any time you conduct what you would consider to be a “meeting” with someone else, take minutes! That is, write down what happened in bullet-point form, so those remote team members who couldn’t be there can benefit from — or at least hear about — whatever happened in sequence.

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. (...) By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to... See more

Criticizing others is a way of building trust. In a three-way friendship with X, Y, and Z, if X establishes that he and Y can together criticize Z, that may boost trust between Y and X, and also increase X’s relative power in the group. Criticizing “Charles Manson” doesn’t do this — you’ve got to take some chances with your targets.

Knowledge is a non-rival good. You don't loose anything if more people have it. In fact, I would even argue the opposite. Knowledge compounds. The more people have it, the more progress we'll make. If you are publishing a paper and only a handful people understand it, the impact of your findings will be limited to what these, highly specialized... See more