This is one that someone else has implemented already, but an interesting idea nonetheless: WikiYou – the place where anyone, no matter how unimportant, can write a biography about themselves.
I’m not signing up; I have my own domain for this.
Certain people function as “social magnets”, for lack of a better phrase. They’ll walk into a room and bring the party with them. (In Soviet Russia, the Party walks YOU into a room! …Sorry, couldn’t resist). They tend to attract people in two topologies: mesh (small groups of people interacting with each other) or star (everyone talking to the “magnet”). When they walk into a quiet room and their entourage begins to build, the former inhabitants of that room (who are almost certainly all introverts) will look for an excuse to leave.
This takes place in cities too, except that now we have groups rather than individuals:
Suppose a group of, say, famous musicians decides to buy houses in a specific area (say, Rumson, NJ). The entire town will attract fans of the group, who will find common ground interacting with each other about the musicians, or will interact with the musicians themselves.
This is a recurring motif on all levels of social organization, and might be worth thinking about in more depth.
Finally, I am at peace again. Having completed all work recently set before me very rapidly, I no longer worry that the rejection of the elite will condemn me to mediocrity. Quite the contrary; it is the same difference that makes me unappealing to the elite that empowers me.
Because my ideas arise unconsciously, I can generate as many as I want; they do not inhibit conscious thought. Because I view the constraints of reality as arbitrary, I can both mold the ideas to fit reality… and mold reality to fit my ideas. Because I manage my time effectively and complete tasks quickly, I can pursue as many ideas as I want and study as many things as I wish. And because I am quite intelligent, hard working, and a gifted writer, I can turn these ideas into papers extremely rapidly (now in only a few hours), particularly if I am able to forego the fluff that is included in most publications… but only if I see the need.
Because my approach is universal, I can carry ideas from field to field, rapidly turning incremental advances in one field into revolutionary ideas in another.
Because I lack the training that the elite would provide me, I am far more open to alternate possibilities that are erased by entrenched knowledge. Because I have yet to meet a significant educational challenge, I am free to pursue whatever interests me after completing my tasks.
Because I was shunned all my life by society, I became self-sufficient. Because I am self-sufficient, I am not constrained by the views of others, or the fads of a “community”, scientific or otherwise. Because I adhere strongly to a well-developed code of morality and integrity, I need not doubt my own motives when confronted by adversity.
Because logic dominates my mind, I see patterns in the most chaotic of systems, including human behavior on all scales. Because I studied computer science, I know precisely how to optimize a system; how to remodel or deform the network of actions that make up the system while leaving the underlying structure untouched – how to reform society without damaging it. Because I was a programming prodigy and have a significant degree of mathematical talent, I can simulate nearly any system I choose, in software or in theory, to evaluate probable outcomes of each decision I may make.
Because I hold no particular love for the status quo, I am free to change it.
And because the elite has cast me out, they have lost the ability to influence my path. By refusing to walk beside me, they have chosen to merely follow.
My self-confidence is back. And I will no longer allow unjustified rejection, or anything short of a display of superior competence, to undermine it.
Sharks can detect magnetism.
So why can’t we set up “invisible fences” around beaches using magnetic fields?
My brother, who is red-green colorblind, alerted me to an interesting phenomenon: he, and apparently many other people, cannot tell whether specific fruit (particularly bananas) are ripe.
Yet no one has contrived a device to perform this function, as trivial as it would be to detect the color of the fruit!
Not only am I finished ahead of schedule, but I fixed one of our previous techniques as well.
If you need to sacrifice sleep to meet a deadline, something is wrong either with your rate of progress or the realism of the deadline. I for one have never and will never sacrifice a night of sleep to work of any sort. It would come out shoddy at best.
And I’m not only meeting but exceeding my deadlines, once again, as unrealistic as they might be.
Most of the hard work being done in the lab seems to fall on me (especially right before a conference deadline), but I somehow seem to be left out of the research that will actually result in publications (and when I am included in it, no one seems to care; there’s a journal paper I’ve wanted to publish since January that we keep having to add “just one more thing” to). The only major attempt that we made to publish something in my first year was a piece of research that I knew from the start would not yield good results… and by major, I mean I was told I should fix our results and write a paper up 3 days before the MICCAI conference deadline. It was rejected, of course.
Not that I particularly care whether my research is published so long as it’s available, but if I’m going to be forced to play the game, I’m going to have to play by its rules or I’ll just end up even more alienated from society.
I’m rapidly losing patience with the whole thing. Like algorithms, research in general is something I’d really like to do, but I’ll have to accept the fact that social pressure is going to make it too difficult to succeed in this area.
And if I can’t succeed, I don’t even want to start.
I just realized a great many things about science, and can chalk them all up to this: A very large majority of scientists are simply incapable of doing proper research – science in the true sense of the word; in the sense that it was practiced by Galileo, Newton, Watson, and Crick.
So they write. They write and write, and produce mountains of garbage. This garbage is published because it’s become the status quo, and other researchers marvel at how much trash a particular researcher managed to spew out in a particular publication, or how many times this process has been repeated with a few words shuffled around.
When they find graduate students, bright young minds lacking only training, they train them to spew out more trash of their own (usually with the advisor’s name attached – this apprenticeship is not an altruistic one) so they’ll find good jobs as academics, where they can perpetuate the cycle.
The reason that science advances at all is because every so often, someone comes along who can (and, more importantly, will) think, who can experiment, and who actually had the freedom to do just that. This doesn’t take anything extraordinary – just patience, training, a small amount of intelligence, lots of time, and complete intellectual freedom.
But maybe that is extraordinary these days.
I am about to attempt to publish four papers simultaneously. At least three of them will probably be accepted. I’d say “wish me luck”, but it’s a little late for that.