Autonomy in academia depends entirely on the field, the funding situation, and the advisor. If you choose wisely, you can build a highly autonomous career. But it is hard for the inexperienced to figure out how to make the right choices.

This may interest you. http://lifehacker.com/this-chart-shows-how-computer-literate...

Interesting how polarized Japan is.

It has the most users at level 3 proficiency, but almost twice the amount of people who aren't able to use computers at all, compared to, say, USA.

Japan have a larger percentage of older people over 30% are aged 60+ and over 12% are aged 75+ one of the major reasons

Or, someone in the first group criticizing observers who fail to distinguish among groups before making predictions.

Those with deepest insights on this topic are least likely to post.

Or they're saying "We're personally tired of the boring but profitable business of selling ads. Let's replace ourselves and focus on the cool stuff."

Or they're saying "Let's getrid of 'Don't be evil' thing and do something evil with different name"

This is the way we deprecate those more talented than ourselves. We say, "He may be able to fly -- but how is his free throw percentage?"

I wasn't trying to deprecate him. He was obviously super talented and it was a privilege for a nobody like me to work with someone of this caliber. But my point is that we should be careful with 'cults of personality'.

Honest question: Is the headline linkbait? I read the entire interview but I didn't see where he really explained why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid.

Upvote. Please give me a way to use this to read academic papers!

I'm working on it — https://github.com/j6k4m8/squirt-academic

But I won't really be able to dig in until after this weekend. Feel free to contribute, PR, list requests, etc.

I'm an academic who is 13 years into his career. I see my job as consisting of three phases: 1) find important, unsolved problems. 2) find convincing answers to these problems. 3) communicate the answers to people who can use them. I usually get to organize my day around these principles. I feel very satisfied with my career.

I'm also in a field that has low financial barriers to doing research. The lab model that is predominant in the natural sciences is very very different.

I admire this man for his willingness to stand by his convictions.