head in the sky; feet on the ground

[gusl]

One important dimension in which researchers vary is whether they are a head-in-the-sky or a feet-on-the-ground type.

I have always leaned towards being a head-in-the-sky type¹: this is evident from my attraction to Philosophy of Science and logic and semantics, and all the time I've spent dreaming about things like the semantic web, and similarly far-fetched ideas. Head-in-the-sky work tends to be hard to evaluate.

Feet-on-the-ground types are concerned with real performance, and tend to not be satisfied unless they have a working system. Crackpots don't find a home among them.

Somewhere in between, there are research programs that involve rigorous but unrealistic modeling (e.g. a few logicians I met in Amsterdam), whose work is (rightly) ignored by empirical scientists (psychologists, economists, etc.²).

My experience has been that I work best on projects with feet-on-the-ground goals, with feet-on-the-ground advisors, because they prevent me from wasting time with unrealizable ideas.

In Amsterdam, my Master's thesis advisor was very much a head-in-the-sky type. My thesis had the grandiose goal of implementing a model of what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science", but it unfortunately (and, in hindsight, predictably) amounted to nothing, because it was based on an unworkable idea. The only lesson learned was that the analogy between parse-trees and logical-derivation-trees seems to be fruitless.

All my research since then has been with concrete machine learning systems. I still have a lot to learn, but since making this switch, my progress (in terms of making a real contribution to science) has been satisfactory.

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¹ Ironically, many of my head-in-the-sky ideas have been motivated by my skepticism (a feet-in-the-ground trait).

² I hear that many theoretical economists are guilty of the same sin.

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

You can read the thesis (with abstract and everything) here. Nowadays, I consider it garbage.