Benjamin Todd

Turing made no money from the discovery of the computer, whereas today it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is because the benefits of research come a long time in the future, but can't usually be protected by patents.

In fact, the more fundamental the research, the harder it is to commercialize.

So all else equal, we'd expect fundamental research to be more neglected than applied research and therefore higher impact.

On the other hand, applied issues can be more urgent.

Breakthroughs like the microscope can let us make fundamental breakthroughs faster.

So it's hard to say whether applied or fundamental research has a higher impact on average.

So in theory, research can be very high impact.

Does research actually help with the most pressing problems facing the world today?

We think it does.

When you look at the problems we're most concerned about, like preventing future pandemics or reducing risks from AI systems, many are mainly constrained by a need for additional research.

For example, research could help us develop ways to decrease the time it takes to go from a novel pathogen to a safe, widely distributed vaccine.

Alternatively, technical machine learning research could help us build safeguards into AI systems to prevent dangerous behavior.

Like communication, research is especially promising when you're a very good fit, because the best researchers achieve much more than the median.

Most papers only have one citation, whereas the top 0.1% of papers have over a thousand citations.

And when we did a case study on biomedical research, remarks like this were typical.

One good person can cover the ground of five, and I'm not exaggerating.

If you might be a top 20% researcher in a topic that's relevant to a pressing problem area, then it's likely to be one of your most impactful options.

And if you might be exceptional in an academic field, maybe top few percent, even if you can't see now how it'll be useful, that's an option you should probably seriously consider.

As we saw earlier, Dr. Nalan helped to save millions of lives with a simple innovation, giving patients with diarrhea water mixed with salt and sugar.