Creative in the Large
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- The researcher, like the artist, sets her own goals and decides how to
accomplish them.
- Engineers are generally given a specification, and told to
implement it at least cost.
- Alternatively, they are given an objective function, and told to
maximize it within budget.
- The goal is generally to solve some puzzle, or perhaps to measure
some parameter.
- Goals often come in a hierarchy.
- E.g., an economics professor must research economics, or she
will get a poor job evaluation. But within that, topic is freely
chosen.
- A researcher may have some large goal. To achieve this goal, they
will often set a sub-goal of decomposing the main problem into
parts.
- Eg, understanding unemployment.
- Decompose into frictional and involuntary unemployment.
- Involuntary unemployment may be further decomposed by gender or
type of work, and so on.
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