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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