A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not.
But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x.
Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way.
It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself.
If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand.
Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not.
In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost.
PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it.
And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.
In most cases, successful inventors of the past didn't have access to capital either. It often took decades of relentless dedication for their ideas to come to life. Sometimes, they even straight up risked their lives (like doctors trying out new therapies on themselves). You could say that's unfair, but it kind of makes sense - this way, only people with a singular focus and huge drive make it to the other end - and it's precisely the kind of people who are most fit to be leading the progress anyway (i.e. it's better for everyone when people who get to do cancer research are obsessed about curing cancer and not just very smart, normal people).
Another advantage of strong individual focus is you can end up owning your own inventions rather than having them assigned away to some extent.
Living off your own technology is not for everyone. Most innovation is not ground-breaking or is so marginal that it actually needs to be highly leveraged to achieve the benefits of scale. Without a large research group to support it is possible to get by on the lesser advances, and if momentum can be built from that it can allow the time and space to gravitate to more potentially impactful approaches compared to modern or established institutional trends.
In many situations it can be a lot easier and less costly & time-consuming to invent another sure-fire energy-saving device for instance, than it would be to risk the resources seeking eminence. You can end up with an unfair advantage at the inventing itself compared to those who divert any effort away from the task, simply because you can not afford to take that kind of risk.
You also have the unfair disadvantage relative to those who basically just toot their own horn, but everybody has that.
A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not.
But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x.
Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way.
It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself.
If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand.
Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not.
In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost.
PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it.
And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.