on doing Real work

This piece is a good companion to our earlier discussion about slop.

The human author is on a quest for what's "real": real problems to work on, results from that work that really matter, etc. No easy feat.

Read the piece - really.

"Actually, let me disambiguate further. There’s real as a descriptor of actuality, as in a thing that exists in the world. There’s also real as a descriptor of quality, as in rigorous or substantive or internally consistent. Of course these two reals are related. Work should be both, as in, describe or create something that really exists, and to do it well. In fact, academia is pretty good at, or at least has some language for, what makes something real in those ways; in some sense, that is the entire premise of the academic institution, to train people and filter work product so that, collectively, we find some real phenomenon about the universe or about people. I think, though, that I’m in search of a secret, third real."