For everyone who wants to know what this discussion is all about, the forbidden idea, here is something that does not resemble it except for its stupefying conclusions:
There's this guy who has the idea that it might be rational to rob banks to donate the money to charities. He tells a friend at a bank about it who freaks out and urges him to shut up about it. Unfortunately some people who also work at the local bank overheard the discussion and it gave them horrible nightmares. Since they think the idea makes sense they now believe that everyone will starve to death if they don't rob banks and donate the money to charities that try to feed the world. The friend working at the bank now gets really upset and tells the dude with the idea about this. He argues that this shows how dangerous the idea is and that his colleagues and everyone else who's told about the idea and who is working for a bank might just rob their own banks.
An inconvenient detail here, that makes the idea slightly less likely, is that it isn't talking about the local bank in your town, or any bank on Earth at all, but one located in the system of Epsilon Eridani. And the friend and people with nightmares are not working for some bank but a charity concerned with space colonization. To conclude that the idea is dangerous, they don't just have to accept its overall premise but also that there are banks over at Epsilon Eridani, that it is worth it to rob them, that one can build the necessary spaceships to reach that place and so on. In other words you have to be completely nuts and should seek help if you seriously believe that the idea is dangerous.
And what is the secondary problem?
The problem is not the idea itself but that there obviously are people crazy enough to take it serious and who might commit to crazy things due to their beliefs. The problem is that everyone is concerned with space colonization but that we don't want to have it colonized by some freaks with pirate spaceships to rob alien banks because of some crazy idea.
P.S. Any inconsistency in the above story is intended to resemble the real idea.
I am familiar with the forbidden idea, and don't think this analogy resembles it at all.
Ideally, I'd like to save the world. One way to do that involves contributing academic research, which raises the question of what's the most effective way of doing that.
The traditional wisdom says if you want to do research, you should get a job in a university. But for the most part the system seems to be set up so that you first spend a long time working for someone else and research their ideas, after which you can lead your own group, but then most of your time will be spent on applying for grants and other administrative trivia rather than actually researching the interesting stuff. Also, in Finland at least, all professors need to also spend time doing teaching, so that's another time sink.
I suspect I would have more time to actually dedicate on research, and I could get doing it quicker, if I took a part-time job and did the research in my spare time. E.g. the recommended rates for a freelance journalist in Finland would allow me to spend a week each month doing work and three weeks doing research, of course assuming that I can pull off the freelance journalism part.
What (dis)advantages does this have compared to the traditional model?
Some advantages:
Some disadvantages:
EDIT: Note that while I certainly do appreciate comments specific to my situation, I posted this over at LW and not Discussion because I was hoping the discussion would also be useful for others who might be considering an academic path. So feel free to also provide commentary that's US-specific, say.