Yes. The basic situation is that I figured out how the methods that Charles Spearman used to discover IQ can be used to shed a lot of light on many different psychology and sociology questions. This is what I was implicitly getting at in my sequence of posts on my Speed Dating Project, though I did a poor job contextualizing the results. IQ is by far the most robust construct to come out of psychology research, so this could in principle revolutionize social science (with a huge amount of work by many talented people).
Some people would say that psychology researchers used the methodology to discover the Big 5 Personality traits among other things, but the constructs that they developed are relatively weak because they haven't utilized the full power of Spearman's framework. See also Sarah Constantin's post A Yardstick for Smell: Thinking in PCA (she preempted me in recognizing the potential of the methods 4.5 years before I did, but I didn't fully understand what she was getting at at the time).
It's difficult to make such claims without coming across as grandiose and/or arrogant, so I should emphasize that I think that many LWers would be capable of doing such research with the right background and style of research, if they took Paul Graham and Steve Jobs' advice. The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck said:
In our acquisition of knowledge of the Universe ( whether mathematical or otherwise) that which renovates the quest is nothing more nor less than complete innocence. It is in this state of complete innocence that we receive everything from the moment of our birth. Although so often the object of our contempt and of our private fears, it is always in us. It alone can unite humility with boldness so as to allow us to penetrate to the heart of things, or allow things to enter us and taken possession of us.
This unique power is in no way a privilege given to "exceptional talents" - persons of incredible brain power (for example), who are better able to manipulate, with dexterity and ease, an enormous mass of data, ideas and specialized skills. Such gifts are undeniably valuable, and certainly worthy of envy from those who (like myself) were not so endowed at birth," far beyond the ordinary".
Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries " that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn't even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play.
[...]
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of 30 or 35 years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birth-right, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.
In my bioinformatics studies we did PCA in statistics 102 and I got the impression that it's a commonly used statistical tool. Do you think people generally do PCA wrong, or is your complaint that it's not used enough?
tl;dr: If you struggle with motivational problems, it's likely that the problem is not intrinsic to you, but instead that you haven't yet found work that you find very interesting.
How I discovered how to do great work
Last winter I did something that I had never done before. I spent ~1500 hours working on genuinely original scientific research.
I had done research for my PhD in pure math, but faced squarely, the problems that I worked on were of very little interest to anyone outside of the fields, and I was not very engaged with my research. Pure math is very heavily stacked with talent, and the low hanging fruit has been plucked, so unless you're one of the most talented people in the world, your prospects for doing anything other than derivative work are very poor.
What I did last fall was entirely different. As I trained to be a data scientist, I found that there's far more low hanging fruit in the field than there is in pure math, and found myself working on novel problems that are of broad interest almost immediately.
Having very high intrinsic motivation made a huge difference. I found myself spending all waking hours (~90 hours / week) working on it obsessively, almost involuntarily. Once I emerged, I realized that what I had done over the past ~3.5 months was far more significant than all of the other work that I had done over the span of my entire life combined. I was astonished to find myself having ascended to the pantheon of those who have made major contributions to human knowledge, something that I hadn't imagined possible in my wildest dreams.
The problem isn't "laziness"
Many of the most interesting people who I know are achieving at a level far below their potential. They often have major procrastination problems, and believe this to correspond to them having a character flaw of "laziness". I've become convinced that these people's problems don't come from them being insufficiently disciplined.
Their problems come from them spending their time trying to do work that they find boring. If you find your work boring, it's very likely that you should be doing something else.
References
My position is not unique to me: it's common to extremely high functioning people.
[1] Steve Jobs created Apple, which owns ~0.1%+ of the world's wealth. In his 2005 Stanford commencement address he said:
[2] Bill Thurston is one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. He formulated the geometrization conjecture, which subsumes the 100 year old Poincare conjecture, considered one of the ~7 most important unsolved problems. He describes his own character as follows:
[3] Scott Alexander / Yvain is widely regarded as a great writer. Political celebrity Ezra Klein characterized his blog as fantastic. Scott wrote:
[4] Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y-Combinator, a seed funder with a portfolio of combined value exceeding $30 billion (with investees including Dropbox, AirBnB and Stripe). In What You'll Wish You Had Known he wrote