How to Do Research Well: Deliberately Practice the Real Skills That Matter
No one truly teaches you how to do research. You're often given a desk, a pre-selected problem, and vague instructions to "create something new." Consequently, many people reverse-engineer the job based on visible outputs—papers, posts, announcements—learning only how to *appear* like a researcher rather than how to *become* one. True research capability is built from stacking small, trainable skills, nearly all of which can be developed through deliberate practice.
**Pick Your Own Problem:** Most researchers absorb problems from advisors or trends, lacking the underlying reasoning. Choosing a problem you genuinely care about, as John Schulman advises, leads to original work. Develop "taste" like a muscle: predict experiment outcomes, guess paper results from methods, and track which findings remain important over time.
**Upgrade Your Inputs:** Relying on shared reading lists (arXiv hot lists, filtered group chats) leads to unoriginal conclusions. Undervalued old literature often holds crucial insights (e.g., MoE, LSTM, backpropagation). Richard Sutton's "The Bitter Lesson" or Claude Shannon's 1952 talk on creative thinking are more predictive than lengthy modern surveys. Breadth matters as much as depth: draw from neuroscience, mechanism design, hardware knowledge, and honest statistics. Read papers directly, especially appendices and limitations sections.
**Write Everything Down:** As Paul Graham noted, writing exposes flaws in seemingly mature ideas. Writing is the cheapest defense against self-deception. Following Feynman's principle, Darwin programmatically wrote down facts contradicting his theory to combat memory bias. Maintain a detailed log of hypotheses, setups, predictions, results, and updated understandings. Reviewing past logs fosters essential humility.
marsbit06/15 12:25
