- I wish the original title was kept ("How to win a best paper award"). It seems a good list for that.
Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".
I would hope that would be of the most unimportant part of science, totally irrelevant to what's important and what matters. But maybe that's not true today.
- For non-CS people – if you're a little confused by "conference paper", CS is a little idiosyncratic in that papers are often primarily disseminated through conferences, rather than independent journals. The advice is good in general, though!
- Best bit:
Put in an unreasonable amount of effort
> Earlier I made an analogy to being an explorer; here's another I like even more. Think of yourself as a wildlife photographer. Obviously you need to be in the right place (you won't get a great picture of anything from your couch) and you need to be skilled at your craft. But once you've met those preconditions, the way to get the best picture is to just spend an unreasonable amount of time waiting for exactly the right circumstances to arise.
by Xcelerate
2 subcomments
- I’ve always thought the issue was a bit less “Find the interesting research problem” and more “Find the resources, network, or skills that get you into the position of being able to work on the interesting research problem.”
If you asked a bunch of researchers working on the “boring” stuff to predict what the hot papers of the year will be about, do we really think they’ll be that far off base? I’m not talking about groundbreaking or truly novel ideas that seem to come out of nowhere, but rather the high impact research that’s more typical of a field.
Even in big tech companies, it’s quite obvious what the interesting stuff to work on is. But there are limited spots and many more people who want those spots than are available.
by cgearhart
3 subcomments
- I often find this kind of advice too vague to really be useful. “Have taste” in the problems you work on isn’t very actionable. (Unless perhaps you list examples of good and bad taste.)
I’ll admit that I may just be immature at research as almost all my experience has either been attempting to replicate research or to put it into practice in production systems.
by batterylake
0 subcomment
- Very insightful! I found the section on killing papers to be a helpful reminder. As a Ph.D. student, this can be particularly challenging as your environment expects somewhat steady progress (annual reviews, advisor meetings, etc.), and you're encouraged to finish papers rather than starting over.
This might also be of interest: https://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/
by yodsanklai
2 subcomments
- The actual title is "How to win a best paper award", which is quite different from doing "important research that matters". Most researchers work in very niche and specialized fields, sometimes for their whole life. They grant themselves all sorts of awards within their community, but it doesn't mean their research "matters".
- The article was so stunningly sanewashed & level-headed, I struggled to identify what in it may cause disagreement, or otherwise justify the label of 'opinionated'.
But the comments have proven me wrong.
by JanisErdmanis
2 subcomments
- > Another reason ignoring the literature can be helpful is that sometimes a bunch of work tries to solve some problem, and so everyone assumes it must be hard---just because no one has solved it yet, even though no one has really tried a fundamentally different approach
How does one approach collaborators in this situation? Like, hey, I have this idea that solves the problem you have been trying to solve in a fundamentally different way that invalidates all the legacy approaches you have invested in, BTW. My emails that follow this spirit tend to get ghosted.
- This is an exceptional read.
by rakovsky89
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by ClaudioAnthrop
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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