An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters
nicholas.carlini.com

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61 points

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mad

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7 hours ago

12 comments

JanisErdmanis ・ 2 minutes ago

> 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.

nxobject ・ 2 hours ago

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!

  • bananaflag ・ 42 minutes ago

    Yeah, and I always find the phrase "publish in a conference" to sound vaguely oxymoron-ish.

batterylake ・ an hour ago

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/

Xcelerate ・ 5 hours ago

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.

  • bo1024 ・ 3 hours ago

    Interesting. I don't quite agree. It's one thing to predict what general topics will be hot and popular this year. But that's not the same as what particular research problem will be important and have lasting influence.

    There are a few kinds of important research. One is solving a well-defined, well-known problem everyone wants to solve but nobody knows how. Another is proposing a new problem, or a new formulation of it, that people didn't realize was important.

    There is also highly-cited research that isn't necessarily important, such as being the next paper to slightly lower a benchmark through some tweaks (you get cited by all the subsequent papers that slightly lower the benchmark even further).

  • hyperman1 ・ 32 minutes ago

    In the book The Cuckoo's egg, Cliff Stoll talks to I think Luiz Alvares. I don't have the book handy here, but Alvarez basically told him to nit get distracted by grants, bosses, ... Here is interesting science to do, so go for it. Just run faster than the rest of the world.

    In a way, it was a sidetrack of the book, but for me the attitude speaking from that text was interesting and inspiring. When I could pull it off, it tended to work.

cjbarber ・ 2 hours ago

This is an exceptional read.

yodsanklai ・ 2 hours ago

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".