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.
nxobject
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!
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Xcelerate
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.
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batterylake
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.
> 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.
yodsanklai
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".
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.
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!
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.
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/
> 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.
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".
mandatory: 'You and Your research' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776480
This is an exceptional read.