One important factor of a PhD that I don’t see explicitly called out in this post is what I’d describe as “research taste”: how to pick what problems to work on. I think this is one of if not the most important part of a PhD. You can only get so much faster at executing routine tasks or editing papers. But the difference between the most and mediam importance research problems can be huge.
Andrej Karpathy has a nice discussion of this:
When it comes to choosing problems you’ll hear academics talk about a mystical sense of “taste”.
It’s a real thing. When you pitch a potential problem to your adviser you’ll either see their face contort, their eyes rolling, and their attention drift, or you’ll sense the excitement in their eyes as they contemplate the uncharted territory ripe for exploration. In that split second a lot happens: an evaluation of the problem’s importance, difficulty, its sexiness, its historical context (and possibly also its fit to their active grants). In other words, your adviser is likely to be a master of the outer loop and will have a highly developed sense of taste for problems. During your PhD you’ll get to acquire this sense yourself.
Clearly we might care about some of these criteria (like grants) less than others, but I think the same idea holds. I’d also recommend Chris Olah’s exercises on developing research taste.
You can get research taste by doing research at all, it doesn’t have to be a PhD. You may argue that PIs have very good research taste that you can learn from. But their taste is geared towards satisfying academic incentives! It might not be good taste for what you care about. As Chris Olah points out, “Your taste is likely very influenced by your research cluster”.
Taste is huge! I was trying to roll this under my “Process” category, where taste manifests in choosing the right project, choosing the right approach, choosing how to sequence experiments, etc etc. Alas, not a lossless factorization
These exercises look quite neat, thanks for sharing!
One important factor of a PhD that I don’t see explicitly called out in this post is what I’d describe as “research taste”: how to pick what problems to work on. I think this is one of if not the most important part of a PhD. You can only get so much faster at executing routine tasks or editing papers. But the difference between the most and mediam importance research problems can be huge.
Andrej Karpathy has a nice discussion of this:
Clearly we might care about some of these criteria (like grants) less than others, but I think the same idea holds. I’d also recommend Chris Olah’s exercises on developing research taste.
You can get research taste by doing research at all, it doesn’t have to be a PhD. You may argue that PIs have very good research taste that you can learn from. But their taste is geared towards satisfying academic incentives! It might not be good taste for what you care about. As Chris Olah points out, “Your taste is likely very influenced by your research cluster”.
Strong +1 to this. I think I have observed people who have really good academic research taste but really bad EA research taste
Taste is huge! I was trying to roll this under my “Process” category, where taste manifests in choosing the right project, choosing the right approach, choosing how to sequence experiments, etc etc. Alas, not a lossless factorization
These exercises look quite neat, thanks for sharing!