“Reading ‘too much’ is possibly the optimal strategy if you’re mainly trying to skill up (e.g., through increased domain knowledge), rather than have direct impact now. But also bear in mind that becoming more efficient at direct impact is itself a form of skilling up, and this pushes back toward ‘writing early’ as the better extreme.”
Two thoughts on this section:
Additional (obvious) arguments for writing early: producing stuff builds career capital, and is often a better way to learn than just reading.
I want to disentangle ‘aiming for direct impact’ and ‘writing early’. You can write without optimising hard for direct impact, and I claim that more junior people should do so (on the current margin). There’s some failure mode (which I fell into myself) where junior researchers try to solve hugely important problems, because they really want to make direct impact. But this leads them to work on problems that are wicked, poorly scoped, or methodologically fraught. Which ends with them getting stuck, demoralised, and not producing anything.
Often, I think it’s better for junior researchers to still aim to write/produce stuff (bc of the arguments above/in your piece), but not be optimising hard for direct impact with that writing. Picking more tractable problems and less important ones.
Love it, thanks for the post!
Two thoughts on this section:
Additional (obvious) arguments for writing early: producing stuff builds career capital, and is often a better way to learn than just reading.
I want to disentangle ‘aiming for direct impact’ and ‘writing early’. You can write without optimising hard for direct impact, and I claim that more junior people should do so (on the current margin). There’s some failure mode (which I fell into myself) where junior researchers try to solve hugely important problems, because they really want to make direct impact. But this leads them to work on problems that are wicked, poorly scoped, or methodologically fraught. Which ends with them getting stuck, demoralised, and not producing anything.
Often, I think it’s better for junior researchers to still aim to write/produce stuff (bc of the arguments above/in your piece), but not be optimising hard for direct impact with that writing. Picking more tractable problems and less important ones.