When I’m writing I sometimes get stuck trying to read what’s been written on the topic before.
I think often that’s driven by an earnest interest/hope/curiosity (looking to learn or read something exciting), or wanting to scope down the thing I’m writing by linking to past stuff (or just driven by remembering a piece that I really appreciated and then getting nerd-sniped along the way). Sometimes it’s more directed (noticing a crux, trying to see if I can look that up) (in general I want to do more of this one, relative to the rest). I still think e.g. that linking is often useful, but overall IMO I do the above too much. (I think actually maybe there’s a form of planning fallacy at play, where I often feel like this will be a 5-minute task but actually it too frequently turns into a 2-hour detour...[1])
There are two patterns that seem more harmful, at least in my case:
(a) a defensive move; wanting to check if what is actuallynew or completely accurate or somehow silly.… , or (b) just following some sort of “path of least resistance” gradient when I”m trying to think about something complicated and it’s easier to go and read about something vaguely related to the topic (or about what the hell is going on with diffusion models or whatever’s on my mind).
I want to think more about (b) later. For now I just noticed myself wanting to post a quick note re the defensive stuff in (a) — the “is this really contributing something new?” point in particular. IMO:
Very little is “actually new” the way people look for
Relatedly IMO we have a pretty bad sense for what is and isn’t “the frontier”. For one thing, some of the most useful pieces people can write are about ideas that feelobvious to them (because they’ve figured them out, it’s clicked, etc.), but which the people around them totally don’t get (i.e. which are on some relevant frontier). (Semi-related.)
It’s often really useful to say things that are really not new, or say things more than once (related)
(especially if you are in conversation with a group of people who share some interests/… with you, and the reason you’re bringing up something “not actually new” is the fact that you usefully noticed that this is relevant here[2])
I also think orienting towards “help people around me (and myself) understand this thing they’re missing (even if that process doesn’t look like ‘push the frontier’!)” is often just a really useful way to prompt oneself when doing research
More generally, IMO orienting (especially right away!) towards outputs that are higher status in various ways seems pretty unhelpful. At least personally, this moves me out of a natural/free/“real” mode of trying to deeply understand and explain — imagining talking to someone I can imagine — and towards a abstract/ far- /fake? mode in which I tend to retreat more to more immediately defensible claims, start writing with “academic distance”, etc.
(This view can be taken too far—“reverse all advice you hear” etc. But still, I think “novelty is often overrated, and maybe that overrating often happens in large part inside people’s heads—unsure.)
Anyway, it’s funny- I’ve personally told people that they shouldn’t worry too much about novelty before, and I endorse what I’ve said there. I think people overrate it, I think writing the same thing multiple times is often useful, etc… But I still notice myself thinking “eh but surely someone has said this, IDK if this would be that useful” (and then spending more time trying to check a minor thing than I would have just writing it if I went at it with a no-apologies attitude)[3]
What gives? Imposter syndrome? (Or thinking too much about how things make me look instead of about what people will read, maybe? Something like low-status-behavior intuitions for women?) I don’t know. I suppose I’ll leave it at that for now, in part as a public reminder or commitment that I don’t have to do this. And I’ll try to resist linking more than I already have.[4] 🙃
(
A flip side of / complementary pattern to the above is making sure we sometimes get into a mindset (state?) where we can:
Notice confusion / disagreement / etc. → find a question
Make deliberate progress on this
Build deep understanding of some area to get a bunch of surface area / intuitions
This makes me remember a recent thread comparing different AI systems’ cyber capabilities (finding vulnerabilities in a codebase, IIRC), where the open-source models had (unlike the others) been given the places with vulnerabilities and asked to figure out how to exploit them instead of having to locate things themselves. Someone compared this to something like giving someone a needle instead of a haystack-with-a-needle
ANyway, IMO noticing that X is relevant for your life / context is really useful, and underrated (vs “coming up with” X)
(and I’m pretty sure I apologize for lack of novelty when I post stuff , which probably worsens the norms here—in fact I might have done that in the previous comment I posted—I should do less of that!)
Althuogh I’m sort of using this as a low-setup-cost / MVP version of a personal wiki, and I had collected some links in an old slack message. So, in the interest of not actually following the links right now...
[This is an unedited babble]
When I’m writing I sometimes get stuck trying to read what’s been written on the topic before.
I think often that’s driven by an earnest interest/hope/curiosity (looking to learn or read something exciting), or wanting to scope down the thing I’m writing by linking to past stuff (or just driven by remembering a piece that I really appreciated and then getting nerd-sniped along the way). Sometimes it’s more directed (noticing a crux, trying to see if I can look that up) (in general I want to do more of this one, relative to the rest). I still think e.g. that linking is often useful, but overall IMO I do the above too much. (I think actually maybe there’s a form of planning fallacy at play, where I often feel like this will be a 5-minute task but actually it too frequently turns into a 2-hour detour...[1])
There are two patterns that seem more harmful, at least in my case:
(a) a defensive move; wanting to check if what is actually new or completely accurate or somehow silly.… , or (b) just following some sort of “path of least resistance” gradient when I”m trying to think about something complicated and it’s easier to go and read about something vaguely related to the topic (or about what the hell is going on with diffusion models or whatever’s on my mind).
I want to think more about (b) later. For now I just noticed myself wanting to post a quick note re the defensive stuff in (a) — the “is this really contributing something new?” point in particular. IMO:
Very little is “actually new” the way people look for
Relatedly IMO we have a pretty bad sense for what is and isn’t “the frontier”. For one thing, some of the most useful pieces people can write are about ideas that feel obvious to them (because they’ve figured them out, it’s clicked, etc.), but which the people around them totally don’t get (i.e. which are on some relevant frontier). (Semi-related.)
It’s often really useful to say things that are really not new, or say things more than once (related)
(especially if you are in conversation with a group of people who share some interests/… with you, and the reason you’re bringing up something “not actually new” is the fact that you usefully noticed that this is relevant here[2])
I also think orienting towards “help people around me (and myself) understand this thing they’re missing (even if that process doesn’t look like ‘push the frontier’!)” is often just a really useful way to prompt oneself when doing research
More generally, IMO orienting (especially right away!) towards outputs that are higher status in various ways seems pretty unhelpful. At least personally, this moves me out of a natural/free/“real” mode of trying to deeply understand and explain — imagining talking to someone I can imagine — and towards a abstract/ far- /fake? mode in which I tend to retreat more to more immediately defensible claims, start writing with “academic distance”, etc.
(This view can be taken too far—“reverse all advice you hear” etc. But still, I think “novelty is often overrated, and maybe that overrating often happens in large part inside people’s heads—unsure.)
Anyway, it’s funny- I’ve personally told people that they shouldn’t worry too much about novelty before, and I endorse what I’ve said there. I think people overrate it, I think writing the same thing multiple times is often useful, etc… But I still notice myself thinking “eh but surely someone has said this, IDK if this would be that useful” (and then spending more time trying to check a minor thing than I would have just writing it if I went at it with a no-apologies attitude)[3]
What gives? Imposter syndrome? (Or thinking too much about how things make me look instead of about what people will read, maybe? Something like low-status-behavior intuitions for women?) I don’t know. I suppose I’ll leave it at that for now, in part as a public reminder or commitment that I don’t have to do this. And I’ll try to resist linking more than I already have.[4] 🙃
(
A flip side of / complementary pattern to the above is making sure we sometimes get into a mindset (state?) where we can:
Notice confusion / disagreement / etc. → find a question
Make deliberate progress on this
Build deep understanding of some area to get a bunch of surface area / intuitions
...
)
Plus just having a somewhat poor memory, and being distractible. And not being better at “form factors” / scoping.
This makes me remember a recent thread comparing different AI systems’ cyber capabilities (finding vulnerabilities in a codebase, IIRC), where the open-source models had (unlike the others) been given the places with vulnerabilities and asked to figure out how to exploit them instead of having to locate things themselves. Someone compared this to something like giving someone a needle instead of a haystack-with-a-needle
ANyway, IMO noticing that X is relevant for your life / context is really useful, and underrated (vs “coming up with” X)
(and I’m pretty sure I apologize for lack of novelty when I post stuff , which probably worsens the norms here—in fact I might have done that in the previous comment I posted—I should do less of that!)
Althuogh I’m sort of using this as a low-setup-cost / MVP version of a personal wiki, and I had collected some links in an old slack message. So, in the interest of not actually following the links right now...
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/archive?sort=new
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
https://michaelnotebook.com/qtr/index.html
https://scienceplusplus.org/cusc/index.html
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hjMy4ZxS5ogA9cTYK/how-i-think-about-my-research-process-explore-understand