Quick Thoughts on Research
Metadata
Highlights
- Momentum: In general: momentum rules, momentum rules, momentum rules. And the corollary is: do everything you can to cultivate motivation1. (View Highlight)
- John Mack, one of the biographers of T. E. Lawrence, remarked that Lawrence’s essential quality was “a power of enablement”. He found many instances where Lawrence’s life would briefly intersect some other person, sometimes for just a few minutes, and yet it would change the course of that person’s life. The pattern was this: Lawrence would question his new acquaintance deeply, elicit what they wanted – sometimes desires they had barely acknowledged to themselves – and then hold that desire up in crystalline form, a kind of mirror, and explain to them a very concrete way in which they had the power and capability to immediately act toward it. Not everyone is Lawrence. But you can consciously approach people with an attitude of enablement, and cultivate the skill. It is a skill. (View Highlight)
- Rather, it means developing your own sets of heuristics for what is of fundamental importance, what are the big overall drivers and opportunities, and what special skills you can develop that will enable you to contribute. Something I love about Einstein’s career is that he published (IIRC) six methods for determining Avogadro’s number. To our modern eye, this looks strange. But I believe it reflects Einstein’s underlying taste well, an obsession with a certain way of understanding the world. It’s the same kind of taste that led him to special and general relativity and his other major discoveries. (View Highlight)
- What do you know that no-one else does? What can you do that no-one else can? If it’s early in your career, and the answer is “not much”, then can you find routine projects that will help other people, and help you develop unique capabilities? What capabilities will enable us to solve the deepest problems over the next 3-30 years? Can you find ways of beginning to develop those, while still doing something useful? (View Highlight)
- Great problems have to be discovered; often the solution of the problem is only a tiny part of the story, most of it is really about discovering the problem. (View Highlight)
- A shocking fraction of what you learn from the best people is tacit knowledge. How they respond emotionally; when they work hard, when they relax; the way they play with ideas; what they ignore; how they respond to fashion; how they respond to news; how they approach problems; how they structure their day; how they structure their year; how they structure their decade. And a million other hard-to-articulate things. (View Highlight)
- More generally, close examination of unusually creative people will expand your sense of what you’re allowed to do, and what may be beneficial to do. (View Highlight)
- Courage matters. An example, one of infinitely many: large research collaborations are usually thought of as being arranged by senior researchers. But one of the two collaborations that discovered the accelerating universe was largely organized and driven by two postdocs (Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt). They saw the opportunity to use type 1A supernovae to determine whether the expansion of the universe was accelerating, and just went and rounded up all the people and resources they needed to do it, despite not having the usual seniority. And, as a result, transformed our understanding of the universe, showing that Einstein was wrong in an important way. And won a Nobel Prize. (View Highlight)
- Learn what it means to work hard: this is surprisingly difficult. It means knowing when to push, when not. It means knowing how to vacation well and how to enjoy your life. You must not become a drudge – a surprisingly common problem among the ambitious. You must become alive to moments of leverage and creative opportunity and insight. And, of course, it also means knowing how to work incredibly hard and with great courage and determination. (View Highlight)
- Do some damn-fool work (View Highlight)
- Groucho’s law of creative work: “You should never work on any project for which you can get funding”: Obviously somewhat tongue-in-check. But there’s some underlying truth. If it’s easy to get funding, yours is probably the kind of work someone else will do anyway. What can you do that won’t otherwise be done? There’s a kind of analog of the efficient market hypothesis in research, the notion that there’s a space of research projects our institutions are pretty much just going to get done. You want to escape out of that, and bend the market, while doing something important. Is there anything you can think of that existing institutions don’t have the courage or imagination to support? Is there some way you can figure out how to do it anyway? (View Highlight)
title: “Quick Thoughts on Research”
author: “michaelnotebook.com”
url: ”https://michaelnotebook.com/qtr/index.html”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Quick Thoughts on Research
Metadata
Highlights
- Momentum: In general: momentum rules, momentum rules, momentum rules. And the corollary is: do everything you can to cultivate motivation1. (View Highlight)
- John Mack, one of the biographers of T. E. Lawrence, remarked that Lawrence’s essential quality was “a power of enablement”. He found many instances where Lawrence’s life would briefly intersect some other person, sometimes for just a few minutes, and yet it would change the course of that person’s life. The pattern was this: Lawrence would question his new acquaintance deeply, elicit what they wanted – sometimes desires they had barely acknowledged to themselves – and then hold that desire up in crystalline form, a kind of mirror, and explain to them a very concrete way in which they had the power and capability to immediately act toward it. Not everyone is Lawrence. But you can consciously approach people with an attitude of enablement, and cultivate the skill. It is a skill. (View Highlight)
- Rather, it means developing your own sets of heuristics for what is of fundamental importance, what are the big overall drivers and opportunities, and what special skills you can develop that will enable you to contribute. Something I love about Einstein’s career is that he published (IIRC) six methods for determining Avogadro’s number. To our modern eye, this looks strange. But I believe it reflects Einstein’s underlying taste well, an obsession with a certain way of understanding the world. It’s the same kind of taste that led him to special and general relativity and his other major discoveries. (View Highlight)
- What do you know that no-one else does? What can you do that no-one else can? If it’s early in your career, and the answer is “not much”, then can you find routine projects that will help other people, and help you develop unique capabilities? What capabilities will enable us to solve the deepest problems over the next 3-30 years? Can you find ways of beginning to develop those, while still doing something useful? (View Highlight)
- Great problems have to be discovered; often the solution of the problem is only a tiny part of the story, most of it is really about discovering the problem. (View Highlight)
- A shocking fraction of what you learn from the best people is tacit knowledge. How they respond emotionally; when they work hard, when they relax; the way they play with ideas; what they ignore; how they respond to fashion; how they respond to news; how they approach problems; how they structure their day; how they structure their year; how they structure their decade. And a million other hard-to-articulate things. (View Highlight)
- More generally, close examination of unusually creative people will expand your sense of what you’re allowed to do, and what may be beneficial to do. (View Highlight)
- Courage matters. An example, one of infinitely many: large research collaborations are usually thought of as being arranged by senior researchers. But one of the two collaborations that discovered the accelerating universe was largely organized and driven by two postdocs (Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt). They saw the opportunity to use type 1A supernovae to determine whether the expansion of the universe was accelerating, and just went and rounded up all the people and resources they needed to do it, despite not having the usual seniority. And, as a result, transformed our understanding of the universe, showing that Einstein was wrong in an important way. And won a Nobel Prize. (View Highlight)
- Learn what it means to work hard: this is surprisingly difficult. It means knowing when to push, when not. It means knowing how to vacation well and how to enjoy your life. You must not become a drudge – a surprisingly common problem among the ambitious. You must become alive to moments of leverage and creative opportunity and insight. And, of course, it also means knowing how to work incredibly hard and with great courage and determination. (View Highlight)
- Do some damn-fool work (View Highlight)
- Groucho’s law of creative work: “You should never work on any project for which you can get funding”: Obviously somewhat tongue-in-check. But there’s some underlying truth. If it’s easy to get funding, yours is probably the kind of work someone else will do anyway. What can you do that won’t otherwise be done? There’s a kind of analog of the efficient market hypothesis in research, the notion that there’s a space of research projects our institutions are pretty much just going to get done. You want to escape out of that, and bend the market, while doing something important. Is there anything you can think of that existing institutions don’t have the courage or imagination to support? Is there some way you can figure out how to do it anyway? (View Highlight)