Completely agree that this is a crucial topic that is under discussed for research. The sort of knowledge/skill you're pointing out also fits really well with the concept of Tacit Knowledge: the sort of expertise that is really hard to verbalize and explain.
That being said, I think some of your proposals are confusing different skills for research.
In fact, we do have this, in the form of blogs. The right type of blogs can provide a valuable form of "film study". I personally learned a lot about statistics from Andrew Gelman's blog. Often, someone sends him a paper and he just gives his off-the-cuff reactions to it: what he liked and didn't, what was convincing, what parts seem sketchy. I probably learned more from reading his blog than from statistics classes (of which I've taken embarrassingly few, yet somehow managed to get hired by a Statistics department; I'll credit Gelman for this). Scott Aaronson's blog is good in the same way for theoretical computer science. Many posts on the GiveWell and Open Philanthropy blogs are good in this way, too. In all cases, I'd look at the earlier rather than later posts (though not the very earliest); the reason is that once blogs have too large an audience, writers start to feel constrained to write more "professionally" and you get less of the valuable off-the-cuff thinking.
While academic blogs can be analogous to film study, it's really important to note that the expertise displayed is very often that of judging or understanding work in the field. From my experience reading Aaronson's blog, that's what he shares best, especially with regard to the limitations of quantum computing. I haven't really digged into Gelman's blog, but the format you mention is a perfect example of the expertise of understanding some research. Very important skill, but not the same as actually conducting the research that goes into a paper.
Pair programming or programming live on twitch are better examples of film study analogues for the latter skill. For research, I haven't found much better than the tacit knowledge method of spending some time with an expert and actually looking for what they do in each context. That's similar to your advisor point, except it scales just a little better, because you don't need as strong a relationship.
Biographies of researchers can also prove a great variant of your "read history" proposal. You have to select carefully, but a well-research biography can put in context a lot of the thinking that the research did, and how they move between different ideas.
I also believe there is some slight issue with the analogy with film studies:
The first habit is film study. Almost every high-level athlete watches films of other players of the same sport, including historical greats, contemporary rivals, and themselves. This allows them to incorporate good ideas from other players' games as well as to catch and eliminate flaws in their own game. Even the very best players benefit from watching film of themselves and others.
In research, especially in a weird new field like alignment, it's rare to find another researcher who want to conduct precisely the same research. But that's the basis of every sport and game: people want to win the same game. It make the whole "learning from other" slightly more difficult IMO. You can't just look for what works, you constantly have to repurpose ideas that work in slightly different field and/or approaches and check for the loss in translation.
A better analogy might be to the sort of study Bruce Lee did to create a whole new martial art. He studied specific techniques, sure, but mostly for adapting them to his purpose, instead of playing the "game" of the original martial art.
Thanks for the feedback!
I haven't really digged into Gelman's blog, but the format you mention is a perfect example of the expertise of understanding some research. Very important skill, but not the same as actually conducting the research that goes into a paper.
Research consists of many skills put together. Understanding prior work and developing the taste to judge it is one of the more important individual skills in research (moreso than programming, at least in most fields). So I think the blog example is indeed a central one.
In research, especially in a weird new field like alignment, it's rare to find another researcher who want to conduct precisely the same research. But that's the basis of every sport and game: people want to win the same game. It make the whole "learning from other" slightly more difficult IMO. You can't just look for what works, you constantly have to repurpose ideas that work in slightly different field and/or approaches and check for the loss in translation.
I agree with this, although I think creative new ideas often come from people who have also mastered the "standard" skills. And indeed, most research is precisely about coming up with new ideas, which is a skill that you can cultivate my studying how others generate ideas.
More tangentially, you may be underestimating the amount of innovation in sports. Harden and Jokic both innovate in basketball (among others), but I am pretty sure they also do lots of film study. Jokic's innovation probably comes from having mastered other sports like water polo and the resulting skill transfer. I would guess that mastery of fruitfully adjacent fields is a productive way to generate ideas.
Sorry for taking so long to answer!
Research consists of many skills put together. Understanding prior work and developing the taste to judge it is one of the more important individual skills in research (moreso than programming, at least in most fields). So I think the blog example is indeed a central one.
I completely agree that it is a relevant and important skill, but there are many people with good understanding of prior work who are completely unable of producing interesting new research. Non-exhaustively, this includes being able to have new ideas, to develop them, to test them, to get feedback and adapt to the feedback. And given that understanding prior work emerges pretty naturally once you read a lot of papers, I'm personally more interested in training for these other skills. My argument was that blogs don't really help for that.
I agree with this, although I think creative new ideas often come from people who have also mastered the "standard" skills. And indeed, most research is precisely about coming up with new ideas, which is a skill that you can cultivate my studying how others generate ideas.
Difference of opinion: for me, coming with ideas is incredibly cheap. I also have piles of promising ideas that I will never have the time to explore, and I keep having new ideas. I never needed any help in that, and so I am completely uninterested in any way to generate more ideas. The other skills of research require way more effort to me (not even sure how to disentangle them TBH), so I focus on those. And I have trouble finding any actual standard skills that translate directly between research field: even things like doing experiments have very different meaning and related skills depending on the field.
More tangentially, you may be underestimating the amount of innovation in sports. Harden and Jokic both innovate in basketball (among others), but I am pretty sure they also do lots of film study. Jokic's innovation probably comes from having mastered other sports like water polo and the resulting skill transfer. I would guess that mastery of fruitfully adjacent fields is a productive way to generate ideas.
Didn't want to imply that athletes never innovate. And that's an interesting example of the innovation from adjacent field. That's definitely how I get a lot of ideas. But that's still made incredibly more potent by being able to study and master the skills from your actual field. Which is really hard to do when there is no film study analogy for it.
These don't quite qualify as research film study, but Fields medallist Timothy Gowers has a number of videos in which he records his problem solving process in detail. E.g. Two products that cannot be equal. From what I can tell, he chooses quite accessible problems. Studying this sort of video might be most analogous to studying how an expert athlete does a drill.
Some users of the Alignment Forum's post their work-in-progress ideas on topics. Taken as a sequence this amounts to something like a paper plus how it was made. Perhaps it would be worth looking back retrospectively and curating sequences which lead to significant insight for study purposes? The closest thing to film study available in one post is probably Commentary on AGI Safety from First Principles - AI Alignment Forum.
A possible example of research film-study in a very literal sense: Andy Matuschak's 2020-05-04 Note-writing livestream.
I would love it if more people did this sort of thing.
One way to do film study as a PHD student is to ask your advisor whether you can record your conversations with him and then review those conversations a month later.
I could also imagine that it could be useful to watch a few videos of how one writes papers to get a better insight into one's own process.
Crossposted from my blog, Bounded Regret.
Research ability, like most tasks, is a trainable skill. However, while PhD students and other researchers spend a lot of time doing research, we often don't spend enough time training our research abilities in order to improve. For many researchers, aside from taking classes and reading papers, most of our training is implicit, through doing research and interacting with mentors (usually a single mentor--our PhD advisor or research manager). By analogy, we are like basketball players who somehow made it to the NBA, and are now hoping that simply playing basketball games will be enough to keep improving.
Drawing on this analogy, I want to talk about two habits that are ubiquitous among elite athletes, that have analogs in research that I feel are underutilized. Those who do pursue these habits as PhD students often improve quickly as researchers.
The first habit is film study. Almost every high-level athlete watches films of other players of the same sport, including historical greats, contemporary rivals, and themselves. This allows them to incorporate good ideas from other players' games as well as to catch and eliminate flaws in their own game. Even the very best players benefit from watching film of themselves and others.
The second habit, which I call act-reflect-ask, occurs in the course of a game or scrimmage. I'll describe this from my own experience (although I'm by no means an elite athlete, I've learned this from people who are). After a point ends, I generally think about what happened during the point--Was there anything I wanted to do better? Did anything unexpected happen? Then I'll re-run those parts in my head, simulating what I would have done differently until I feel like I know how to consistently make the right decision. In some cases, I can't figure it out--perhaps I was playing defense, someone beat me, and I can't figure out what they did or can't figure out the counter. In that case I'll ask a teammate about it (or the person who beat me, if it's a friendly scrimmage) and talk it over until I see the right strategy for the future.
Both of these strategies are invaluable for improving. They leverage the fact that as humans, we tend to learn socially: we are very good at adopting strategies from others, so film study and asking are efficient ways to learn. Both strategies also lead to deliberate practice focused on real-world contexts. Below, I'll show that these strategies have analogs in research, and argue that good researchers should adopt both into their own habits.
As mentioned above, good athletes watch lots of film of other athletes. This extends to other skills as well--most chess players, including grandmasters, study games by both contemporary and historical greats. They do this to understand how other very strong players play, in order to adopt ideas and, in the case of rivals, to counter those ideas (this part is less relevant to research). Even the very best players do this.
What is the equivalent to this in research? Ideally, we would watch world experts as they work, observing how they think, perform experiments, and so on. Unfortunately, this is difficult--much research work is internal rather than external, and we don't routinely film great researchers in the same way as we do with athletes. The closest obvious analog is working closely with a mentor, as many PhD students do with their PhD advisor. Then, it is often possible to see first-hand how a more experienced researcher approaches a problem. However, this isn't scalable, and most people only get to do this with one person--their advisor. (As an aside, it is very useful for students to develop a good model of their advisor's thinking style--I think this tends to be underrated.)
A more scalable approach would be reading papers, but this doesn't achieve the full goal of film study--you only see the finished product, rather than the thought process, and it tends to only show the part of a writer's thoughts that are widely defensible. What we want is a public record of someone's thoughts, including off-the-cuff thoughts that wouldn't make it into a paper.
In fact, we do have this, in the form of blogs. The right type of blogs can provide a valuable form of "film study". I personally learned a lot about statistics from Andrew Gelman's blog. Often, someone sends him a paper and he just gives his off-the-cuff reactions to it: what he liked and didn't, what was convincing, what parts seem sketchy. I probably learned more from reading his blog than from statistics classes (of which I've taken embarrassingly few, yet somehow managed to get hired by a Statistics department; I'll credit Gelman for this). Scott Aaronson's blog is good in the same way for theoretical computer science. Many posts on the GiveWell and Open Philanthropy blogs are good in this way, too. In all cases, I'd look at the earlier rather than later posts (though not the very earliest); the reason is that once blogs have too large an audience, writers start to feel constrained to write more "professionally" and you get less of the valuable off-the-cuff thinking.
In addition to blogs, debates are another good source of off-the-cuff, in-the-moment thinking, as long as the participants don't overprepare and as long as they are trying to make good arguments rather than score rhetorical points. Actually, the best debates I've seen also take part via blogs, such as the debate over de-worming in global health. Seminars can be good film study, but are primarily film study for giving presentations rather than doing research (and for this, also watch recordings of great talks online). Seminar Q&A can be good film study for research thinking, as long as participants are opinionated and express those opinions in a clear way that exposes their underlying mental model. For programming, you can watch people code on Twitch, or pair program with other students in your research group.
The above are all useful sources of in-the-moment thinking. For research, we also make decisions--such as what directions to pursue--that have consequences on the scale of years. To film study these, I read histories of important scientific developments. Good histories will follow individuals around in detail for an extended period of time, ideally with primary sources. For instance, The Making of the Atomic Bomb covers developments in physics up to and through the Manhattan project, and discusses many of the decisions, discoveries, and dead ends faced by Fermi, Szilard, Oppenheimer, and others. (The dead ends are especially important, so that you can see the whole process and not just what is useful today.) Another great example is The Eighth Day of Creation, which does the same for the development of modern biotechnology. Such histories have helped me gain a better understanding of how science develops on the scale of years or decades, which I would otherwise have to learn the hard way, over my own years and decades of research.
Some other miscellaneous advice: transcripts of talks can sometimes be good in the same way as blogs. Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" is excellent on this front. For talks, recording yourself and watching the recording may be the fastest route to improvement. Finally, in addition to histories, case studies (often taught in law or business courses) also provide information that would be expensive to gather otherwise.
In summary, film study blogs for off-the-cuff research thinking; watch great presentations and record yourself to learn how to speak; pair program and watch programming streams; and read histories of science for long-term research decisions.
In the act-reflect-ask loop, we reflect on whether something could have gone better after we do it, and ask someone else if we can't figure it out. There are many ways to do this in research:
In addition to helping yourself improve, these habits help others as well--asking someone for advice engages their own thinking in a growth-oriented direction, so by helping you they are likely improving themselves, too. This also helps at the level of teams, as it builds chemistry and creates a shared culture of excellence and growth. Indeed, in sports, the best teams do this regularly, and veteran players are proactive in finding ways to help younger players. Some professional players even stay in a league, making millions of dollars a year, solely by being excellent sources of advice and mentorship.
Find ways to routinely study research decision-making, through blogs, seminars, video streams, and histories. Actively consume these to adopt and build up effective mental heuristics. Whenever you do something, reflect on how it could be better, and ask others for advice. As you learn more yourself, find ways to give back to others. Consistently doing these will help you to become a better researcher over time, and contribute to a culture of excellence among those around you.