This is a question, but also a linkpost from my (new) Substack.
“How could I have thought that faster?” is great advice I am embarrassed I did not think of myself. A subset of this, I would say, is not thinking original thoughts, but rather the ability to effectively learn new things. What prompted this is my continual inability to find all the papers relevant to a question I am researching in a timely manner.
I have been reading about biological learning rules for four years, albeit not continuously, yet still manage to find papers that are both old and have all the keywords that I routinely search. I wonder how I missed them, if I found them before and ignored them for some reason. But the big fear isn’t about any paper in particular, it’s that I won’t be able to fill in huge knowledge gaps when the answer is out there.
I think that this poses a real problem to academics in general and will only worsen as more and more research is published that could be applicable to your problem.
I also think it is worse for autodidacts or people otherwise learning alone, having structure and people around you lets you leverage existing knowledge much easier.
Maybe this is just me being bad at using search engines/the new wave of LLMs but it is a big frustration. I don’t think tools like semantic scholar fully solve the problem either, at least not for me.
I think this generalizes past finding papers to read. It is more of a failure to know what you should be spending your time doing during the skill/information acquisition stage of a project. When you start a project, you usually aren’t sure how you are going to solve all the problems that pop up along the way. If you don’t already have a huge bag of problem solving techniques that are applicable to that domain, it is hard to know where you should be allocating your time to learn what will be useful and not a bunch of extraneous knowledge vs. actually getting to work.
I guess what I am really asking is how best to solve these instances of the explore vs. exploit problem. How do you know when you’re informed? If you want to make the declaration that a topic is not well researched academically, how do you know you have exhausted the literature enough?
I have been burned on this so many times I have become very enamored by the idea of going all the way back to basics. This is enjoyable to a certain extent and almost ensures I don’t miss anything but it is probably not optimal in many ways. LW has discussed the use of reading textbooks as they are an underrated way of gaining knowledge. I have somewhat successfully rolled this into my belief system but it still doesn’t feel like making progress. The questions I have become interested in are now in neuroscience but I am going througha math textbook. I think it will be useful but is it optimal? Am I just going to have to eat a year of study before I can start work on things I actually care about?
This is a question, but also a linkpost from my (new) Substack.
“How could I have thought that faster?” is great advice I am embarrassed I did not think of myself. A subset of this, I would say, is not thinking original thoughts, but rather the ability to effectively learn new things. What prompted this is my continual inability to find all the papers relevant to a question I am researching in a timely manner.
I have been reading about biological learning rules for four years, albeit not continuously, yet still manage to find papers that are both old and have all the keywords that I routinely search. I wonder how I missed them, if I found them before and ignored them for some reason. But the big fear isn’t about any paper in particular, it’s that I won’t be able to fill in huge knowledge gaps when the answer is out there.
There is an especially humorous, or disappointing, example of this happening to someone else: that being a biologist rediscovering calculus in 1994.
I think that this poses a real problem to academics in general and will only worsen as more and more research is published that could be applicable to your problem.
I also think it is worse for autodidacts or people otherwise learning alone, having structure and people around you lets you leverage existing knowledge much easier.
Maybe this is just me being bad at using search engines/the new wave of LLMs but it is a big frustration. I don’t think tools like semantic scholar fully solve the problem either, at least not for me.
I think this generalizes past finding papers to read. It is more of a failure to know what you should be spending your time doing during the skill/information acquisition stage of a project. When you start a project, you usually aren’t sure how you are going to solve all the problems that pop up along the way. If you don’t already have a huge bag of problem solving techniques that are applicable to that domain, it is hard to know where you should be allocating your time to learn what will be useful and not a bunch of extraneous knowledge vs. actually getting to work.
I guess what I am really asking is how best to solve these instances of the explore vs. exploit problem. How do you know when you’re informed? If you want to make the declaration that a topic is not well researched academically, how do you know you have exhausted the literature enough?
I have been burned on this so many times I have become very enamored by the idea of going all the way back to basics. This is enjoyable to a certain extent and almost ensures I don’t miss anything but it is probably not optimal in many ways. LW has discussed the use of reading textbooks as they are an underrated way of gaining knowledge. I have somewhat successfully rolled this into my belief system but it still doesn’t feel like making progress. The questions I have become interested in are now in neuroscience but I am going through a math textbook. I think it will be useful but is it optimal? Am I just going to have to eat a year of study before I can start work on things I actually care about?