The Researcher's Bible (1985) | Hacker News Reader

The Researcher's Bible (1985)

homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk

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"If I can do it, it's trivial: Once you have seen the solution to a problem it appears trivial. Then it is tempting to say `that's too easy, I'll try something else'. This is a non-terminating loop! Your solution won't be trivial to other people (probably it will be wrong or over-complex) and should anyway be used as a basis for further work. Motto: do the easiest thing first, then stand on the shoulders of these achievements and do the next easiest thing, etc. - a better infinite loop."

This is good advice for life in general, not just for researching.

Terence Tao said a similar thing recently:

The funny thing is anything you prove yourself, you think “oh, that was a lot easier than I thought.” You know, once you actually see it, you realize it wasn’t that hard after all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8382124

One thing a friend of mind did during their PhD which he said was very useful was to always have his thesis. Every month he took a few days and wrote up his current state of mind and conclusions were. So over a period of years he went from rough outline to final thesis without ever having that 'OMG got to write everything up' moment. It also have him a lot of practice writing. Yeah — he ended up throwing away and backtracking a few times — but he was so chilled compared to his peers when it got to the end of his doctorate.

(and by curious coincidence one of the authors of this piece, Ben du Boulay used to be my boss many moons ago ;-)

Submission note: this submission was inspired by another recent post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399587 and is on a similar theme, though again mainly focussed on AI research.

A PDF version is also available (linked below), but I thought it'd be best to submit the original HTML version for mobile readers, and those who prefer not to use PDFs.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/cps300/resbible.pdf

Closely related is a prior HN discussion[1] on Simon Peyton Jones' talk on "How to write a great research paper"[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6989806

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA

“Most days you think ‘I am a worm’. This is the natural state of the researcher.”

Forget to add "already been done" or "too trivial a problem" after "2.1 Solving the world". The secret to being a PhD is enough knowledge of the field to choose the "right size problem" to churn another paper in six months, a degree in four years, and tenure in seven years.

There are fields outside my own where I have significant book knowledge. But I dont know enough about the research frontier to choose the right size problem.

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