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The Paradox of First Principles (And Why Nobody Wants to Hear That You're in Pursuit of Greatness) - sohail mohammad

sohailmo.ai · 2,512 words · saved by 1 readers

There's a moment in Nicholas Carlini's essay "How to Win a Best Paper Award" where he describes his process for coming up with research ideas. Read everything, he says. Absorb the entire body of scientific literature in your field. Understand what's known, what's been tried, what failed and why. Then forget all of it. Not because it doesn't matter (it does, deeply) but because if you only think in terms of what's already been done, you'll never produce anything worth doing. The existing literature can poison your thinking. Once you've seen ten papers use Approach X, you implicitly assume Approach X is the right way, even when it isn't. Carlini describes watching an entire subfield of machine learning pursue membership inference attacks using overcomplicated neural network methods that made no sense to him. Instead of following along, he put the field out of his mind, developed his own approach from basic principles (treating membership inference as the hypothesis test it actually is) a

There's a moment in Nicholas Carlini's essay "How to Win a Best Paper Award" where he describes his process for coming up with research ideas. Read everything, he says. Absorb the entire body of scientific literature in your field. Understand what's known, what's been tried, what failed and why. Then forget all of it. Not because it doesn't matter (it does, deeply) but because if you only think in terms of what's already been done, you'll never produce anything worth doing. The existing literature can poison your thinking. Once you've seen ten papers use Approach X, you implicitly assume Appro

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