✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Research as Understanding

web.archive.org · 522 words · saved by 1 readers

I misunderstood the nature of research for most of my life, and this prevented me from doing any. I thought significant research came from following the scientific method until novel discoveries popped out. I'd never contributed something new to human knowledge before, so being a researcher—which required replicating this outcome—felt impossibly far out of reach. But it turns out the novel discovery is just a side effect. You don't make novel discoveries by trying to make novel discoveries. Instead, research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning. Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet. This hit me during COVID quarantine when I escaped to the mountains of Santa Fe to learn probability theory from a dear mathematician friend. He began by asking me to teach him something simple, like combinatorics. I said that seemed pointless, a

Research as Understanding 52 captures 17 Oct 2021 - 19 May 2026 Sep OCT Nov 14 2023 2024 2025 success fail About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Archive Team Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history. History is littered with hundreds of con

Explore this link on the map →

related reading