flâneur

Anosha Rahim

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on the atlas — 42

highlights — 102

  • “I’ve had more trouble with myself than any other man I’ve ever met”.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Obviously, all researchers do some of this. For the problem-solver, the process of exploring for problems often works along the following lines: keep moving around, looking for problems that you consider (a) well-posed, or able to be well-posed after some work on your part, (b) likely to fall within a reasonable time to the arsenal of tools at your disposal (perhaps with some small expansion of that arsenal), and (c) below some minimum thresholds of interest and difficulty. Once you’ve found a problem of this sort, you work hard on the problem, solve it, and publish.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • the notebook is a good place to write down ideas as soon as you have them, so you can revisit them later.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • I strongly advise you to keep a notebook, where you record your daily ideas and experiments.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • you don’t allocate this time, then your knowledge is likely to plateau after you learn the basics that you need for your day-to-day work. It’s easy to settle into a comfort zone of methods you understand well—you may need to expend active effort to expand this zone.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • allocate some fraction of your time towards improving your general knowledge of ML as opposed to working on your current project.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • , you can significantly improve your chances to do great work in the long term by regularly setting aside time for your personal development.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • good textbooks collect decades of ideas and present them in the proper order with the same notation
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • textbooks are a much more dense way to absorb knowledge than papers
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • Textbooks and theses are good for building up your foundational knowledge, but you’ll also need to read a lot of papers to bring your knowledge up to the frontier.
    An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
  • Theorists can be a pretty judgmental lot about the value of their own work, and the work of others. This helps lead some into the error of only working on big problems, and not sometimes working on little problems, for the fun of it, for the contact it brings with colleagues, and for the rewarding and enjoyable sense of making a real contribution of some significance.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • by attacking only the most important and most difficult problems an experienced researcher (a) takes themselves out of circulation, (b) stops making ongoing contributions, (c) loses the habit of success, and (d) risks losing morale, which is so important to research success. I think the solution is to balance one’s work on the more and less important problems: you need to schedule time to do the more important stuff, but should also make sure that you spend some time on less high-risk activities.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Rather than investing all his time and effort on attacking the problem, he’d put the problem into a larger context
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • By making the research process part of a larger endeavour, he ensured that the process was a success no matter how it came out, even if he failed to solve the problem, or was scooped by someone else. It’s a case of not putting all of one’s psychological eggs in one basket.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • tackle a mixture of more and less important problems.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • My belief is that the way to start out in a research career is by working primarily on small and relatively tractable problems, where you have a good chance of success.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Being clear about some goal, even if that goal is the wrong goal, or the clarity is illusory, is tremendously powerful.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • What types of questions do people in the field tend to ask? Can we abstract away patterns in those questions? What other fields might there be links to? What are the few most important problems in the field? Problem-creators set aside time for doing this kind of systematic exploration, and do it in a disciplined way, often with feedback from others.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • form your own independent standards for what is interesting and important and worth doing, and make judgments about where you should be making a contribution, based on those standards
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • People who work in isolation rarely end up making contributions that are all that significant. Your decision about what is important should be informed by others: talk to your peers, find out what they think is important, look in the textbooks and history books and biographies, and, yes, look at what wins prizes (of all sorts).
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • many people have very successful research career as problem-solvers. But you can also consciously decide to invest more time and effort into developing as a problem-creator.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • you can stay quite current by (a) quickly skimming a great deal of work, to keep track of what is known, and what sort of problems people are thinking about, and (b) based on that skimming, picking a dozen or so papers each year to read deeply,
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • You are almost certainly better off reading deeply in the ten most important papers of a research field than you are skimming the top five hundred.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • in any given research field there are usually only a tiny number of papers that are really worth reading
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • develop unique combinations of talents
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Do what you can do better than anybody; to mangle a quote from Lincoln, nobody can be better than everybody all of the time, but anybody can be better than everybody some of the time.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • creative research is best viewed as an extension of self-development, especially an extension of a well-developed reading program
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • nobody, no matter how talented, is born an effective researcher; that distinction can only be obtained after a considerable amount of hard work and personal change, and there is no reason to suppose that just because one is now able to publish lots of papers that one has peaked as a researcher.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • There are a lot of incentives for people to concentrate on creative research to the exclusion of self-development. Throughout one’s research career, but particularly early on, there are many advantages to publishing lots of papers. Within limits, this is a good thing, especially for young researchers: it brings you into the community of researchers; it gives you the opportunity to learn how to write well, and give good presentations; it can help keep you motivated. I believe all researchers should publish at least a few papers each year, essentially as an obligation to the research and wider c…
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • The third factor affecting self-discipline is a special kind of honesty, honesty to oneself, about oneself.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • The first factor is having clarity about what one wants to achieve, why one wants to achieve it, and how to go about achieving it.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • fallacy to believe that self-discipline is merely a matter of will, of deciding what it is that you want to do, and then doing it. Many other factors affect self-discipline, and it’s important to understand those other factors
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • a goal that gets you excited, that makes you want to get up in the morning, and where you’ve developed a confidence in your own mind that you have a chance of achieving that goal.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • this means constantly reminding yourself that you are the person ultimately responsible for your research effectiveness.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Of course, the right way to respond to a bad situation is not to beat yourself up, but rather to admit that, yes, things are going badly, to figure out exactly what problems you are facing, write out possible solutions, prioritize and implement them, without getting too worried or hamstrung by the whole process.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • The second way of abdicating responsibility is to get caught up in displacement activities.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • The heart of personal effectiveness is not necessarily any special knowledge or secret: it is doing the basics consistently well.
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • Motivation and desire alone are not enough. You also need to have the rest of your life in order to be an effective researcher. Make sure you’re fit. Look after your health. Spend high quality time with your family. Have fun. These things require a lot of thought and effort to get right. If you don’t get them right, not only will your life as a whole be less good, your research will suffer
    Principles of Effective Research | Michael Nielsen
  • I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!
    You and Your Research
  • Don't try an alibi. Don't try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.
    You and Your Research
  • I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I'm surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself.
    You and Your Research
  • . I bragged about something so I'd have to perform. I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable.
    You and Your Research
  • Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative.
    You and Your Research
  • Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do…
    You and Your Research
  • By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.
    You and Your Research
  • If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you.'' And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system.
    You and Your Research
  • at Bell Labs quite a few people far more able and far better endowed than I, but they didn't produce as much. Some of them did produce more than I did; Shannon produced more than I did, and some others produced a lot, but I was highly productive against a lot of other fellows who were better equipped. Why is it so? What happened to them? Why do so many of the people who have great promise, fail?
    You and Your Research
  • I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
    You and Your Research
  • The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give.
    You and Your Research
  • There are three things you have to do in selling. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks.
    You and Your Research