There are a bunch of activities that I engage in when doing research. These include but are not limited to:
Figuring out the best thing to do.
Talking out loud to force my ideas into language.
For the last 3 months I have been working maybe 50 hours per week by meeting with people and doing stream-of-thought reasoning. That was very productive. Probably in large part because of this.
Even when working alone I try to use this. The main thing that holds me back from using it all the time when working alone is that it can be quite awkward.
Recording myself explaining something, usually on a whiteboard. This is useful to check:
Check if my understanding is good enough yet to write a post.
Helps remove the awkwardness when talking to yourself (because you are not).
Trying to explain an idea on the whiteboard.
I mainly use whiteboards when I am still at the stage of being confused.
Writing pseudocode.
Similar to forcing yourself to explain something in natural language.
Notice where you are confused by not being able to express something.
Writing a concrete implementation we can run.
I rarely do this because it is so slow, probably because I have not acquired sufficient software engineering skills yet.
I expect that writing programs can be very useful for getting observations that you could not easily generate in your head. E.g. Mandelbrot did make plot fractals.
Writing down things that we have figured out on a whiteboard or any other process in rough notes.
Writing a distillation of the thing I have figured out, such that I can understand these notes 1 year from now.
Reflecting on how it went.
Writing public posts, that convey concepts to other people.
My main questions are:
What research processes do you use?
When do you use them?
What do you get out if it goes well?
Also, feel free to mention great posts about this. I am most interested in processes that you personally use on a regular basis.
[Question] What are the Activities that make up your Research Process?
There are a bunch of activities that I engage in when doing research. These include but are not limited to:
Figuring out the best thing to do.
Talking out loud to force my ideas into language.
For the last 3 months I have been working maybe 50 hours per week by meeting with people and doing stream-of-thought reasoning. That was very productive. Probably in large part because of this.
Even when working alone I try to use this. The main thing that holds me back from using it all the time when working alone is that it can be quite awkward.
Recording myself explaining something, usually on a whiteboard. This is useful to check:
Check if my understanding is good enough yet to write a post.
Helps remove the awkwardness when talking to yourself (because you are not).
Trying to explain an idea on the whiteboard.
I mainly use whiteboards when I am still at the stage of being confused.
Writing pseudocode.
Similar to forcing yourself to explain something in natural language.
Notice where you are confused by not being able to express something.
Writing a concrete implementation we can run.
I rarely do this because it is so slow, probably because I have not acquired sufficient software engineering skills yet.
I expect that writing programs can be very useful for getting observations that you could not easily generate in your head. E.g. Mandelbrot did make plot fractals.
Writing down things that we have figured out on a whiteboard or any other process in rough notes.
Writing a distillation of the thing I have figured out, such that I can understand these notes 1 year from now.
Reflecting on how it went.
Writing public posts, that convey concepts to other people.
My main questions are:
What research processes do you use?
When do you use them?
What do you get out if it goes well?
Also, feel free to mention great posts about this. I am most interested in processes that you personally use on a regular basis.