While he pushed that he could have more substantial results in 6-12 months, other job candidates had had 2-3 projects done in the same timespan as Tom, and all he could muster up was a “maybe perhaps possibly”?
This trap reminded me of this gem I recently stumbled upon. Here’s the bottom line, so you can determine whether this seems unintuitive/worth exploring:
Many of our default intuitions about how to pursue uncertain ideas are counterproductive:
We often try easier tasks first, when instead we should try the most informative tasks first.
We often conflate a high-level approach with a low-level instantiation of the approach.
We are often too slow to try to disprove our own ideas.
Building frameworks that reify the research process as a concrete search problem can help unearth these incorrect intuitions and replace them with systematic reasoning.
This trap reminded me of this gem I recently stumbled upon. Here’s the bottom line, so you can determine whether this seems unintuitive/worth exploring: