In 2025, I’m interested in trying an alternative research / collaboration strategy that plays to my perceived strengths and interests.
Self-diagnosis of research skills
Good high-level research taste, conceptual framing, awareness of field
Mid at research engineering (specifically the ‘move quickly and break things’ skill could be doing better), low-level research taste (specifically how to quickly diagnose and fix problems, ‘getting things right’ the first time, etc)
Bad at self-management (easily distracted, bad at prioritising), sustaining things long-term (tends to lose interest quickly when progress runs into hurdles, dislikes being tied down to projects once excitement lost)
So here’s a strategy for doing research that tries to play to my strengths
Focus on the conceptual work: Finding interesting questions to answer / angles of attack on existing questions
Do the minimal amount of engineering required to sprint quickly to preliminary results. Ideally spend no more than 1 week on this.
At that point, write the result up and share with others. Then leverage preliminary result to find collaborators who have the interest / skill to scale an initial proof of concept up into a more complete result.
Interested in takes on whether this is a good / bad idea
Edit: Some influences which led me down this line of thinking:
In 2025, I’m interested in trying an alternative research / collaboration strategy that plays to my perceived strengths and interests.
Self-diagnosis of research skills
Good high-level research taste, conceptual framing, awareness of field
Mid at research engineering (specifically the ‘move quickly and break things’ skill could be doing better), low-level research taste (specifically how to quickly diagnose and fix problems, ‘getting things right’ the first time, etc)
Bad at self-management (easily distracted, bad at prioritising), sustaining things long-term (tends to lose interest quickly when progress runs into hurdles, dislikes being tied down to projects once excitement lost)
So here’s a strategy for doing research that tries to play to my strengths
Focus on the conceptual work: Finding interesting questions to answer / angles of attack on existing questions
Do the minimal amount of engineering required to sprint quickly to preliminary results. Ideally spend no more than 1 week on this.
At that point, write the result up and share with others. Then leverage preliminary result to find collaborators who have the interest / skill to scale an initial proof of concept up into a more complete result.
Interested in takes on whether this is a good / bad idea
Edit: Some influences which led me down this line of thinking:
Effective strategy starts with a good diagnosis
Zero to One
Do the most informative thing