I wish I’d learned to ask for help earlier in my career.
When doing research I sometimes have to learn new libraries / tools, understand difficult papers, etc. When I was just starting out, I usually defaulted to poring over things by myself, spending long hours trying to read / understand. (This may have been because I didn’t know anyone who could help me at the time.)
This habit stuck with me way longer than was optimal. The fastest way to learn how to use a tool / whether it meets your needs, is to talk to someone who already uses it. The fastest way to understand a paper is to talk to the authors. (Of course, don’t ask mindlessly—be specific, concrete. Think about what you want.)
The hardest part about asking for help—knowing when to ask for help. It’s sometimes hard to tell when you are confused or stuck. It was helpful for me to cultivate my awareness here through journalling / logging my work a lot more.
Counterargument: Doing it manually teaches you the skills and the strategies for autonomously attaining high levels of understanding quickly and data-efficiently. Those skills would then generalize to cases in which you can’t consult anyone, such as cases where the authors are incommunicado, dead, or don’t exist/the author is the raw reality. That last case is particularly important for doing frontier research: if you’ve generated a bunch of experimental results and derivations, the skills to make sense of what it all means have a fair amount of overlap with the skills for independently integrating a new paper into your world-models.
Of course, this is primarily applicable if you expect research to be a core part of your career, and it’s important to keep in mind that “ask an expert for help” is an option. Still, I think independent self-studies can serve as good “training wheels”.
Directionally agreed re self-practice teaching valuable skills
Nit 1: your premise here seems to be that you actually succeed in the end + are self-aware enough to be able to identify what you did ‘right’. In which case, yeah, chances are you probably didn’t need the help.
Nit 2: Even in the specific case you outline, I still think “learning to extrapolate skills from successful demonstrations” is easier than “learning what not to do through repeated failure”.
In such a case one should probably engage in independent research until they have developed the relevant skills well enough (and they know it). After that point, persisting in independent research rather than seeking help can be an unproductive use of time. Although it is not obvious how attainable this point is.
I wish I’d learned to ask for help earlier in my career.
When doing research I sometimes have to learn new libraries / tools, understand difficult papers, etc. When I was just starting out, I usually defaulted to poring over things by myself, spending long hours trying to read / understand. (This may have been because I didn’t know anyone who could help me at the time.)
This habit stuck with me way longer than was optimal. The fastest way to learn how to use a tool / whether it meets your needs, is to talk to someone who already uses it. The fastest way to understand a paper is to talk to the authors. (Of course, don’t ask mindlessly—be specific, concrete. Think about what you want.)
The hardest part about asking for help—knowing when to ask for help. It’s sometimes hard to tell when you are confused or stuck. It was helpful for me to cultivate my awareness here through journalling / logging my work a lot more.
Ask for help. It gets stuff done.
Counterargument: Doing it manually teaches you the skills and the strategies for autonomously attaining high levels of understanding quickly and data-efficiently. Those skills would then generalize to cases in which you can’t consult anyone, such as cases where the authors are incommunicado, dead, or don’t exist/the author is the raw reality. That last case is particularly important for doing frontier research: if you’ve generated a bunch of experimental results and derivations, the skills to make sense of what it all means have a fair amount of overlap with the skills for independently integrating a new paper into your world-models.
Of course, this is primarily applicable if you expect research to be a core part of your career, and it’s important to keep in mind that “ask an expert for help” is an option. Still, I think independent self-studies can serve as good “training wheels”.
Directionally agreed re self-practice teaching valuable skills
Nit 1: your premise here seems to be that you actually succeed in the end + are self-aware enough to be able to identify what you did ‘right’. In which case, yeah, chances are you probably didn’t need the help.
Nit 2: Even in the specific case you outline, I still think “learning to extrapolate skills from successful demonstrations” is easier than “learning what not to do through repeated failure”.
In such a case one should probably engage in independent research until they have developed the relevant skills well enough (and they know it). After that point, persisting in independent research rather than seeking help can be an unproductive use of time. Although it is not obvious how attainable this point is.