I feel pretty great about this post. It likely took five to ten hours of my time, and I think it has been useful to a lot of people. I have pointed many people to this post since writing it, and I imagine many other newcomers to the field have read it.
I generally think there is a gap where experienced researchers can use their accumulated knowledge to create field-building materials fairly easily that are extremely useful to newcomers to the field, but don’t (typically because they’re busy—see how I haven’t updated this yet). I’d love to see more people making stuff like this!
Stylistically, I like that this was opinionated. I wasn’t just trying to survey all of the papers, which I think is often not that helpful because lots of papers are not worth reading. Instead, I was editorializing and trying to give summaries, context, and highlight key parts and how to think about the papers, all of which I think make this a more useful guide to newcomers.
One of the annoying things is that posts like this get out of date fairly quickly. This one direly needs an update, both since there has been a year and a half of progress and since my thoughts on interpretability have moved on a reasonable amount since I wrote it. But I think that even getting about a year of use out of this is a solid use of time.
I feel pretty great about this post. It likely took five to ten hours of my time, and I think it has been useful to a lot of people. I have pointed many people to this post since writing it, and I imagine many other newcomers to the field have read it.
I generally think there is a gap where experienced researchers can use their accumulated knowledge to create field-building materials fairly easily that are extremely useful to newcomers to the field, but don’t (typically because they’re busy—see how I haven’t updated this yet). I’d love to see more people making stuff like this!
Stylistically, I like that this was opinionated. I wasn’t just trying to survey all of the papers, which I think is often not that helpful because lots of papers are not worth reading. Instead, I was editorializing and trying to give summaries, context, and highlight key parts and how to think about the papers, all of which I think make this a more useful guide to newcomers.
One of the annoying things is that posts like this get out of date fairly quickly. This one direly needs an update, both since there has been a year and a half of progress and since my thoughts on interpretability have moved on a reasonable amount since I wrote it. But I think that even getting about a year of use out of this is a solid use of time.