Robin Hanson thinks of himself (imo mostly correctly) as a polymath. He once said something like: to try to make sure he’s not just passively consuming material as a way to dodge thinking of new ideas, he gives himself the rule that in any new field of study he must push himself to come up with at least some original work in the field.
Other reasons to follow new research even if you are not at the cutting edge of research:
You want to know whether buying X drug is a good idea (e.g. Lumina Probiotic’s cavity stopping bacteria).
You want to solve some special problem of yours. You can get a leg up over doctors by being a specialist in you, and also in helps to distinguish good advice from bad and have models for what’s going on. Sometimes nobody’s condensed the research you need. Other times you can’t trust previous condensations to be properly skeptical of studies, and so you need to do spot checks of the research yourself. Still other times you just can’t wait for a textbook writer.
You’re someone reporting on or forecasting advances in a field. For example, Zvi’s not a covid researcher, and yet his amazing covid coverage was helped by reading recent research. For the reporting part, you could call him a condenser—but for forecasting, does that count as ‘research’? It’s certainly cutting edge work, but it’s work of a different kind, that nonetheless needs to learn from new studies.
As a form of ‘happy news’. I remember hearing about lenacapavir, the HIV (prophylactic and anti transmission) drug that you only need to take once or twice a year, and how it had outstanding trial results. I don’t really care that I’ll probably never need it—I like knowing that I might see a kick in the graph of HIV soon.
Notably, only the Zvi example would benefit from reading as much as a cutting edge researcher. The rest mostly require only reading specific papers here and there.
Robin Hanson thinks of himself (imo mostly correctly) as a polymath. He once said something like: to try to make sure he’s not just passively consuming material as a way to dodge thinking of new ideas, he gives himself the rule that in any new field of study he must push himself to come up with at least some original work in the field.
Other reasons to follow new research even if you are not at the cutting edge of research:
You want to know whether buying X drug is a good idea (e.g. Lumina Probiotic’s cavity stopping bacteria).
You want to solve some special problem of yours. You can get a leg up over doctors by being a specialist in you, and also in helps to distinguish good advice from bad and have models for what’s going on. Sometimes nobody’s condensed the research you need. Other times you can’t trust previous condensations to be properly skeptical of studies, and so you need to do spot checks of the research yourself. Still other times you just can’t wait for a textbook writer.
You’re someone reporting on or forecasting advances in a field. For example, Zvi’s not a covid researcher, and yet his amazing covid coverage was helped by reading recent research. For the reporting part, you could call him a condenser—but for forecasting, does that count as ‘research’? It’s certainly cutting edge work, but it’s work of a different kind, that nonetheless needs to learn from new studies.
As a form of ‘happy news’. I remember hearing about lenacapavir, the HIV (prophylactic and anti transmission) drug that you only need to take once or twice a year, and how it had outstanding trial results. I don’t really care that I’ll probably never need it—I like knowing that I might see a kick in the graph of HIV soon.
Notably, only the Zvi example would benefit from reading as much as a cutting edge researcher. The rest mostly require only reading specific papers here and there.