I think one important context for not reading the existing literature first is calibration. Examining the difference between how you are thinking about a question and how others have thought about the same question can be instructive in a couple of ways. You might have found a novel approach that is worth exploring, or you might be way off in your thinking. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon an obsolete way of thinking about something. Figuring out how your own thinking process lines up with the field can be extremely instructional, and super useful if you want your eventual original work to be meaningful. At the very least, you can identify your own common failure modes and work to avoid them.
The fastest and easiest way to accomplish all this is by using a sort of research loop where you collect your own thoughts and questions, then compare them with the literature and try to reconcile the two, then repeat. If you just read all the literature first, you have no way to calibrate your explorations when you finally get there.
I think one important context for not reading the existing literature first is calibration. Examining the difference between how you are thinking about a question and how others have thought about the same question can be instructive in a couple of ways. You might have found a novel approach that is worth exploring, or you might be way off in your thinking. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon an obsolete way of thinking about something. Figuring out how your own thinking process lines up with the field can be extremely instructional, and super useful if you want your eventual original work to be meaningful. At the very least, you can identify your own common failure modes and work to avoid them.
The fastest and easiest way to accomplish all this is by using a sort of research loop where you collect your own thoughts and questions, then compare them with the literature and try to reconcile the two, then repeat. If you just read all the literature first, you have no way to calibrate your explorations when you finally get there.