I think this is mainly a function of how established the field is and how much time you’re willing to spend on the subject. The point of thinking about a field before looking at the literature is to avoid getting stuck in the same local optima as everyone else. However, making progress by yourself is far slower than just reading what everyone has already figured out.
Thus, if you don’t plan to spend a large amount of time in a field , it’s far quicker and more effective to just read the literature. However, if you’re going to spend a large amount of time on the problems in the field, then you want to be able to “see with fresh eyes” before looking at what everyone else is doing. This prevents everyone’s approaches from clustering together.
Likewise, in a very well established field like math or physics, we can expect everyone to already have clustered around the “correct answer”. It doesn’t make as much sense to try and look at the problem from a new perspective, because we already have very good understanding of the field. This reasoning break down once you get to the unsolved problems in the field. In that case, you want to do your own thinking to make sure you don’t immediately bias your thinking towards solutions that others are already working on.
I think this is mainly a function of how established the field is and how much time you’re willing to spend on the subject. The point of thinking about a field before looking at the literature is to avoid getting stuck in the same local optima as everyone else. However, making progress by yourself is far slower than just reading what everyone has already figured out.
Thus, if you don’t plan to spend a large amount of time in a field , it’s far quicker and more effective to just read the literature. However, if you’re going to spend a large amount of time on the problems in the field, then you want to be able to “see with fresh eyes” before looking at what everyone else is doing. This prevents everyone’s approaches from clustering together.
Likewise, in a very well established field like math or physics, we can expect everyone to already have clustered around the “correct answer”. It doesn’t make as much sense to try and look at the problem from a new perspective, because we already have very good understanding of the field. This reasoning break down once you get to the unsolved problems in the field. In that case, you want to do your own thinking to make sure you don’t immediately bias your thinking towards solutions that others are already working on.