In support of this, I remember Geoff Hinton saying at his Turing award lecture that he strongly advised new grad students not to read the literature before trying, for months, to solve the problem themselves.
Two interesting consequences of the “unique combination of facts” model of invention:
You may want to engage in strategic ignorance: avoid learning about certain popular subfields or papers, in the hopes that this will let you generate a unique idea that is blocked for people who read all the latest papers and believe whatever the modern equivalent of “vanishing gradients means you can’t train deep networks end-to-end” turns out to be.
You may want to invest in uncorrelated knowledge: what is a body of knowledge that you’re curious about that nobody else in your field seems to know? Fields that seem especially promising to cross-pollinate with alignment are human-computer interaction, economic history, industrial organization, contract law, psychotherapy, anthropology. Perhaps even these are too obvious!
I agree with these. Related, if you work in a team I think it is far more important that you read papers no-one else in your team has read, than reading papers that everyone in the team has read. Put that way it is obvious, but many research groups welcome new members with a well-meaning folder of 30+ pdfs which they claim will be useful.
In support of this, I remember Geoff Hinton saying at his Turing award lecture that he strongly advised new grad students not to read the literature before trying, for months, to solve the problem themselves.
Two interesting consequences of the “unique combination of facts” model of invention:
You may want to engage in strategic ignorance: avoid learning about certain popular subfields or papers, in the hopes that this will let you generate a unique idea that is blocked for people who read all the latest papers and believe whatever the modern equivalent of “vanishing gradients means you can’t train deep networks end-to-end” turns out to be.
You may want to invest in uncorrelated knowledge: what is a body of knowledge that you’re curious about that nobody else in your field seems to know? Fields that seem especially promising to cross-pollinate with alignment are human-computer interaction, economic history, industrial organization, contract law, psychotherapy, anthropology. Perhaps even these are too obvious!
I agree with these. Related, if you work in a team I think it is far more important that you read papers no-one else in your team has read, than reading papers that everyone in the team has read. Put that way it is obvious, but many research groups welcome new members with a well-meaning folder of 30+ pdfs which they claim will be useful.