I had a side project to get better at research in 2023. I found very little resources that were actually helpful to me. But here are some that I liked.
Diving into deliberate practice. Most easily read is the popsci book Peak. This book emphasizes “mental representations”, which I find the most useful part of the method, though I think it’s also the least supported by the science.
The book Ultralearning. Extremely skimmable, large collection of heuristics that I find essential for the “lean” style of research.
Reading a scattering of historical accounts of how researchers did their research, and how it came to be useful. (E.g. Newton, Einstein, Erdős, Shannon, Kolmogorov, and a long tail of less big names.)
(Many resources were not helpful for me for reasons that might not apply to others; I was already doing what they advised, or they were about how to succeed inside academia, or they were about emotional problems like lack of confidence or burnout. But, I think mostly I failed to find good resources because no one knows how to do good research.)
Seconded! I love Holden’s posts on wicked problems, I revisit them like once a week or whenever I’m feeling down about my work :p
I’ve also found it incredibly useful to read historical accounts of great scientists. There’s just all kinds of great thinking tips scattered among biographies, many of which I’ve encountered on LessWrong before, but somehow seeing them in the context of one particular intellectual journey is very helpful.
Reading Einstein’s biography (by Walter Isaacson) was by far my favorite. I felt like I got a really good handle for his style of thinking (e.g., how obsessed he was with unity—like how he felt it “unbearable” that there should be an essential difference between a magnet moving through a conducting coil and a coil moving around a magnet, although the theories at the time posited such a difference; his insistence on figuring out the physical meaning of things—with special relativity, this was the operationalization of “time,” with quanta this was giving meaning to an otherwise mathematical curiosity that Planck had discovered; his specific style of thought experiments; and just a sense of how wonderful and visceral his curiosity about the world was, like how as a very young child his father brought him a compass, and as he watched the needle align due to some apparently hidden force field he trembled and grew cold at the prospect of non-mechanical causes). He’s so cool!
I had a side project to get better at research in 2023. I found very little resources that were actually helpful to me. But here are some that I liked.
A few posts by Holden Karnofsky on Cold Takes, especially Useful Vices for Wicked Problems and Learning By Writing.
Diving into deliberate practice. Most easily read is the popsci book Peak. This book emphasizes “mental representations”, which I find the most useful part of the method, though I think it’s also the least supported by the science.
The popsci book Grit.
The book Ultralearning. Extremely skimmable, large collection of heuristics that I find essential for the “lean” style of research.
Reading a scattering of historical accounts of how researchers did their research, and how it came to be useful. (E.g. Newton, Einstein, Erdős, Shannon, Kolmogorov, and a long tail of less big names.)
(Many resources were not helpful for me for reasons that might not apply to others; I was already doing what they advised, or they were about how to succeed inside academia, or they were about emotional problems like lack of confidence or burnout. But, I think mostly I failed to find good resources because no one knows how to do good research.)
Seconded! I love Holden’s posts on wicked problems, I revisit them like once a week or whenever I’m feeling down about my work :p
I’ve also found it incredibly useful to read historical accounts of great scientists. There’s just all kinds of great thinking tips scattered among biographies, many of which I’ve encountered on LessWrong before, but somehow seeing them in the context of one particular intellectual journey is very helpful.
Reading Einstein’s biography (by Walter Isaacson) was by far my favorite. I felt like I got a really good handle for his style of thinking (e.g., how obsessed he was with unity—like how he felt it “unbearable” that there should be an essential difference between a magnet moving through a conducting coil and a coil moving around a magnet, although the theories at the time posited such a difference; his insistence on figuring out the physical meaning of things—with special relativity, this was the operationalization of “time,” with quanta this was giving meaning to an otherwise mathematical curiosity that Planck had discovered; his specific style of thought experiments; and just a sense of how wonderful and visceral his curiosity about the world was, like how as a very young child his father brought him a compass, and as he watched the needle align due to some apparently hidden force field he trembled and grew cold at the prospect of non-mechanical causes). He’s so cool!
Any other biography suggestions?