The idea of having supporters for geniuses seems good. But drills sound really boring, and I don’t even think they would help. As a math researcher, I already get practice from solving problems that seem interesting, and doing specified drills would be throwing away the information about what I find interesting in favor of some other heuristic, which is unlikely to track cognitive usefulness as well as curiosity does. In the words of Isaac Newton:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Additionally, many intellectual fields (math, programming, science) largely consist of factoring out repeated patterns into named constructs, so repeating the same thing over and over again is often an antipattern. Some techniques are repeated, but most of the difficulty is in finding the right abstractions rather than in repeatedly applying them.
(There are some cases where drills help, such as in memorizing multiplication tables, but they are rarer than cases where they are counterproductive)
Where athletic coaches have drills ready, for research I feel like it would be more like a procedure for identifying and rectifying a mistake. I strongly suspect that this falls under the heading of “things good researchers do anyway”, for example:
1. When checking a conclusion, notice that one element of the arguments is too weak
2. That element is too weak because it lies outside the researcher’s core of expertise and so the implications were unclear to them
3. The researcher seeks out a colleague who has better expertise so as to understand the implications better
The thing is I expect a very large difference between this being something a researcher may or may not do on their own, versus something that will happen because it is the group expectation and everything is organized to make it as easy as possible. The more reliable this kind of supporting infrastructure is, the more we could extend it down below the level of genius (to turn mediocre researchers into competent ones, say).
Strongly agree that research progress usually happens because of networks of individuals with good norms/protocols such as checking each other’s work.
The things you mention seem more like skills to be taught once (or a few times) and practiced naturally, than things to be drilled repeatedly.
The idea of having supporters for geniuses seems good. But drills sound really boring, and I don’t even think they would help. As a math researcher, I already get practice from solving problems that seem interesting, and doing specified drills would be throwing away the information about what I find interesting in favor of some other heuristic, which is unlikely to track cognitive usefulness as well as curiosity does. In the words of Isaac Newton:
Additionally, many intellectual fields (math, programming, science) largely consist of factoring out repeated patterns into named constructs, so repeating the same thing over and over again is often an antipattern. Some techniques are repeated, but most of the difficulty is in finding the right abstractions rather than in repeatedly applying them.
(There are some cases where drills help, such as in memorizing multiplication tables, but they are rarer than cases where they are counterproductive)
Where athletic coaches have drills ready, for research I feel like it would be more like a procedure for identifying and rectifying a mistake. I strongly suspect that this falls under the heading of “things good researchers do anyway”, for example:
1. When checking a conclusion, notice that one element of the arguments is too weak
2. That element is too weak because it lies outside the researcher’s core of expertise and so the implications were unclear to them
3. The researcher seeks out a colleague who has better expertise so as to understand the implications better
The thing is I expect a very large difference between this being something a researcher may or may not do on their own, versus something that will happen because it is the group expectation and everything is organized to make it as easy as possible. The more reliable this kind of supporting infrastructure is, the more we could extend it down below the level of genius (to turn mediocre researchers into competent ones, say).
Strongly agree that research progress usually happens because of networks of individuals with good norms/protocols such as checking each other’s work.
The things you mention seem more like skills to be taught once (or a few times) and practiced naturally, than things to be drilled repeatedly.