alt Hacker NewsYou and I are in agreement for the most part.
Especially steps 1-2 are not things easy to hand off in the first place.
Step 6 it's important: reflect on your work and challenge it. I'm distinguishing this from 4 because you need to take the part of a strong adversary.
I'm not quite sure this is hire evolutionary programs work, having written plenty myself. I'd lean on no. I'm certain this is not the fill of my work as a researcher.
As a researcher you can't just put ideas together and follow some algorithm. There's no clear way to continue except in the incremental works. Don't get me wrong, those can do a lot of good, but they'll never get you anything groundbreaking. To do really novel things you need to understand details of what went on before. It's extremely beneficial to reproduce because you want to verify. When doing that you want to look carefully at assumptions and find what you're taking for granted. Maybe that's step 1 for you but step 1 is ongoing. The vast majority of people I meet fail to check their assumptions at even a basic level. Very few people want to play that game of 20 questions over and over being highly pedantic. Instead I hear "from first principles" and know what's about to follow is not a set of axioms. Carl Sagan bakes a pie from first principles. That's too far tbh, but you should probably mill your own flower (and that's still a long way from first)
That's a very useful insight thank you.
Something that interests me is finding the right balance between assumptions and guarantees. If we don't look to closely, then weak assumptions and strong guarantees bring the most utility. But that always comes at a cost.
As merely a programmer I wonder this: You mentioned challenging your assumptions. How often does a researcher change their guarantees?
In the current hype cycle there are many different voices talking over each other and people trying stuff out. But I feel in the mid or long term there needs to be a discussion about being more pragmatic and tightening scope.
How important is that aspect for you? How long are you allowed (or do you allow yourself) to chase and optimize for an outcome before you reconfigure where you're heading?