Summary: Research is about understanding rather than just making new discoveries. It involves delving deep into a topic until you reach the edge of current human knowledge. By asking questions and exploring beyond what’s known, anyone can start doing research.
Instead, research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning. Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet. (View Highlight)
I felt as if my whole life I’d been hiking in a dense fog-ridden forest and suddenly stumbled upon a lush valley saturated with sunshine and stunning clarity. This was research. I wasn’t straining to discover something new. I was accidentally doing it because I was curious, because my friend had asked a question I couldn’t answer and it seemed nobody else had figured it out either. (View Highlight)
Research, I realized, is what happens as a byproduct when you try to understand something and hit the bounds of what humanity currently knows. (View Highlight)
When our goal is to understand something, we start getting curious: why does this work this way, and not that way? Why doesn’t this do what I expected? Strange! These observations of strangeness, where pieces of the understanding puzzle don’t fit, lead to exploring beyond what’s known. (View Highlight)
New highlights added September 7, 2024 at 12:34 PM
Put another way, the generating function for novel work is trying really hard to deeply understand something until you pass through the edge of current human understanding, and then continuing imaginatively onwards. (View Highlight)
Of course, that understanding needs to be augmented with a model of what’s already known. Without such a model, you may think you’re discovering new things at the edge, but you’re actually in the center rediscovering what’s known. With a good model, in many areas it’s amazing how quickly you shoot beyond the edge. (View Highlight)
When we see research as a process of understanding rather than a process of producing novel discoveries4, it becomes clear that many curious, bright people who don’t believe they can be researchers already have the foundational skills needed. We’re naturally curious; we already know how to learn, how to notice when something doesn’t make sense. We ask questions, and we work out the answer. At some point, we’ll ask questions where nobody has the answer. At that point, we’re starting to do research.5 (View Highlight)
Viewed as a way to understand reality more deeply, suddenly research shifts from something intimidating to something beautiful, this process of slowly feeling the inner workings of the universe come into focus, clicking into place, a blossoming of clarity suffusing, igniting the jungle of neurons traversing my mind, until I can finally see. (View Highlight)
