Personal Manifesto for conducting research
Often I see a lack of research as a major bottleneck in any project undertaken by people. This is often prevalent in projects that attract a lot of grifters, i.e, hyped areas, where a most common example is technology.
This has led to a degradation of overall quality of research. For clarification, I do not mean research as in academic research, but more of the action that we perform in our everyday work. LLMs and the advent of it's deep research capabilities have added fuel to the fire, where people seem to have truly offloaded their cognitive thinking to them, leading to further degradation.
For no particular reason (maybe to send this post to anyone whom I think may fall prey to the above trap) I decided that I will list some ways I would approach research, on a topic that I know little about. These points are for beginners, not experts.
Our main sources often are:
People. The first and foremost way is to simply interact with people who know about the concept, and gather as much information as possible. If in-person exposure is unlikely, we have social media sites (like reddit, twitter, instagram, linkedln). The ideal person is someone who has the exact knowledge that you seek, but in cases where this is not possible (either due to the concept being niche, or the domain being ill-structured), we must extrapolate.
PAEBB. Reading and collecting material in the form of papers, articles, essays, blogs and books. The content that we consume from these sources would be different, and often denser then if we talk to people. Reading material is often a better way to expose oneself to radically new perspectives, and grasp more in less time (as compared to talking to people). There is also the added benefit that reading material (at least the long-form ones) are more well thought out, and can provide valuable insights that otherwise would've been missed while talking.
Information gathering must be limited. Avoidance of rabbit holes, unnecessary jargons, unsolicited opinions and misguided perspectives is imperative. Especially the opinions. We must learn to distinguish between opinions and facts, and to be honest, most of the research out there is based on opinions, even to a large extent, within STEM.
That being said, how would I go about learning the basics of a new domain ?
Read a bit of history. It gives us the origin of the said domain. This helps a LOT, wherein we understand why the domain came into existence, how it's evolved and what are it's current paradigms.
Create a mental scaffolding of the modern paradigms and current best practices that are being done by experts. This could come from PAEBBs or even news. This gives us a bird's eye view of the domain, which is often necessary for ...
Identification of which sub-domain concerns you directly. More often then not, most domains are vast, and we can easily overload our brains with information that we do not need in this age of internet and LLMs.
Recursively perform the above procedures, till you get to your problem/use case/application. The next step is to actively look for solutions, which directly and immediately solve your problem/use case/application. This step maybe different if one's aim is to learn, but initially it helps to look at solutions, before "testing ourselves".
These above points assume you've time and patience to get an in-depth understanding of the domain before you tackle any problems. And in case you don't have time, hire a professional. It often better to do that instead of acting based on partially known information, but of course there can be other trade-offs involved.