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You and Your Research

~ Richard W. Hamming

Transcript

Doing significant things

Hamming starts out making a case for doing significant things:

Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?

Luck is not as important as we think

He then plays down the importance of luck emphasizing his belief that "luck favors the prepared mind".

There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

The importance of courage

The courage to follow one's intuitions and belief is important.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

The compounding effect

Hamming also emphasizes the importance of tapping into the compounding effect.

Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.

But he also warns against failing to direct that hard work sensibly.

Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

Dealing with the ambiguity

Part of being a great scientist is to both believe and not believe one's ideas.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.

Harvesting the power of the subconscious

Looking at creativity, he assents that "creativity comes out of your subconscious".

He recommends extreme focus on the problem at hand as a way to get the subconscious to also work on the problem and come up with a (creative) solution.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. ... Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Working on important problems

Coming to the topic of important problems, and important work, Hamming poses these three questions:

  • What are the most important problems in your field?
  • Are you working on one of them?
  • Why not?

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

By important problem, he means not just things that could have a big impact but also have "a reasonable attack". So, "time travel" doesn't count (at least for now).

To this end, he blocked off a section of Friday afternoon as "Great Thoughts Time" where they would only discuss great thoughts. Eg: "How will computers change science?"

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it.

Doors opened vs doors closed

He observed that the people who worked with doors closed did more work in the short term but would hit a wall down the line or found they were working on slightly the wrong problem.

Working on general problems

Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

By working on general problems rather than specific isolated ones, or even changing one's mode of thinking to be more general, Hamming found he was more productive and happy with his work. One of the ways to do this is to work on things others can build upon.

Selling your work

It's not just enough to do good work. One also needs to sell it.

Three things to do in this regard:

  • Learn to write clearly and well
  • Learn to give reasonably formal talks
  • Learn to give informal talks

Why don't a lot more people do great work?

Hamming contends it's because:

  • They lack the drive and commitment.
  • They have some personality defect. Eg: The urge to assert oneself, fight the system unnecessarily, anger. And also, self-delusion.

Closing notes

All of this famous talk is good, interesting advice. Of course, this applies only if you want to do "great" work. There is nothing against a dignified "normal" life. Also, the advices here mostly do apply to any field but of course, some of it may fare better for the kind of scientific work Hamming had in mind.

For me, the part about introspecting whether I'm working on important problems or not hits home the most.

Could pair this with Good and bad procrastination.

Also, Cal Newport has a very good set of notes on this talk.

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