I study mathematics at Oxford; I took a leave of absence, and I’m planning to go back in the spring. Today, I met an ex-CFAR math professor. I didn’t know any such people exist! We spoke about having a foot in both worlds.
Blog posts & research papers
L: something i’ve been thinking about is the tradeoff between blog posts and research papers. i think i’ve been idly writing blog posts in the hope some of them will turn into research papers, but i don’t know if that’s realistic at all.
early in inkhaven, i asked for examples of blog posts that have turned into research papers. and i got sent a few — in particular, some decision theory and incentive design stuff.
it’s possible my process should look more like this:
blog to generate / process ideas
go away and run experiments / write up theory / write research papers about the ideas
come back to blogging for dissemination & share any thoughts / directions that didn’t make it in
on any given sunday, i can write 1-2 blog posts off the bat, and i can read research papers towards one specific blog post — or i can work on some research problem where i probably won’t have anything to show for it at the end of the day, but might if i put 10-20 days in like that.
oh, i guess — i guess i could spend the day working on the problem and then in the evening write up how it went, good or bad.
X: yeah, that sounds like a good middle ground
Depth-Breadth & Obsession
X: i’ll tell you something that i tell my graduate students: your job is to get obsessed with doing mathematics. anything that makes it more fun is what you should be doing
also, there’s something important about aloneness, particularly in mathematics research. that doesn’t necessarily mean being alone / apart from your own research group — but it does mean your research group should be isolated / cordoned off from the world, a little bit
L: right now it feels hard for me to go deep into intellectual siloes in mathematics, because any subfield might get bitter-lessoned at any time. that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing — you are what you know and the modes of thinking you use; i want to bend my mind into those shapes; to me it will still have been worth it if the field does get bitter-lessoned. but the situation does seem to favor skimming, staying light…
also, there’s the great challenge of organizing and categorizing all the world’s information, of bringing all the world’s computation together into one symphony, which runs counter to aloneness / intellectual depth and which has felt really exciting to me in the past week, especially if what i care about is research getting done more than who does it. there’s soo much low-hanging fruit here. and it’s irresistible, and when i do all this systems-infra stuff, it pulls me away from deep intellectual siloes
but i also think i really got captured by academic questions of computation and cognition :)
then within ai safety there’s still the question — i can go further into RL theory and formal verification and theoretical things like this, or i can go into systems and building ai scientists and suchlike things. both exist in academia
X: do you feel pulled one way or the other between the things you just mentioned?
L: no, not really one way or other the way i just described.
i started a series on the bitter lesson, and i read a bunch of papers and wrote the first post, but i haven’t gotten to the rest yet
X: lol yeah i also struggle with finishing things. sometimes i think finishing isn’t the point though—
L: yeah, agree. i guess — i guess i could write daily about one thing for thirty days, hmm! that seems like it’d be good for generating and processing research ideas
X: yeah that seems like it’d be good
L: wait, you’re in <field>, right? you might know my professor, <name>—
X: i do! while i was at <uni>, he came by a lot—
L: :00