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> Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".

How is that the case? The tips seem to aim for impactful research: picking good ideas and executing well on them. There's a tacit assumption that such impactful research will win best paper awards, but that's actually not substantiated and isn't obviously correct, since best paper selection committees can't see the future. For example, many (maybe most?) winners of retrospective awards (test-of-time / influential paper) aren't papers that won a best paper award when originally published.

Most of the author's papers he cites in the post, including the membership inference paper which is one of the papers the author is "most proud of," didn't win best paper awards.

Step 1. Write a paper with Shamir

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Receive award

Yeah, and I always find the phrase "publish in a conference" to sound vaguely oxymoron-ish.

> The only rule that matters is delivering the message to your reader

The point is he is a superb writer in my book, it is fun to read and there are similarly good quotes that say the same in different ways. It is not enough to hone your technical skill alone because "the right circumstances" do not appear if you only change one variable.

When I read this I see someone having fun, being able to convey that is a good trait.

Interesting. I don't quite agree. It's one thing to predict what general topics will be hot and popular this year. But that's not the same as what particular research problem will be important and have lasting influence.

There are a few kinds of important research. One is solving a well-defined, well-known problem everyone wants to solve but nobody knows how. Another is proposing a new problem, or a new formulation of it, that people didn't realize was important.

There is also highly-cited research that isn't necessarily important, such as being the next paper to slightly lower a benchmark through some tweaks (you get cited by all the subsequent papers that slightly lower the benchmark even further).

In the book The Cuckoo's egg, Cliff Stoll talks to I think Luiz Alvares. I don't have the book handy here, but Alvarez basically told him to nit get distracted by grants, bosses, ... Here is interesting science to do, so go for it. Just run faster than the rest of the world.

In a way, it was a sidetrack of the book, but for me the attitude speaking from that text was interesting and inspiring. When I could pull it off, it tended to work.

"Having taste" is mostly about predicting the future. Which problems are worth studying, which problems you are capable of solving, and which solutions turn out to be important, in retrospect. If there was an actionable way of developing taste in something, the activity itself would probably be so predictable that it would not be a particularly good research topic.

Taste is mostly about having a good intuition on the topics where your intuition is worth following. It tends to develop with experience. But if you want to develop the kind of taste that helps picking good research topics, you need the right kind of experience for that field of research. Experience that turns out to be of the right kind, in retrospect. If your experiences and interests align (again in retrospect), you will probably develop a good taste for research problems in your field of interest. But that requires some amount of luck, in addition to everything else.

Unrelated, but I see the use of the phrase "taste" as having a strong Twitter / e/acc smell (in a negative way).

I tend to associate it with folks who are prepared to victim blame researchers for not adapting to the "new economy" as being people who have "bad taste" or "low agency", maybe as a way to rationalize/justify the upcoming inqeuality that AI will create.

Basically a recycling of the way "IQ"/smarts/hard-work has historically been used to justify disproportionate rewards for the upper class.

(Obviously a gigantic stretch on my part, and not saying the author is in this camp, but just wanted to vent somewhere)

Yes this does not work as well for math or physics. The biggest problem in math is arguably the Riemann Hypothesis . Good luck getting up to the speed on the literature on that . You can invest a lifetime trying to solve the biggest problems in physics or math and get nowhere. You may have to choose more modest goals.

The subtitle is “or, an opinionated take on how to do important research that matters”.

Sometimes you don't need a collaborator if you have the idea. If the other party is not at all working on the angle that you're interested in, it's probably not the correct collaboration to ask to.

Also, a collaborator is usually not a stranger over the internet, it's often someone who you know and you already worked with, so it is not that ackward to expose a new idea and propose to work together.

It takes time and social skills to make long lasting collaborations, the two parties must trust each other in order to collaborate. In this context, exchanging ideas is not really an issue.

I felt this was why math textbooks pose open problems without mentioning them as such. I feel Karatsuba for example was able to come up with his multiplication scheme because he wasn't aware a mathematician had written a false result proving impossibility of faster than quadratic time multiplication.

Or more concretely that famous story where a student had solved certain open problems in statistics thinking they were homework problems.