The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources.

As an example, almost all textbooks are actually secondary sources. The primary source may be a journal article. And yes, often, those secondary sources are far superior than the primary sources. Insisting on reading all those journal articles as opposed to a good textbook is simply indulging in a fetish, IMO.

I didn't read the post yet, but

>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

It completely depends on the depth at which you are researching for leisure. If you like to do it to learn some stuff, just using LLMS, wiki and books is perfectly fine!

If you're trying to make a breakthrough in human understanding, it is useful to understand very very well the foundations. It is not required, sometime, another background is enough to see clearly some research issue.

But as you're doing research for fun, if you want to push the boundaries, having very strong foundational knowledge is awesome and very empowering.

Take for example the LLMs, you have many levels of comprehension that you may aim for (just an example):

- simply using occasionally (existance awareness)

- experimenting with prompts engineering (exploratory research)

- studying the neural architectures (understanding better what's going on)

- understanding how the architectures are validated (if they are...)

- finding limiting cases (deeper exploratory research)

- thinking about in under the perspective of bayesian/classical statistics (research at the normal mathematical/engineering level)

- going deep into characterizing the architectures in terms of manifolds, or any other suitable structure that you believe is true (deep fundamental research)

- opening up new questions about what can be learned and why (leading to another research field)

The first 3 are available inside a LLM, on Wikipedia and in books. The rest you need to fetch some papers. The more you go down the path, the more obscure the papers gets.

Up to the end, the last point, where you land in survey papers for the other field, and then you can start again with new questions. The good thing is that most of the fundamental research can be readily applied to understand the new field! It's like a jump start.

But at the end of the day, depending on which depth you want to do your leisure research, the deeper you go, the more foundation papers become important, not just from their content, but also the powerful ideas that can be transferred in other research projects.

Maybe.. One thing that is missing from what I say is that it's not about the quantity, or even the quality of the material you read. But it depends on engaging in deep thinking about it! Someone can spend his life reading and not become smarter, maybe only more knowledgeable.

I my opinion, deep thinking is maybe the most fun and useful skill in leisure research, as in paid research.

“Postmodern Neomarxism” basically doesn’t exist outside of a few fringe academics. Recommend you read Derrida’s _Spectres of Marx_, which goes into detail about how dead academic Marxism was even in 1993 (spoiler: it’s even deader now). His hopes for a “New International” never materialized and died with him.

Even Žižek’s more recent _Too Late to Awaken_ is a depressing slog of an elegy, and he is the closest thing to a real “Neomarxist” you could ask for.

Relatedly, Foucault and Deleuze do not write anything remotely like Zinn. Comparing them is wholly meaningless, they’re playing entirely different games.

> As long as you're paying more attention to the road than to your audiobook...

I am, that's why I hit "Rewind" on my audiobooks very often. But even though I'm "distracted" by the road, I find that I concentrate more on a (difficult) audiobook than the equivalent book. With a book, it's actually easy to zone out for a paragraph or two. With audiobooks, if I zone out, I feel quite lost very quickly. I need to rewind.

>>> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts

>I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

This is how you end up on the Crackpot Index. Thinking you created a theory of everything or a cold fusion device despite literally not knowing algebra or basic electrical engineering.