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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#271

Post by MisterTea »

bumby wrote: post #257
MisterTea wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who's had quite a few dealings with animals (the family business is a horse farm) my interpretation is that human psychology is basically animal psychology with a "language instinct" bolted on as a peripheral. Growing up with cats and dogs all my life I 100% agree with this. That has caused me to look at animals as individuals I can't communicate with instead of lower life forms that are brainless sacks…

Where do you draw the line? Do you think dung beetles have emotions? Not being snarky, I just think it’s a difficult idea to pin down.

Why do you need a line?

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#273

Post by MITSardine »

mmooss wrote: post #124
_fat_santa wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning. In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth . As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources. Also, r…

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by primary and secondary sources, but I think you have to be a little more nuanced; otherwise, it sounds like you're advocating for reinventing the wheel ad vitam aeternam. As opposed to "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that.

For instance, I would consider a literature review a secondary source. It can come to some conclusions as to the credibility of a hypothesis given all this presented evidence (primary sources). This can be very precious work, as it would save a person interested in higher-level topics a great deal of time, and most likely (if the review is any good) be done with more competence than the interested person has (amateur or not).

An amateur (or indeed a professional) is more likely to find pertinent information in existing "secondary sources" (which can also be plural) than by trying to comb through a comparatively enormous volume of primary work they are not equipped to interpret and synthesize (or even find). Not just in my lazy opinion, it's indeed the consensus in science that the most recent review/synthesis work is a good starting point to any background information collection.

And why not, as a starting point, have a tertiary source point you towards adequate synthetic work. When you type "my topic of interest review" on google scholar and pick the most cited moderately recent review of the topic, are you not in effect relying on a tertiary source?

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#274

Post by bumby »

MisterTea wrote: post #271
bumby wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? Do you think dung beetles have emotions? Not being snarky, I just think it’s a difficult idea to pin down.

Why do you need a line?

Because we generally acknowledge a need to discriminate how we relate and interact with others. I treat a child differently than an adult, a dog differently than a human, and a plant differently from an animal. Humans as classification machines; I’m not sure we could interact in this world without it.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#275

Post by bumby »

preciousoo wrote: post #261
bumby wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? Do you think dung beetles have emotions? Not being snarky, I just think it’s a difficult idea to pin down.

I mean, the whole predator/prey paradigm proves this, no? Both sides will act sneaky and use crafty mechanisms to get ahead of each other

I don’t think that fully encapsulates the issue. I can recognize some other being has subjective experience irrespective of any predator/prey relationship.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#276

Post by mberlove »

This article read a little different than I expected from the title. I was just thinking about this topic recently through a book that surveyed historians in the 19th century. So many of them got their starts doing historical research as a hobby or a passion in life. The discoveries they made were a life's work, their joy rather than something required to do (many did make it their occupation, though not all).

It's inspiring I think that the depth of passion in any topic can carry you through to important discoveries. In that sense the coding hobbyist and the citizen scientist are little different IMHO.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#277

Post by codelieb »

rottc0dd wrote: post #54
sergioisidoro wrote: post #34

I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count. This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but n…

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text. In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Fey…

Feynman's introductory physics course also entailed a lot of problem-solving and labs, in addition to the lectures that are the basis for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. If you go to The Feynman Lectures Website (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu) and you take a look at the "Original Course Handouts" you can see the homework sets, quizzes and tests his students took (which are not for the feint of heart - many of the problems are quite difficult), and also the labs they did. For those reading the book now, there is also a supplemental volume (sold separately), "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" which includes most of the problems given to Feynman's students, and many from later years given to students whose textbook was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#278

Post by codelieb »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #73
rottc0dd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text. In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Fey…

Feynman lectures pretend that physics doesn’t require a ton of hard, painful, and not all that rewarding math to get to any of the good stuff.

Anyone who could write this has apparently no familiarity with The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is chock full of quite difficult mathematics.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#279

Post by mmooss »

MITSardine wrote: post #273
mmooss wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning. In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth . As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources. Also, r…

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by primary and secondary sources, but I think you have to be a little more nuanced; otherwise, it sounds like you're advocating for reinventing the wheel ad vitam aeternam. As opposed to "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that. For instance, I would consider a literature review a secondary source. It can come to some conclusions as to the credibility of a hypothesis g…

I think those are essential things to do and valuable regardless of what else someone does. I do them myself all the time. I think the literature review is an amazing tool - really the best tool for learning, IME - and one that most people in the world (outside the research community) overlook.

Here we are talking about research in the science sense; those aren't research. You couldn't publish a literature review as 'research', for example, or get a Ph.D. for one - 'here's my dissertation topic - a lit review of ...'!.

There is lots of actual potential research for citizen scientists to do. And if they want to just learn from what's been discovered already, that's great - I certainly do that.

I think it's important that people understand that reading a textbook or secondary source isn't scientific research. Confusingly, now that I think of it, if you say 'I researched which EVs have the range we need', people assume you did not do actual research of driving them all. But that's a different meaning for the same word.

In your field, is 'research' used differently?

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#280

Post by mmooss »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #260
awongh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth > the primary sources; that's where the truth is I mentioned this elsewhere on the thread, but I also feel like the most influential primary sources are less important than secondary sources- if you read Marx, the social and political circumstances of his ideas are in the context of an industrial economy and just don't apply in the same way anymore. You ca…

With Marx the literature is basically religious in nature so reading his successors without reading Marx would be like reading religious commentaries on the bible without reading the original bible stories. There could be reasons to do that (e.g. modern text is easier to read), but you'd be missing a lot. There are other writers who were writing before or at the same time as Marx on similar topics who were clearer in…

Anti-liberalism and Marxism may be popular and therefore people join in dismissing Marx, but afaik Marx was and to some extent is (the ideas are from a long time ago) taken seriously as a serious theorist.
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