Thread by @AnthonyLeeZhang

Some more thoughts on "do research you enjoy" vs "follow this advice to write 3 AERs":

I had a strong negative reaction to advice to simply "do research you enjoy" in grad school and I think I've finally figured out my main issue with this advice

Think about many enjoyable human activities: music, sports, videogames. These are done primarily for fun, but the nature of these is that for many people, they are just more fun when you are good at them than when you are not

Some component of this is subjective, but many people have more fun playing moonlight sonata than mary had a little lamb. Many people like landing 50 straight free throws, 70% headshot rate in counterstrike, etc., this materially changes the experience of the hobby

The path to becoming good at most things tends to involve a lot of time spent on very boring practice. If you want to play Beethoven, play an hour of scales every day for years. If you want to make shots, shoot a million free throws. If you want to be good at CS, aim-train

These kinds of practice are REALLY boring. But they're a sacrifice made to achieve higher levels of ability and the different levels of fun that they unlock

In each of these hobbyist fields there are people who decide they would rather stay at a low technical level, since the practice/ability tradeoff isn't worth it for them. This is totally fine. But it's also totally understandable to put the time into practice to get good

99% of the lives of professional athletes/musicians/etc. are really boring, you literally do the same thing over and over again day after day after... word is apparently Nadal has missed single digit days of tennis practice in decades, or something

OK enough of the detour. IMO, research is really kind of similar to this. Research involves a lot of pieces that are boring, but builds you up into a position to do better research

Some of this is learning math/econometrics, reading literature, etc. Some of it is also understanding the mechanics and politics of writing papers, and getting them accepted and published

I don't think this is the fun part of doing research (some people seem to act like this is the main fun part and I think this is a mistake). But it's a necessary piece to put yourself in a position where you can do better research

Some people are happy to do the best research they can without putting so much time into "expanding the production set", that's fine. Some people want to push the boundaries of this set so they can do the best research they can and I think that's also fine

It's a somewhat shallow kind of love of a field, honestly, that leads one to just say "I'm doing this for fun"

It takes a deeper love of a field to spend a long time focusing on the really boring parts of it in trying to maximize one's potential at it

And, IMO, it is kind of toxic to judge the hard workers/grinders in the field, much of this is part of just getting to a high level in most fields of human activity

This is of course a one-sided view of things: past a point, spending too much time thinking about field politics stops making you a better academic. This is also true about practicing scales/free throws though, and the exact optimal point is really hard to say

I'll also admit to being personally quite biased: I've always enjoyed personally "hustle porn" material like whiplash, Jiro tamagoyaki, etc. IMO there is real beauty in devoting a large fraction of your life to doing one thing really, really well

So that's my (unneccesarily long) counterpoint to "do what you like". Have in mind a goal that you like, but realize that the path towards that goal often involves a lot of stuff you may not like. It's your choice whether or not that tradeoff is worth it to you.

For fun, here's a video of counterstrike (well, Valorant) pro aim practice, by recently ex-C9 Tenz:

Oh and if you haven't already, watch Disney/Pixar Soul which talks about some of these issues, and is also just a fantastic movie

Seriously watch just like 30s of this though: it is really amazing how good you can get at clicking on circles if you practice enough