4 ms·

> Long time HN'er college dropout and I read a LOT of scientific papers. Probably an average of 4 a week over the past couple of decades, sometimes reading 40

> Long time HN'er college dropout and I read a LOT of scientific papers. Probably an average of 4 a week over the past couple of decades, sometimes reading 40 in a week. I'm guessing that you don't actually dive into each paper to 100% understand it? I find it takes me at least 10 hours of reading/looking things up per paper before I could consider that I fully understand it. But that would mean, if I want to do 4 papers per week, I'd spend at least 40 hours/week, that's like a full-time job, so obviously I don't have time for that. How much time would you estimate it takes you to read through one paper? And how much of the content would you estimate gets retained and can be recalled when you wish?

MacsHeadroom 3y ago
How much I understand, and how long it takes to get there, depends on a lot on how well-read I already am into a field. I can read and fully understand an ML paper in an hour or so. But 6 months ago it took me a day to get through a couple of ML papers and I did not fully grok the mechanics of things like attention heads. I'm more read in material science, chemistry, pharmacology, and cognitive science. Computer science (especially quantum computing, networking, and cryptography), photonics, and pure math are also big areas of interest for me. Anything outside of that wheelhouse will take longer and I'll initially understand less, depending on how distant it is from my stronger subjects.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  That's quite a range. How do you manage the signal-to-noise ratio? Normally that requires significant familiarity with the field, or a very specific query in mind. For example I only read papers in medicine when I'm researching an actual medical issue that I or someone else is having.
  - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
    I follow a lot of highly respected researchers and (research minded) operators in the fields I'm interested in. Very often they post about papers of interest on X/twitter or their personal blogs. I also follow a handful of science communicators on YouTube who do short summary videos of papers of interest (Two-Minute-Papers, Anton Petrov, Sabine Hossenfelder, to name a few). Other times I notice a general trend (ex. increasing discussion of a new paradigm X, more startups raising to work on Y, or a large chunk of talks at an annual conference being variations of Z). Then I ask the forementioned academics and operators in my circle what papers I should read to get a handle on XYZ and/or simply follow the citations. Given the amount of followers a lot of these researchers, operators, and science communicators have, I do not think I'm remotely unique in my efforts.
nerdponx 3y ago
You don't typically need to pore over the paper and absorb every detail. Usually you can skim a little and backtrack if you missed something.
jldugger 3y ago
> I'm guessing that you don't actually dive into each paper to 100% understand it Depends on the paper's content but there's often sections that you don't need to 100% understand to get value. For example, in survey papers, there's typically a section that is basically "what queries we typed in at the library." I skip those and I think you can too =) For practical papers, sometimes the evaluation can be skimmed. Author's benchmarks are usually designed to be the most favorable to the paper's novel approach, so I don't spend too much time thinking about them. Similarly, Related Work sections can be skimmed. If you're well read in the field, you probably won't learn anything from it, and if you're entirely unread "its like X but different because Y" isn't helpful as you have no idea what X is, beyond the one dense sentence the paper just gave you. > And how much of the content would you estimate gets retained and can be recalled when you wish? If I really want to remember a paper, it goes into Anki flashcards. This is rare, personally. Usually only for tech I support in prod.

MacsHeadroom 3y ago

How much I understand, and how long it takes to get there, depends on a lot on how well-read I already am into a field. I can read and fully understand an ML paper in an hour or so. But 6 months ago it took me a day to get through a couple of ML papers and I did not fully grok the mechanics of things like attention heads. I'm more read in material science, chemistry, pharmacology, and cognitive science. Computer science (especially quantum computing, networking, and cryptography), photonics, and pure math are also big areas of interest for me. Anything outside of that wheelhouse will take longer and I'll initially understand less, depending on how distant it is from my stronger subjects.

nerdponx 3y ago
That's quite a range. How do you manage the signal-to-noise ratio? Normally that requires significant familiarity with the field, or a very specific query in mind. For example I only read papers in medicine when I'm researching an actual medical issue that I or someone else is having.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago
  I follow a lot of highly respected researchers and (research minded) operators in the fields I'm interested in. Very often they post about papers of interest on X/twitter or their personal blogs. I also follow a handful of science communicators on YouTube who do short summary videos of papers of interest (Two-Minute-Papers, Anton Petrov, Sabine Hossenfelder, to name a few). Other times I notice a general trend (ex. increasing discussion of a new paradigm X, more startups raising to work on Y, or a large chunk of talks at an annual conference being variations of Z). Then I ask the forementioned academics and operators in my circle what papers I should read to get a handle on XYZ and/or simply follow the citations. Given the amount of followers a lot of these researchers, operators, and science communicators have, I do not think I'm remotely unique in my efforts.

nerdponx 3y ago

You don't typically need to pore over the paper and absorb every detail. Usually you can skim a little and backtrack if you missed something.

jldugger 3y ago

> I'm guessing that you don't actually dive into each paper to 100% understand it Depends on the paper's content but there's often sections that you don't need to 100% understand to get value. For example, in survey papers, there's typically a section that is basically "what queries we typed in at the library." I skip those and I think you can too =) For practical papers, sometimes the evaluation can be skimmed. Author's benchmarks are usually designed to be the most favorable to the paper's novel approach, so I don't spend too much time thinking about them. Similarly, Related Work sections can be skimmed. If you're well read in the field, you probably won't learn anything from it, and if you're entirely unread "its like X but different because Y" isn't helpful as you have no idea what X is, beyond the one dense sentence the paper just gave you. > And how much of the content would you estimate gets retained and can be recalled when you wish? If I really want to remember a paper, it goes into Anki flashcards. This is rare, personally. Usually only for tech I support in prod.