I often don't look to see if there's preexisting research that overlaps what I'm working on. I just like *doing* research, the process of it, and there's some intimacy of knowledge that comes from working with the process myself that feels super valuable to me.
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Like when I read another paper, I'm never totally sure how much to trust them, what their incentives were. I mean you can make pretty good guesses about it, but it doesn't come close to the directness of making it myself, getting my hands dirty. Feels so good.
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A lot of people feel like something having been studied already makes it not worth studying yourself, I often feel like “oh good, maybe I’ll get to find an answer then!”
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Same
When I generate knowledge myself it becomes ‘intimate knowledge’
I remember it better, I feel more confident about my claims, it is more fulfilling, and I gain meta knowledge around research and knowledge-gathering itself
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This is similar to my experience. Reading papers can be like spoilers. Plus, an interesting bonus of being on your own is there's no signpost declaring "here is the state of the art". It was quite the nice surprise when some of my stackoverflow self-answers started being cited...
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Most things have already been explored so better to use time exploiting than exploring.
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It’s just as interesting when there is research, because you can compare it against those findings.
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This need for preexisting research made it so much more difficult than it needed to be to get a project approved for master's degree. Like I had an idea that would be interesting and idgaf that it is a different tree instead of a new leaf in the academia tree.
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