Conversation

The psychological boundary between research and development is marked by the onset of nerd-OCD. When you adopt what would seem like draconian, oppressive levels of discipline and rigor if someone else imposed it on you. An everyday example is calorie tracking in dieting.
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The "rigor" lies not in the "scientific" aspect of the R&D (the actual science part tends to be scribbles on paper napkins) but in the almost ceremonial/ritual behaviors that kick in once you know what you have to figure out correctly.
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Much of the rigor in rigorous science is actually embodied by the non-human instrumental parts, whether it is a telescope or an Excel spreadsheet. Humans don't actually do rigor themselves. They delegate it to tools. Even closed-form math has gone that way now, with Mathematica
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Everybody does research the way everybody writes. Just as what separates "real" writers from lay people who write work emails is the rewrite cycle, what separates "real" researchers from lay idea-spitballers is the cycling between shitposting and OCD phases. The research REPL.