Modified: May 16, 2022
lustful curiosity
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.I saw this phrase on Twitter somewhere and it really resonates as a description of the ideal approach to science.
There is no real scientific 'method' that anyone agrees on or follows mechanically. The common thread is wanting to understand something so badly that you do what you need to do (including developing appropriate methods) to understand it.
It reinforces that science can't just be a job. As Josh Tenenbaum says, "don't work on research you don't love". And the point is that you need the lustful curiosity to do research well. You need to have a genuine question and want to answer it. And if you do you'll be really effective and you'll enjoy working with purpose.
To the extent I've ever felt this: it's been about the connections between AI 'writ large' (bayesian inference, RL, agent design) and human thought. I enjoy building things but I don't 'want to know' how to build things, I 'want to know' how my mind (and other people's minds) works and how to use that to be happy and a good person.