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2025-04-26 10:31:34
How I Think About My Research Process: Explore, Understand, Distill
Published on April 26, 2025 10:31 AM GMTThis is the first post in a sequence about how I think about and break down my research process. Post 2 is coming soon.Thanks to Oli Clive-Griffin, Paul Bogdan, Shivam Raval and especially to Jemima Jones for feedback, and to my co-author Gemini 2.5 Pro - putting 200K tokens of past blog posts and a long voice memo in the context window is OP.IntroductionResearch, especially in a young and rapidly evolving field like mechanistic interpretability (mech interp), can often feel messy, confusing, and intimidating. Where do you even start? How do you know if you're making progress? When do you double down, and when do you pivot?These are far from settled questions, but I’ve supervised 20+ papers by now, and have developed my own mental model of the research process that I find helpful. This isn't the definitive way to do research (and I’d love to hear other people’s perspectives!) but it's a way that has worked for me and others.My goal here is to demystify the process by breaking it down into stages and offering some practical advice on common pitfalls and productive mindsets for each stage. I’ve also tried to be concrete about what the various facets of ‘being a good researcher’ actually mean, like ‘research taste’. I’ve written this post for a mech interp audience, but hopefully it is useful for any empirical science with short feedback loops, and possibly even beyond that.This guide focuses more on the strategic (high-level direction, when to give up or pivot, etc) and tactical (what to do next, how to prioritise, etc) aspects of research – the "how to think about it" rather than just the "how to do it." Some of skills (coding, reading papers, understanding ML/mech interp concepts) are vital for how to do it, but not in scope here (I recommend the https://arena-chapter1-transformer-interp.streamlit.app/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hjMy4ZxS5ogA9cTYK/how-i-think-about-my-research-process-explore-understand