# Researcher Thinking — Resources

## Knowledge

- [Talk: "You and Your Research" — Richard Hamming (Bell Labs, 1986)](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
  The canonical text on doing important work: important problems, courage, open doors, working with the door open. Use for: problem selection, the "important problems" questions, research habits.
- [Article: "A Survival Guide to a PhD" — Andrej Karpathy (2016)](http://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/)
  Karpathy's distilled research taste: importance × tractability, "10x more important is only 2-3x harder", fertile-ground problems, avoiding +2%-on-a-benchmark work. Use for: developing taste, choosing what to work on.
- [Essay: "Cargo Cult Science" — Richard Feynman (Caltech, 1974)](https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)
  The standard for scientific integrity: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself." Use for: knowing when an answer is real, self-skepticism.
- [Paper: "Strong Inference" — John Platt (Science, 1964)](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.146.3642.347)
  Multiple competing hypotheses + crucial experiments that exclude them. Use for: designing questions/experiments that discriminate rather than confirm.

## Wisdom (Communities)

- [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com) — discussion threads on the above essays surface practitioner experience; search "Hamming You and Your Research".
- (To explore: LessWrong for epistemics, r/MachineLearning for research-practice threads — pending user interest)

## Gaps

- A good practical source on "when to stop digging / when is an answer settled" beyond Feynman — candidate: Polya's *How to Solve It* (heuristics + looking back phase).