Researcher Thinking · Lesson 0001
One idea, two filters, five minutes.
Most people think great researchers are great answerers. They're not — they are great question pickers. Hamming spent lunches at Bell Labs asking physicists and chemists three questions:
"What are the important problems of your field?" … "What important problems are you working on?" … "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?" — Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (1986)
He stopped getting invited to lunch. He also identified, decades in advance, which of his colleagues would do work that mattered.
A question is worth your time only if it passes both filters:
| Filter | Test |
|---|---|
| Importance | If you answered this, would anything change — for the field, the product, or your understanding? Or would it be a +2% footnote? |
| Attack | Do you have a reasonable, concrete way to start — a dataset, an experiment, a wedge? Hamming: "It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack." |
This is why "time travel" is not an important problem in Hamming's sense and "can a neural net write its own captions" (Karpathy's thesis-era question) was: the second had an attack.
When you face any fuzzy problem, before doing any work, write down 2–3 candidate questions and run each through the two filters. Kill the ones that fail either filter. This 5-minute habit is the whole lesson.
1. What makes a problem "important" in Hamming's sense?
2. Two questions both have a concrete attack. Karpathy's heuristic says pick…
3. You have a fuzzy problem. The first move this lesson prescribes is to…
Take one real problem from your current work. Write three candidate questions about it. Run each through Importance and Attack. Bring the survivors back to your teacher (the agent) — that's the input for Lesson 0002, where we'll learn how to design a test that could actually settle one of them.
Read (or re-read) Hamming — You and Your Research. It's a 45-minute read and the single highest-density document on this topic ever produced.