Posts Tagged “meta-research”

Taste in research, and the paradox of deciding what not to work on

A large part of taste in research is deciding what not to work on. You might choose not to apply method X, even though you don’t really understand it, because it has a reputation for being fiddly and difficult to get right. You might choose not to work on topic Y because you think that even though there’s a lot of people writing papers about it, its goals are too ambitious to ever be met. This extends all the way to entire fields of research. I could name a few popular fields within computer science — with active research communities, large amounts of external research funding, leading researchers with fancy prestigious awards — that I suspect are being investigated in entirely the wrong way, and that I personally think are currently pointless.

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