On the importance of good research
We're often bounded by the limitations of knowledge base that is already available to us. Oftentimes we are stuck in the same loop time and time again while solving a larger problem. Chunks of the same issue keep popping up. This is where documentation comes into play. This where a single publication recording patterns of the same stuff over and over again, helps the seekers stand on the shoulder of giants. This is one way to do research. Just recording stuff and documenting it. This is the prime example of why over 80% of modern research papers are AI sloppified jargon that is just existing because it is allowed to exist purposeless, motionless and lifeless.
The other and often overlooked by short sighted minds, is the collection of good data points via the already available information and piercing them together to form a completely new perspective about something that has been wrong all along. Technology plays an authoritative & pivotal role in discovering things. Consider if I tell you that a dog is a cat (yes i'm a retard), you will believe it, because both a cat and a dog has 2 eyes, a tail, and fluffy skin. Because they are the only data points available for you to classify them. Now I have a new technology that allows me to introduce more features. Say behaviorial patterns, type of food consumption, interaction with humans, audio output when they make some noises(bark or speak). This allows me to create 2 different classes to identify them separately.
Hamming talks about why research is important. Ambition is the driver here. There is no great goal of a human life so as to etch his name in the historical records for generations to follow & inspire.
Good research is not just collecting your insights from already available data and writing a thesis on it, with a pinch of salt it needs to be rewritten in a new form than earlier. It can be another branch of the same thing, it can be a rebasing of the same branch that was stuck somewhere and you not only removed the bug, but provided doors for new opportunities and possibilities.
Every new discovery must be done with the intention of taking humans forward and conquer the worlds unknown and far away from our access. When your mind creates something out of thin air and you're able to prove it, you have become a creator (or a discoverer?). This holds limitless possibilities, some of which you would like to imagine pretty well. Before Elon musk demonstrated that launched vehicles can be brought back to earth, no one was of the viewpoint that it could be done. But then there was Falcon heavy. Then the whole jargon of multiple negations turned to resentment towards advancement and all the crap that followed. With new stuff, always come new problems. But this is not important today. This is what we can solve if we just keep on building stuff out of thin air.
