The Path to PhD — Field Notes on Becoming a Scientist
Patrik ReizingerThe manual I wish I'd had when I started my PhD. On research, failure, and the craft of becoming a scientist.
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path2phd.substack.comLatest Issues
AI slop isn’t an AI problem
Many people seem to think AI slop is slop because it’s AI. That’s like blaming the printing press for pulp literature. AI lowered the barrier to entry, so volume exploded—but a human still made the (implicit) value judgment to publish what...
Developing taste
I’m obsessed with taste, i.e., the skill of telling great ideas from bad ones, and have written substantively about its downstream consequences for research idea development: Idea triage and the haunt filter, How to develop great ideas, and...
What do you actually value in research? (a tiny tool)
Do you know what your research values are? Would you rather get rich and work on a topic you hate, or take a pay cut to work on something you love?
Discussing such dilemmas is a great icebreaker — and a mirror. The original Would you rathe...
Don’t run your projects open-loop
Projects often end without closing the feedback loop, i.e., asking about the process itself. Generally, the outcome is what you are evaluated against, but the process is what matters in the long term and it is your biggest lever to improve...
Two kinds of fast
Some people are boasting about how quickly they get a paper done with AI. Which provoked the obvious retort: “if you write your paper in 3 days, I’ll AI-review it in 20 minutes — why should I give it more attention than you did?”
Speed is...
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\ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa \ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa PhD researcher at the University of Tübingen, working on causality and representation learning within the ELLIS and IMPRS-IS programs. First-generation academic. Writing about what it takes to become a good scientist.
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