Starting a Completely New Journey

It’s been almost three months since I started my journey in interpretability.

Being involved in a research field is a completely new thing for me. It feels especially foreign because most of my experience is in engineering and I lack any academic experience.

I believe having a genuine curiosity about things and how they work is what helps me keep exploring the field.

I’ve spent a lot of time during these months reading guides, articles and papers. I’ve also been doing ARENA. However, I think that one of the most important things one can do — especially at this stage — is doing things, a lot.

By doing things I mean:

• Getting your hands dirty. That is, actually playing around with various techniques and seeing what’s happening with your own eyes.
• Writing about things publicly. Writing down your understanding is where you polish your thinking and see (and hopefully close) all the gaps.
• Replicating and extending papers. It not only helps you consolidate the knowledge from the paper, but it also improves your research skills, e.g., thinking about new applications of the ideas, designing experiments, having a sense of what matters and what doesn’t.

In retrospect, I could’ve made better progress if I had focused more on the latter two. I think these matter a lot — you become better at research work by doing research work, i.e., exploring research problems, understanding why they matter, forming your own hypotheses and communicating your own findings to the world.

In any case, I find this journey really intriguing. I’ve been learning a lot of new things besides the technical ones: clear writing, quality reading and how to approach research.