how to be good at research
A thread by @itsreallyvivek arguing that research skill is a stack of trainable sub-skills, not a gift. Core moves: pick problems you genuinely want to exist (Schulman), upgrade inputs by reading old papers and skipping summaries, write everything down to expose hidden gaps (Graham, Feynman, Darwin), tighten the experimental loop with scripted tooling (Karpathy), stare directly at failure cases instead of loss curves (Andrew Ng), deliberately wander across subfields to find your unfair advantage, and cultivate collaborators who will tell you an idea is bad. The post synthesizes concrete tactics from Hamming, Sutton, Shannon, and others, emphasizing falsifiable forecasts, reproducible tooling, and reading raw data over third-hand threads. Actionable for research engineers and PhD students tired of surface imitation.