I really enjoyed "When We Cease to Understand the World", although it's more fiction than history of science

“Science in history” by Bernal is my first recommendation. The work of Ian Hacking is a good recommendation for
Probability

haha that's a new idiom for me. it's perfect! and the flip side is, "target and (potentially) regret", which causes quite a lot of stress. (what if your work gets rejected by the community or worse, overlooked)

but these pressures are real and have always persisted.



I think @abeirami.bsky.social may be interested in this rant.

but now I've the maturity to seek validation from things like "a specific person complimenting my work" or even better, "a meaningful citation where someone substantially builds on my work." (ofc, i also seek internal validation/satisfaction but I gotta be realistic, lol).

i had intense first-hand struggle with a lot of these effects in my phd since i had <= 1 paper/year for the most part. i started managing it only after getting visibly recognized by experts for one of my papers at one point. i still struggle with it at some level.

then there are many other insidious feedback cycles like the fact that publishing more => more visibility => more opportunities/networks/interfaces with the community/more citations => more opportunities/internships etc., => more papers

for example, with the advent of twitter, there's a pressure to stay constantly visible and to have many different things to say every now and then (bec everyone else is doing that), rather than pitch your one paper again and again which starts feeling awkward :-(

someday I hope to write a blog about "all the other forces that discourage me" from publishing less. people always say "publish less!" but without acknowledging these varied and nuanced forces

all other incentivation strategies I had thought of are much more negative/mean. like
- "evaluating someone based on some bottom k papers" or
- "judging negatively for publishing >N papers"

haha thank you! honored you feel that way!

btw, i just noticed this, this sort of a compliment is actually a great way to incentivize people to be more selective in publishing papers (and to counter all the other forces that discourage me from my rate of ~1 paper a year)

Read the full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.15266

This work was with great collaborators at CMU: @chenhenrywu.bsky.social who co-led, Charles Ding & @adtraghunathan.bsky.social! Go follow them to see what else they’re up to! 11/

But, there's a lot of scope for exciting work:
→ generalizing these insights to real cows,
→ studying RL/CoT for creativity,
→ understanding surprising behaviors of seed-conditioning 10/👇🏽

Of course, this is all a study of spherical cows. 🐮
Given the noisy, subjective studies of real cows, we believe an objective study brings
→much-needed clarity of thought (like disentangling the two modes of creativity),
→more ideas,
→better-defined experiments. 9/👇🏽

Our vision is that seed-conditioning can help models sample a latent thought and articulate that one thought into words,

but temp sampling has to articulate multiple latent thoughts in parallel to produce a marginal next-word distribution -- this is more burdensome! 8/👇🏽

Next, we revisit how to produce randomness: the go-to temp sampling 🌡️ vs. injecting a random prefix (seed-conditioning). 🌱

Remarkably, seed-conditioning produces meaningful diversity even w *greedy* decoding 🤑; it is competitive with temp & in some conditions, superior. 7/👇🏽