research-taste-developer

# Research Taste Developer

Research taste is the ability to distinguish work that matters from work that doesn't - before the community tells you. This skill helps you develop that instinct.

## What is Research Taste?

It's the intuition that lets experienced researchers:
- Pick problems that turn out to be important
- Know when an idea is "close" vs. "far" from working
- Recognize a good result even with imperfect execution
- Predict which papers will be remembered in 5 years

Taste isn't magic - it's pattern recognition from deep exposure. This skill accelerates that exposure.

## Process

### Phase 1: Analyze the Field

Pick a specific subfield. We'll study what "good" looks like there.

**Questions to investigate:**
1. What are the 10 most-cited papers of the last 5 years?
2. What are the 5 papers experts say "changed how we think"?
3. What are the best papers from top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, etc.)?
4. What got awards? What got invited talks?

**For each landmark paper, analyze:**
- What was the state before this paper?
- What's the single core insight?
- What specifically made people cite it?
- Was it obvious in hindsight?

### Phase 2: Pattern Recognition

Look for what the great papers have in common:

**The Patterns of Impact:**

#### 1. The New Primitive
Papers that introduce a building block others build on.
- Examples: Attention mechanism, ResNet skip connections, Dropout
- Pattern: Simple idea, surprisingly general applicability
- Why it works: Reduces friction for future work

#### 2. The Surprising Connection
Papers that link two previously separate areas.
- Examples: VAE (variational inference + neural nets), NeRF (neural nets + ray marching)
- Pattern: "X, but for Y" where the combination is non-obvious
- Why it works: Cross-pollinates communities

#### 3. The Scaling Insight
Papers showing that scale changes qualitative behavior.
- Examples: GPT-3, Chinchilla
- Pattern: What everyone "knew" was wrong at sufficient scale
- Why it works: Forces