Working in Public
This is a very important insight that totally changed my mind by Richard Hamming. Also see Learning in Public.
From You and Your Research: “Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.”
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Working with the door open
“There is pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.”
Other reasons about socialize, for serendipity:
- Andrew Dong talking about his AlphaGo project, and me realizing that these ideas can directly translate to autonomous racing, much better than CFR, because the principle is the same