I had a fruitful master’s, something I’m proud of, but I didn’t expect it to become a burden. The issue isn’t about how others expecting me to produce more, it’s about how I’ve conditioned myself to recognize shortcuts yet struggle to resist taking them.

A friend and I were discussing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s map and territory metaphor. We were saying that good research is about finding the right abstractions to articulate the territory in a useful map. And since research papers are essentially in the form of maps, if you’re skilled at drawing maps, you can publish a decent one without truly immersing yourself in the terrain. You don’t have to walk every path, just gather enough fragmented information to sketch something convincing.

And that’s the trap. The intellectual temptation of staying at the map-making level, abstracting, synthesizing, shaping knowledge from a distance. It’s efficient, it produces results, and it aligns perfectly with how research is rewarded. But the most valuable insights don’t come from drawing the map; they come from struggling in the territory, where things are uncertain, chaotic, and deeply uncomfortable.

So what about those papers that last longer and remain great? They don’t just outline a landscape; they carry the weight of having been there. You can feel it between the lines, the synthesis of hard-won failures and fleeting successes, the residue of deep exploration. The good researchers, I guess, aren’t tourists sketching maps from a distance. They are the ones who walk into the unknown, get lost, and only then carve out a path.

That said, my prior work still holds up—so, you know, please check it out still lol Good Face Icon