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What makes a paper good? |
To fill in later after doing some reading and thinking
Rahman's advice is that on the margin I need to focus on writing a paper and let the thinking happen as a byproduct.
My problem is that I don't know how to write a paper. Advice: mimic the style of good papers.
Where are the good papers?
- Top journals:
- AER
- Econometrica
- Latest issue has an author with no experience in matching literature writes a paper on complementary contracts. She reads a bunch, wanders in, dislocates a subject
- Punchy Authors:
- Aumann
- Faruk Gul
- Lucas on dynamic programming?
Rahman was frustrated by my talk today. I spent too long on obvious stuff, which suggests that I lack confidence in my material. (Though this contradicts the advice from the previous night about thinking of it like a lecture for undergrads and to "present more details than you like". (Unless the main takeaway is that my undergrad lecture style also needs complete rethinking.)) (Well if I state more details but pump them out smoothly, that's probably more listenable.) I need to state proofs upfront; my discourse should be more formal. Study problem. Deliver Analysis. (Note to self. Concrete equations and theorems before extemporaneously rambling about them)
(Was the previous time I explained with a list of obvious theorems listed out boom boom boom a better style?)
He also got the vibe that I didn't really care about what I was presenting. Not sure why I gave off that vibe. Maybe it was the disheveledness of it?
I need to condense the talk and deliver more man-hours of work in that hour. Some people spend two years of work and condense it into an hour of talk. How many hours of Robbie work did I show off? Not much, he says. (I spend lots of time making it but it was so disorganized that I only showed off a piece of it.)
Paper should go:
- Conjecture
- Proof
- (Examples)
- Repeat
And then once that's banged out, go back and reorganize it.
I want to see a paper, not a TED talk. I hate TED talks.
Comparison to Being John Malkovich. That's a movie with no fat to trim. One scene happens then another then another. (A comparison I recalled was the Catch Me if You Can guy giving a talk at Google. No stuttering. No pausing. He makes a point and smoothly keeps moving. Story story story story... No improvization.) Filmmakers watch films and try to imitate that style. If I'm not sure what a good paper looks like, I should read some good papers and try to imitate the style. Fake it till you make it.
Also lots of advice about making it a top priority and spending time on it. Thinking about problems as I fall asleep. But I'm already doing that! The problem is that my time is misallocated. And I do waste lots of time. But in terms of spending effort on spending more effort, I think I'm up against the boundary conditions. I already have pills and psychiatry appoints and special lighting equipment. What I need is to expend that time and effort productively.
My problem is that I don't know how to write a paper. Took a second year class where the advice was to write a bad paper to get it out of your system. But didn't really heed that advice. So I wasted a good chunk of time. First year and half of second year were disrupted by illness. Third year was largely misallocated and that's my fault.
- Read one paper from Aumann and one from Gul
- Make notes about what makes them good
- Write out a list of three specific conjectures/theorems I can make about tranmissions. State and prove these statements by thursday.
- Friday, September 25th by 4pm: Submit a paper.
- (anti-goal: don't allocate time to other shiny doodads)
- don't spend more time on making marginal improvements to your lecturing
- Don't spend more time in the short run on art projects
- don't spend time making pretty macro notes for the first years.
- Don't spend time going through computational exercises (until next week when Fatih's workshop makes them important.)