New ideas require thinking through things yourself before learning what others think

An approach like this is significantly more inefficient at collecting knowledge, but strictly necessary for developing research skill & taste.

Reinvention of what is already known is very likely, but Discovery of something the rest of the world already knows is still a valuable discovery. Independently arriving at known results gives deeper understanding.

This is expressed well here:

When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them.

Techniques to do this

• Moratorium periods: for core questions, spend extended time (month+) thinking without reading, building only your own ideas. Then engage literature with your own framework as the anchor
  • The Ashwin method: alternate weeks of thinking & reading literature
• Feynman’s method of reading papers: read the abstract and try to guess the experiments/methods/etc. If you’re right you can skip the rest of the paper & if you’re wrong you can learn something interesting
• Think first, read to challenge: form your own views on a question before reading literature. Write down predictions so you can’t unconsciously revise them. Read to stress-test, not to absorb
• LLMs as librarians only: fact retrieval, technical lookup, interrogating you, not idea generation or thinking partnership

• Tried (2026-03-09): “No literature” week — Deep study of fundamentals and questioning them + open space to think. No literature.