Recommended Papers

I think everyone should read more academic papers. They’re everywhere on the internet, and often behind the headlines you read in the news. Reading them is often revealing in a way that reading the news is often not.

Reading papers can be intimidating, but my basic strategy is below. Go step-by-step and bail at any point you think you’ve got everything you want from a paper.

  1. Upload the paper to your favorite AI and have a quick conversation about it.
  2. Read the abstract. This is a summary of what the paper is about, and its findings.
  3. Read the conclusion. It is often nearly identical to the abstract.
  4. Look over all the figures (charts, graphs, images, etc).
  5. Start reading from the beginning, skim if you want, and read as much of the whole thing as you care to.
  6. Look at the paper’s bibliography and start reading those papers.

You’ll find that you can get the gist of a paper very quickly. For the ones that are only a little interesting you can be done in a minute or two, and the ones you find really interesting turn into hours (or weeks) of research.

If you really want to go in depth, start collecting all the related papers in the bibliography and chat with NotebookLM about them.

Here is a small collection of my favorite papers (I’ve stretched the definition of a paper somewhat):