Being a researcher or scientist is more a way of living than an occupation. When you truly embrace this identity, you learn to think independently. Each paper becomes a snapshot of your thinking at a particular moment. In my field, where we primarily publish in conferences, you can trace how someone's thoughts evolve through their work over time. Once you start living as a researcher, the world becomes a canvas where you leave your mark through ideas. You start operating in a slightly different world, possibly making it difficult to relate to others who don't share this way of seeing things.

The freedom of working in thought spaces can be both liberating and overwhelming. Some find structure by joining larger organizations or switching fields for fresh inspiration. Today, I'm reflecting on what drew me to this path in the first place.

I wrote my first paper in high school. I was in the school physics team named BaCoN, after Francis Bacon. The name was fitting for what we believed in, Bacon was critical of Aristotle's approach to natural philosophy, particularly the reliance on deductive reasoning from first principles, which Bacon believed was overly theoretical and insufficiently grounded in observation and experimentation. I've moved away from physics now, but the empirical spirit that guided the scientific revolution still guides the way I think.

Scientific method becomes genuinely joyful once you start getting into it. There's something deeply satisfying about forming hypotheses, testing them through careful observation, and sharing your discoveries with others. Especially nowadays with everyone's attention span getting shorter due to social media, having someone read your work carefully and think deeply about the same problem together feels precious. Then, there's this aspect of building on top of humanity's knowledge. Writing and publishing become more than just a task, it becomes part of humanity's long tradition of knowledge discovery.

My research career only took off when I started working for an NLP startup in 2020. I took a leave from college. I was also away from my parents because I decided to live by myself right after high school. I was first hired to do some HTML error checking tasks and was randomly tasked to develop a system that can measure the readability of a text, mostly because everyone was really busy and I was kind of the only one available. Instead of keeping the research internal, I ended up proposing (with presentation slides) that we should submit to a global conference like EMNLP. Part of me knew it was a challenge. I had just graduated from high school and NLP was already incredibly hyped up, but we ended up developing the state of the art system and got published. I ended up leading all research projects in the small NLP lab, which helped a lot in building my career. I just really enjoyed experimenting and writing it up, first authoring around 10 papers my two years there.

One of the things that I appreciate the most about some fields is that the review processes are often double blind. Anyone can publish if they're confident in their work. You don't need formal training to start publishing, that's a myth. While Yuval Noah Harari argued that shared myths and collective beliefs shaped human history, we should sometimes remember that most social constructs are imaginary, in Steve Jobs's spirit. If you're just starting in research, find the smallest problem you can make progress on, do robust empirical experiments, and write it up. That's the spirit of the scientific method, and there's always room for one more person to join in making collective progress. You'll have a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

At least for me, publishing papers itself is enjoyable, but what made research meaningful in the long run is the chance to shape what's possible. This is another thing that's honestly pretty noble about science and engineering work. It gives you, at least in a distributed form, the power to shape what doesn't exist yet. Though I hope any talented person would use this freedom for good causes, you have the freedom to make progress in either positive or negative directions. Often, you might not know the full implications at the time, like how J. Robert Oppenheimer had mixed feelings after developing the atomic bomb. But if you've decided to explore what doesn't exist yet, it's incredibly beneficial to have a mission, which is also why most AGI labs have mission statements like safe AGI for the benefit of all.

My personal version of the mission is that I see the need to augment human capabilities. You could call it a slightly modified form of transhumanism. Though I could make a separate post later on this topic, I see multiple benefits to this. One is reducing cognitive biases that could lead to devastating consequences like war and poor business decisions. Another challenge I'm watching is aging populations, especially in East Asia and parts of Europe, where maintaining productivity becomes harder as the workforce shrinks. If we take Earth GDP as a proxy for total human productivity, I see augmentation as inevitable to maintain productivity, which eventually leads to prosperity and helps people live better, more capable lives.