Blog: Mike Rosulek — “So You're Starting a PhD?”

Notes:

Key Concepts:

Academic Writing as Communication Tool:

Writing serves as a medium for organizing one's thoughts. It’s not just a chore, but a puzzle for the most eloquent articulation of ideas. It also aids debugging process and a sanity check measure.
Immediate measures can be instituted, such as encapsulating the outcomes of a meeting in an academic manner. Sustaining a working document, crafting summaries of the papers, videos, and blogs perused, as well as maintaining a personal annotated bibliography are proactive steps.

An Annotated Bibliography of Practical Secure Computation

Optimally Reading Research Papers

A methodical approach can be employed to delve into literature, particularly when aiming to understand key findings. Initially, one might seek lecture notes that expand upon the material, especially if it pertains to fundamental concepts. This can be achieved by incorporating the term "lecture notes" within the search queries. In the absence of good lecture notes, one might opt for video recordings of conference presentations, which often provide a digestible overview of the material. This step could be particularly beneficial for recent findings, with videos from conferences such as those organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) being readily available on Youtube. This tiered approach not only prepares an individual with a foundational understanding but also enhances the appreciation of the nuances articulated in the paper.

Maintaining Productivity In Adversities

“Treat the relationship between present-you and future-you as adversarial. Design your life accounting for the fact that future-you is selfish, short-sighted, lazy, unreliable, uncooperative, and pretty dumb.”
“Mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.”
“Set small, achievable milestones, with a slow gradient towards a long-term goal. Never try to re-invent yourself overnight;”
When adopting a new productivity system, ensure it's simple and usable for your future self, focusing on practicality over sophistication to effectively reduce cognitive load.
Utilize a commitment contract through platforms like Beeminder to set, track, and ensure adherence to personal quantitative goals, with escalating financial penalties as a motivation to stay on task.
Focus on measuring inputs like dedicating specific hours to projects, rather than output-oriented goals such as publication acceptances, aligning with SMART criteria to track and visualize progress effectively.
Allocate time for deep work, structuring routines to enable sustained, undistracted attention, as emphasized by Cal Newport, to optimize the efficacy of your PhD research endeavors.

Questions:

How can one maintain clarity in academic writing without oversimplifying the content to the point of diminishing comprehension?

Highlights

“I encourage you to set aside some time and watch this video on writing by Steven Pinker. He lays out the basic principles of clear writing, with many positive and negative examples. It should convince you that it is possible to articulate why a certain piece of writing is effective or not. That ability already gets you over halfway to being a great writer. For more details and constructive advice, you should then read either Pinker's book or Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Williams & Colomb.”
“You don't have to wait until you're churning out conference papers to work on writing. You can practice writing now:

Summarize the results of a productive meeting.
Write a summary of a conference talk you watched or a paper you read. Especially if it took a lot of effort to finally understand a paper, you will want to capture your understanding now before you eventually forget and have to re-learn the paper again.
In the extreme, maintain a personal annotated bibliography (see one I started here).”

How to optimally read research papers?

Highlights

“Here's what I do when I have to learn about some result from the literature. If it's a fundamental one then I first try to find lecture notes that present the material (i.e., use "lecture notes" in my search terms). Otherwise, I try to find a video of the conference presentation. Only after this do I attempt to read the paper. Lecture notes and videos will prepare you to read and appreciate the details that are contained in the paper. Videos of recent IACR conferences are on Youtube.”

How to maintain healthy productivity levels?

Highlights

“Akrasia, also known as weakness of will, refers to the frustrating dynamic between your present-self and future-self, where present-self makes objectively good plans but consistently overestimates the ability of the future-self to actually deliver on them. The Grand Unified Theory of productivity (as I see it) is to treat the relationship between present-you and future-you as adversarial. Design your life accounting for the fact that future-you is selfish, short-sighted, lazy, unreliable, uncooperative, and pretty dumb.”
“Future-you is lazy but fortunately can be fooled by inertia. Once future-you starts an activity, inertia will often take care of the rest. Starting an activity is the hardest part. Design your environment so that the desirable activities have low "activation energy" or "transaction cost" --- in other words, make these activities very easy to start (e.g., sleep in your workout clothes if you want to exercise first thing in the morning). Conversely, make undesirable activities harder to start (e.g., leave your phone in a different room from where you sleep). As Matt Might says:If these sound like dumb little tricks, just remember that future-you is dumb.

Mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.”

Future-you has a tendency to give up at the first sign of adversity. Set small, achievable milestones, with a slow gradient towards a long-term goal. Never try to re-invent yourself overnight; that is a recipe for guaranteed failure. Change only one very small behavior at a time, and slowly iterate. Don't think of a 1% improvement every day as (1.01)n, but rather 2Ω(n). When future-you gives up, it reverts back to old behavior. A habit is like a "save point" that prevents future-you from reverting past it. So focus on developing habits.
When you want to adopt some new productivity system into your life (some fancy new website, or app, or filing system), you are implicitly trusting future-you to do some new things. These new things have to be idiot-proof, since future-you is an idiot. The most important thing to consider is whether future-you will actually use it, not how amazing it is when it is used. However, when you can rely on future-you as part of a workflow, the reduction on your cognitive load is a wonderful feeling.
A commitment contract is an extreme form of adversarial-ness between present-you & future-you. Your present self commits to a contract that binds your future self into compliant behavior, with contract terms that are severe enough that even your stupid future self can't avoid them. A good example of this is Beeminder (based in Portland), whose business model is to serve as adjudicator of such commitment contracts. Set a quantiative goal for yourself (e.g., write 10 thesis pages per week), then track your progress. Beeminder has your credit card info and will take your money if you don't meet your goals. The penalties start small but increase exponentially, so you will eventually reach an amount that motivates future-self. Think of it as paying Beeminder for the privilege of discovering your personal utility function. I've paid them $117 so far for this privilege. (If you don't like this idea, you could always just hire someone to slap you in the face whenever you go off task.)
Measure inputs rather than outputs. This is mostly a restatement of the standard time-tested management-speak about SMART goals."Quality time spent in an activity" is always a great goal. It also helps to have some scoreboard that tracks these criteria, so you can see your status at a glance.

Bad goal: Get 2 papers into Crypto+Eurocrypt this year. This is an "output" of the peer-review process that you do not directly control.
Better goal: Submit 2 papers to Crypto this year. This is at least an "input" to the peer-review process, but it is also the "output" of an uncertain research process.
Best goal: Spend 100 hours in focused work, on each of 3 different projects this year. This is an "input" that you have complete control over. If you can do this, you'll certainly be in great shape.

Set aside time for deep work. This is a concept pioneered in Cal Newport's book of the same name. In PhD research, your attention is your most important resource, and your work practices should reflect this fact. Explicitly structure your routines to facilitate intense, uninterrupted periods of focused attention. (Here are some extreme examples: 120 hours, 87 hours of work in 7 days. I don't recommend this as the only strategy in your arsenal)

Review:

Review Date: October 25, 2023

Created a Bee-minder Pledge for making sure I review at least two lectures a week : beeminder.com/aspiringcat/lecturenotereview

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