On The Craft of Research

Still reading. Booth’s move is the one I needed before quals: a topic is not a question, a question is not a claim.

I am using the book as a template for the thesis map:

• Topic — attention in sequence models
• Question — what, exactly, does attention do if it is not memory?
• Claim — Attention is a routing function
• Significance — if it is routing, then BERT is a stack of bidirectional routers, not a new kind of thought

The rest of the book is about readers. That is this site. A reading note should make a claim a stranger can disagree with.

Tonight’s pages: the chapter on warrants. Tomorrow: turn one warrant into a permanent note, or it does not count as reading.