This is the first post in a sequence about how I think about and break down my research process. Post 2 is coming soon.

Thanks to Oli Clive-Griffin, Paul Bogdan, Shivam Raval and especially to Jemima Jones for feedback, and to my co-author Gemini 2.5 Pro - putting 200K tokens of past blog posts and a long voice memo in the context window is OP.

Introduction

Research, especially in a young and rapidly evolving field like mechanistic interpretability (mech interp), can often feel messy, confusing, and intimidating. Where do you even start? How do you know if you're making progress? When do you double down, and when do you pivot?

These are far from settled questions, but I’ve supervised 20+ papers by now, and have developed my own mental model of the research process that I find helpful. This isn't the definitive way to do research (and I’d love [...]

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Outline:

(00:36) Introduction

(03:28) The key stages

(03:35) Ideation (Stage 0): Choose a problem

(04:14) Exploration (Stage 1): Gain surface area

(06:55) Understanding (Stage 2): Test Hypotheses

(09:17) Distillation (Stage 3): Compress, Refine, Communicate

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First published:
April 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hjMy4ZxS5ogA9cTYK/how-i-think-about-my-research-process-explore-understand

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“How I Think About My Research Process: Explore, Understand, Distill” by Neel Nanda

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“How I Think About My Research Process: Explore, Understand, Distill” by Neel Nanda