Asked about Killing your own ideas early
When is persisting after a negative result right?
An answer that works
When the failure is mechanical rather than conceptual and I can name exactly what went wrong, or when strong people keep independently suggesting the idea. Not when I am persisting because stopping would feel like failure.
Then they push further
How do you tell those apart in the moment?
Whether I can name the fault before I fix it, and whether the fix has an independent reason to be right. A tuned model producing outputs identical to the base model on every example is a loading bug and I can say so before checking. A fourth variant of the setup, each one chosen after the last failed and justified afterwards, is not four pieces of evidence about the idea.
Reading an answer is not being able to give one. The section that teaches this is Killing your own ideas early, 3 hours of Research taste.
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