How to do conceptual research: Case study interview with Caspar Oesterheld

Executive summary: Caspar Oesterheld shares insights into his conceptual research process, highlighting the importance of immersion, goal-orientation balanced with curiosity, and iterative high-level thinking alongside narrow projects.

Key points:

1. Caspar developed key concepts like surrogate goals, evidential cooperation in large worlds (ECL), and decision auctions through a combination of deep immersion in research areas, high-level thinking, and building on existing ideas.
2. Spending significant time (e.g. 6 months FTE) in a research area helps build useful heuristics and intuitions.
3. Balancing narrow technical projects with regular high-level thinking about the overall problem space is important. Getting stuck in familiar reasoning loops can sometimes lead to breakthroughs.
4. Having the right combination of ideas salient in mind can spark insights, as with realizing the importance of AI after learning about automated theorem proving.
5. Research involves diverse activities like reading, writing, discussion, solo thinking, and background rumination. Occasional obsessive immersion alternating with background immersion can be helpful.
6. Goal-orientation is important, especially with shorter timelines, but curiosity and exploration also play a key role. Academia introduces additional publishing incentives.

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