[peatmoss]

> You start with a question, conduct experiments, analyze results, adjust your hypothesis, and repeat the process.

This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.

I’m pretty ambidextrous when it comes to Python and R, so I’m not typically a combatant in the data science language flamewars.

But... for as much as the Python community likes to assert their superior coding chops, I’ve observed that the R community does a much better job of reading about prior art.

[notlob]

> This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.

One of the earliest, most important, and most useful lessons I learned from a senior grad student: "a day in the library can be worth a week at the bench."

[mathinpens]

Or this: you spend 4 months on a project and belatedly notice schmidhuber proved a much better result in 1985 and yells at you and you get kicked out of academia

[newen]

You don't get kicked out of academia for that... Well maybe if you're a student and you lose your funding. It's really embarrassing and I'm sure frustrating too. I've reviewed a couple of papers where they didn't do their literature review, there were lots of obvious (to people who read) prior work, and I've had to straight reject their papers. I feel bad for them but do your literature review folks!

[mathinpens]

I was kidding!!! But people do take literature review seriously (which on the balance is good)