Conventional wisdom tells us that when starting with a new topic, we should first research what others had to say about this, and only later do our own thinking.
Six months in the lab can save you a day in the library– Albert Migliori
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However, in my experience it is a lot harder to appreciate the solutions that others have found, when you didn’t try to solve the problem yourself.
The obvious counterargument is that reading the solution right away is more efficient, and you don’t have the time to do all the thinking yourself. I would argue that you can save even more time when you only read the introduction and the conclusions but not the details. If you weren’t deeply involved with the problem before, you would only remember the gist anyway. Come back for the details when you really need them and have tried to come up with your own solution.
S. Keshav suggested a similar process for reading research papers. I think this should be applied to anything with deep technical content such as book chapters or detailed blog posts.
As for the “think again” part from the title of this post… I guess that is obvious.
