Studio 1: Begin with your curiosity
This studio is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
What you can defend when you leave. Start from the one thing AI cannot supply: a curiosity you own. Commit it, stretch it with your tools, and choose the research problem worth months of your work.
Start without a tool
Research starts with something that will not leave you alone: a pattern you keep noticing, a contradiction, a decision you want to understand. This first move is yours alone. Write four lines by hand.
- One thing you genuinely want to understand, in one sentence.
- Why an answer would matter, and to whom.
- What you currently think the answer might be. A starting belief, not a claim.
- One kind of evidence that could make you revise that belief.
Keep what you wrote. Lesson 1 shows why this page is where research starts and why the jump on it is yours, then helps you stretch it, with AI welcome at the table, into the problem your project will chase.
The milestone ahead
Research begins with a jump that is yours to make. Einstein sketched discovery as a cycle: you start from experience, you leap to an idea that could explain it, and you reason down to predictions you can check. The leap has a name, abduction, and a Google DeepMind position paper by Tom Zahavy argues that today’s AI cannot make it: the tools have mastered patterns and derivations, but they have only text about the world, not the experience the jump starts from (Zahavy 2026). Take that as an argued position rather than a settled boundary. Either way the jump is yours, because you are the one who answers for the claim. This first milestone puts it on the record: the curiosity you committed by hand, the candidates you and your tools stretched it into, and the one research problem you chose to chase.
This studio closes with Milestone 1: Your curiosity, committed, a short chapter of its own after the lessons. What it asks you to produce. Your committed curiosity with its starting belief and the evidence that would revise it, the brainstormed candidates with what you kept and rejected and why, and one chosen research problem, scored and red-teamed, with your expected answer on record.
Milestone 2 sets the rules that protect this curiosity, opens the ledger that records every delegation, verifies your first AI assistance, and closes the arc by declaring your formal research question. The milestone chapter keeps the working details: the practice steps, the versioned record, and how the artifact is assessed.
The lessons in this studio
Read them in order, working each lesson’s It is your turn as you go. Each one builds a piece of Milestone 1; beside each lesson is the piece it hands you.
- Lesson 1 — From Curiosity to a Research Problem: your committed curiosity, the brainstormed candidates with NEW elements marked and kept or rejected with reasons, your chosen research problem scored and red-teamed, and your expected answer.
When the last lesson closes, the milestone chapter is next. Nothing you write in a lesson is busywork: every piece above is on the milestone’s checklist.