"The golden rule of research is to carefully define your question before you start searching for answers..."
-probably many people
Unfortunately...I very often seem to disregard this rule, and start searching for answers to questions that I have not defined...this is a very inefficient search method.
Yes, and no. It can certainly be very helpful to have a clear problem in mind when one starts work ("truth comes more easily out of error than confusion"), but my experience has been that, in anything other than intellectually trivial exercises, the problem formulation _changes_ as one goes on. (Some research exercises might not have a lot of intellectual content yet still be valuable: _someone_ has to stand around measuring, say, the specific heat of benzene as a function of pressure.) This because, if nothing else, one _learns_ about the subject, and comes to see how the original formulation can be improved.
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