What I Always Wanted to Know about Second Class Values
Summary
Nicholas Carlini shares actionable guidance on producing high-impact research and winning best-paper awards. He emphasizes developing good taste for problems, building strong collaborations, reading broadly, focusing on a single core idea, and writing clearly, with practical tips on abstracts, introductions, and figures. The piece blends practical advice with personal examples from adversarial ML and security research to illustrate how to maximize real-world impact.