Do you ever have that I-just-fit-a-model feeling?

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Didier Ruedin writes:

Here’s something I’ve been wondering for a while, and I thought your blog might be the right place to get the views from a wider group, too. How would you describe that feeling when—after going through the theory, collecting data, specifying the model, perhaps debugging the code—you hit enter and get the first results (of a new study) on your screen?

I find this quite an exciting moment in research, somehow akin making a (silly) bet with a friend, but at the same time more serious as I’m wagering (part) of my view how the world functions.

Anyhow, I thought it could be interesting to hear from others how they feel in that moment.

For me it’s often an anticlimax, in that once I’ve gone through all the effort to successfully fit a model, then I have to go through another long set of steps to understand what I have in front of me. Every once in awhile the results just jump out and are exciting, but usually it takes a lot of work to see what I’m looking for. Then when I finally find it, I can often step back and reformulate the problem more directly.

Anyway, what do all of you think?

5 thoughts on “Do you ever have that I-just-fit-a-model feeling?”

  1. I have a somewhat similar experience:
    I had for a long time been working on creating my first R package (which is quite an effort under windows). I tried to build, there was an error, I solved to problem, tried to build, there was another error, and so on.
    Then I finally got things right, and could load my package and view the help-files of my functions in my browser, with layout, links and all. Seeing that was one of my moments of greatest joy, so to say.
    This I-just-created-something-awesome feeling actually kept me going for several days!

  2. > For me it’s often an anticlimax, in that once I’ve gone through all the effort to successfully fit a model, then I have to go through another long set of steps to understand what I have in front of me.

    I wonder to what extent that’s a high-d effect? I generally work with low-d models – a handful of nuisance parameters but only a couple parameters I’m genuinely interested in. When I’ve got my code debugged and the fit results start coming forth there often is a “Yes!” moment because it’s pretty obvious whether or not the data is telling me something interesting. If I was working high-d models instead of low-d ones then I imagine that would be less likely to be the case.

  3. I suffer from severe post Ctrl-Enter let-down/anxiety. Thats when I start worrying about explaining to my boss what I have been spending my time on, and why it was worth it.

  4. Pingback: That Feeling | Didier Ruedin

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