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RESEARCH DEBT

https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

Partly works because we can utilize collaborative thinking

Thinking about understanding knowledge as climbing a mountain. Everytime novel
work happens, the mountain gets a little bit taller.

> Mathematics is a striking example of this. For centuries, countless minds have
> climbed the mountain range of mathematics and laid new boulders at the top.
> Over time, different peaks formed, built on top of particularly beautiful
> results. Now the peaks of mathematics are so numerous and steep that no person
> can climb them all.

Yes, the climb is hard but it could be easier. Let’s build staircases for the
mountains.


DEBT IN RESEARCH

 * Poor exposition -> no good explanation of ideas and concepts
 * Undigested ideas -> it takes effort to polish ideas, developing the right
   analogies, language, and ways of thinking
 * Bad abstractions and notation -> abstractions and notation are the user
   interface of research. To have bad notation is to have bad ways to interact
   with the underlying knowledge
 * Noise -> there’s too much new progress being made each day. How do we choose
   what to focus on?

Not just about poorly explained ideas, but rather the lack of ideas being
digested and worked through in public (communal messiness of thought). How can
we create better abstractions, notations, and visualizations to improve how we
interact and interface with ideas?

> Part of thinking is having a conversation with ourselves.


INTERPRETIVE LABOUR

There is a tradeoff between energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy
needed to understand it. This energy differential is called ‘interpretive
labour’

Most research is one-to-many, where there are a lot more people trying to
understand a subject than explaining it. As a result, the quality of
explanations have an outsized impact for the better.



Cost of understanding increases when there are more source to try to understand.
This may be why people specialize so that there is less noise. Related: group
limits


DISTILLATION

“Distillation is also hard. It’s tempting to think of explaining an idea as just
putting a layer of polish on it, but good explanations often involve
transforming the idea. This kind of refinement of an idea can take just as much
effort and deep understanding as the initial discovery.”

So who should distill knowledge?

 * Needs to be more than one person: too much knowledge to polish every idea
   from scratch
 * Cannot be less skilled non-experts: refining and explaining ideas requires
   creativity and deep understanding

Is distillation a form of maintenance ?


WHERE ARE THE DISTILLERS?

The research distiller is an integral role for a healthy research community, yet
almost no one is filling it right now.

Is it because people want their work to look hard? Do people not enjoy
distillation? While both of these may play a small part, the biggest part is
malalignment of incentives (relevant to incentives in open source maintenance ).

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Welcome weary traveler of the web, it looks like you've stumbled upon part of my
web of thoughts and other things! Feel free to poke around but don't expect
anything here to be remotely polished, accurate, or well-linked. This is mostly
an internal thought dump that I've decided to publish in the hopes that
something in here inspires someone or something. You can find a rough index
here.

 * ↳ (country roads) take me home

made by Jacky Zhao, © 2021

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