Refers to the mountains that aspiring researchers have to climb in order to build on top of existing research.
It is the accumulation of missing interpretive labor, which arises from:
- poor exposition of developed ideas
- undeveloped ideas (tacit knowledge not formalized, polished, or published)
- poor research UI (bad abstractions and notation)
- the number of new papers screaming for attention
The cost
This leads to communal messiness of thought and field fragmentation.
Consider the tradeoff between the energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy needed to understand it.
if N people are trying to understand each other, it takes each one O(1) effort to write an explanation of their ideas but O(N) effort to understand each of the other N-1 people’s ideas. The result is that energy cost looks like O(a + bN) where a and b are coefficients for the trade off between energy on the explanation side and energy on the understanding side. That a is the energy spent on explaining and b is the corresponding effort needed to understand.
Since many explanations are not one-to-one, the cost of understanding has a (sometimes huge) multiplier b.
The problem
Poor explanations are normalized
it’s normal to give very mediocre explanations of research, and people perceive that to be the ceiling of explanation quality
Good explanations take effort
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.
Talent constraints
We can’t solve research debt by having one person write a textbook: their energy is spread too thin to polish every idea from scratch.
We can’t outsource distillation to less skilled non-experts: refining and explaining ideas requires creativity and deep understanding, just as much as novel research.
Perverse incentives
wanting your work to look difficult
Lack of formal support
An aspiring research distiller lacks many things that are easy to take for granted: a career path, places to learn, examples and role models.
Root cause
Distillation work isn’t seen as a real research contribution. Above are all proxies/consequences of this.
Problems with Distill
Distill was set up to incentivize quality distillation work, but it’s now on a hiatus due to structural friction (volunteer burnout).
we don’t think that publishing in a journal like Distill significantly affects how seriously most institutions take non-traditional publications
we don’t believe that having a venue is the primary bottleneck to authors producing more Distill-style articles. Instead, we believe the primary bottleneck is the amount of effort it takes to produce these articles and the unusual combination of scientific and design expertise required.
Distill’s impact has been through:
- Providing mentorship to authors and potential authors.
- Providing the Distill template (which is used by many non-Distill authors)
- Individuals involved in Distill producing excellent articles.
- Providing encouragement and community to authors.
However, mentorship and editor articles are in tension with Distill being a journal.
Self publication seems like the future.
Solution brainstorming
- A repo of links to self-published articles (with innovative formats)
- No need for uniform style
- Community reviewers, votes based (Reddit like platform for understanding research/learning?)