There’s a tradeoff between the energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy needed to understand it. On one extreme, the explainer can painstakingly craft a beautiful explanation, leading their audience to understanding without even realizing it could have been difficult. On the other extreme, the explainer can do the absolute minimum and abandon their audience to struggle. [...] Research debt is the accumulation of missing interpretive labor. It’s extremely natural for young ideas to go through a stage of debt, like early prototypes in engineering.
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Research distillation is the opposite of research debt. It can be incredibly satisfying, combining deep scientific understanding, empathy, and design to do justice to our research and lay bare beautiful insights. [...] Why do researchers not work on distillation? One possibility is perverse incentives, like wanting your work to look difficult. [...]
(Disclaimer: I only skimmed the post, so this may be off-topic or redundant. In any case, thanks for writing this!)
Interesting! I feel like literature reviews are somewhat related to this—almost like, concept distillation or summarization. As far as I can tell, literature reviews are fairly in-demand within the EA community.
I just want to link this article on “Research Debt” and the distillation of ideas: https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/
A couple of passages:
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(Disclaimer: I only skimmed the post, so this may be off-topic or redundant. In any case, thanks for writing this!)
Interesting! I feel like literature reviews are somewhat related to this—almost like, concept distillation or summarization. As far as I can tell, literature reviews are fairly in-demand within the EA community.