15 ms·

Research Debt

508 points by wwilson 10y ago

pcrh 10y ago
I like the ideas put forth in this article. I wonder, though, if "distillation" is a re-casting of "scholarship" as considered by the humanities. People studying topics ranging from Biblical Studies to History to Literature often do not create new source material, unlike in STEM. Yet there is a large degree of effort taken to "distill" existing facts through new lenses, producing novel concepts and interpretations. These efforts can transform our understanding of many areas of human endeavour.
- colah3 10y ago
  That's a nice connection -- it does have a similar flavor to that kind of humanities scholarship. :)
RangerScience 10y ago
Ooooh. I've actually been working on a blog post where I try reading a science paper (knowing only a little about the science) and learn / explain as I go. This seems like the better way to do it (my way is taking way to many words) - something like better science reporting. My concern is the act of writing - Medium has a real nice web editor. What can I use to write an article using this HTML/CSS/JS without literally writing the HTML?
- thanatropism 10y ago
  I wanted to have a Medium blog because some friends were writing think-pieces and the design looked cool but... no math equations, no deal. So what are you doing, generating images by hand?
- sacheendra 10y ago
  Have you checked out Adrian Colyer's Morning Paper. You might get some insight from how he does it.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Looks like an awesome resource https://blog.acolyer.org https://blog.acolyer.org
- Tyr42 10y ago
  I am using one of the Markdown -> Static website converters. Pretty good, and you can use MathJax for the LaTeX
- elvinyung 10y ago
  Shameless self promotion: I've been doing the same thing, for systemsy papers. http://blog.elvinyung.com/ http://blog.elvinyung.com/ I genuinely think it's really unfortunate that academic research are often so hard to approach without getting used to it. Often the concepts underneath are very cool and useful, and aren't actually that complicated. There is much to benefit from bridging the gap between academia and the wider community.
cing 10y ago
I don't see anything wrong with the "textbook" -> "review" -> "article" strategy to climbing a mountain of debt. A good review paper should hit a sweet spot in terms of exposition, digestion, abstraction, and noise filtering. Transformative new ways of visual thinking, well, that's a different story. The problem is just that the pace of research in the authors field is too fast at the moment. What's the hurry? Over time, the citation graph will reveal the most significant work, and the community will naturally distill that research for maximum effect. The danger is that beautiful distillation of an extremely "niche topic" will not change the fact that it has limited scope and may even limit abstraction. Of course, I say danger with tounge-in-cheek...
- colah3 10y ago
  You're right that reviews and textbooks do valuable distillation, but I'd claim we can do much much better. I think we can distill things massively better -- create massively better explanations and ways of thinking about ideas -- if only we invested more in it. It isn't just when the distillation happens, it's the quality. That's a really bold claim and all I can do is point to the occasional example where someone put effort into distilling and did something wonderful. My intuition is that these aren't one-off miracles, but are the expected result when the community takes this really seriously. The problem is that distillation is requires focused energy. Reviews and textbooks give us a bit, but it's diffuse. I think we can do much better, and I hope we'll be able to demonstrate that with Distill.
  - mncharity 10y ago
    > distillation [] requires focused energy As well as an underappreciated magnitude of expertise. You might like my "Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content" http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 . > create massively better explanations and ways of thinking about ideas Agreed. My hobby project this month is: assuming it's possible to teach size down to atoms in early primary school [1], could we then leverage that to do a multi-scale interdisciplinary "nucleons-up" introduction to atoms and materials. Current content is so notably incoherent, and leaves both students and teachers so very steeped in misconceptions, that there seems an opportunity for supplemental content, if it can be shaped to work. [1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE "Remembering Sizes 2015" - the approach seemed promising... the videos didn't.
debtor123 10y ago
This abstraction of debt doesn't really work for me...
- treehau5 10y ago
  Great! Do you mind expanding on why it doesn't work for you with emphasis on the relevant, objectifiable aspects? (as objectifiable as you can be for an anecdote, of course!)
  - debtor123 10y ago
    I thought I was being clever, since the author mentioned bad abstractions as a kind of research debt...
  - milesvp 10y ago
    I'll take a shot. What's actually being described in the article is entropy. Entropy counts always go up, and it takes energy to fight entropy. Or to put it another way, it takes more effort to produce simple writings, than it does to make complicated writings (especially for things that appear inherently complex). This means that debt isn't the right term here, because debt is something that must be paid back by the individual, or organization that took out the loan. It also requires a lender, which, if we're talking about technical debt, is usually future you. In terms of publishing papers, the author isn't borrowing effort from his own future, he's simply not doing work that he doens't need to do. The problem the article is talking about is that others have to do work because the author didn't do work. This is not debt, it's something else (I'm sure there's a term for it in economics, the closest I can think of would be some subtle variant of a negative externality). While I agree that research would be easier if authors spent more time distilling their ideas, that effort is a public good, and effort that will largely not have a positive expected ROI for the author, even if there is a huge ROI from a community collective point of view.
    - colah3 10y ago
      I agree that when you think about individual researchers it's a negative externality -- in many cases, the researcher doesn't pay, but other members of the research community do. This is true in programming as well: often the technical debt falls on your collaborators. You understand that crazy code you wrote and didn't document, but no one else does. For the debt perspective to really work, you need to think of the research community as a team working together to advance science. Individual members of that team take out debt to advance their work faster, but in the long run it costs the team more.
akyu 10y ago
I really love this effort. Research papers are low bandwidth way to get information into our brains. They take a lot of effort to read, even if the ideas are not particularly complicated. Often when reading complicated material, I have to come up with metaphors in my mind to make sense of it. This is somewhat of a wasted effort, as the author who wrote the material surely had metaphors for their own mind when writing, but too often they don't share these metaphors, and stick to purely technical writing. I think this is one reason why ideas like general relativity are so popular, even though the material is actually quite complicated. The average educated person can give a reasonable explanation of general relativity because the metaphors used to explain it are so powerful, even though its very unlikely they understand any of the math involved.
- sdenton4 10y ago
  I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper. The talk is very often the distillation of the ideas in the paper, as conducted by one of the involved researchers. Indeed, one of the main points of conferences is to allow us to trade these distilled versions of our research with one another and place them in the context of everything else going on...
  - cing 10y ago
    Research posters too (which sometimes end up on FigShare). At least there are several journals that accept video abstracts, like: http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630/videoabstract/list/10/1 http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630/videoabstract/li...
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    > I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper. This has been in the idea pipeline for a while, but the arXiv is slow-moving. (They probably wouldn't host the actual video files for cost reasons, but that's not a big deal.) http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/09/02/additional-material-on-the-arxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/09/02/additional-material-on...
eddotman 10y ago
Pretty compelling arguments. I do think that the ML / CS / etc. community is actually more open than other academic fields, and so this is definitely the right subfield to start in. Putting open access preprints online is not common practice in all disciplines, although it really should be. I wonder if it makes sense for Distill to also publish on fields outside of pure ML - e.g. as applied to specific problems in other domains. I work in materials informatics, and I suspect that research in such fields (ML + applied sciences) might benefit quite a bit from having key results 'distilled' in this format.
- colah3 10y ago
  In the very long run, I'd like to see Distill or Distill-like journals cover all of math/cs/science. But I think the right approach is to start with a narrow topic and do really well there. I guess startup people would say that we're focusing on a single vertical. :) We haven't done very good line drawing for journal scope yet, and I'm not sure how we'll handle cross-disciplinary work.
btown 10y ago
"What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?" The above quote is from Ted Chiang's short story "The Evolution of Human Science," originally published in Nature as "Catching crumbs from the table" [0]. It's a brilliant depiction of this very problem: when new developments contribute to an increasing gap between those who can make new developments, and those attempting to understand the state of the art, the entire process of scientific inquiry becomes less efficient. In fact, the scenario depicted is one where the majority of researchers become "distillers," to use the language of the original post. While Chiang posits a science-fiction reason for the divide, "normal" research/technical debt is insidious as well. Without incentives to reduce debt, the knowledge gap widens until only a handful of experts can make significant contributions. It's a problem that needs to be tackled head-on in both research and engineering. I'd love to see more initiatives like Distill. [0] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a... - a highly recommended companion piece to the original post.
- cs702 10y ago
  There's another subtle aspect to this: the same or very similar ideas, methods, and tools show up or are reinvented again and again, under different guises, in different disciplines and subfields that have their own jargon, unnecessarily making human comprehension even harder. Tibshirani's "glossary" of ML and Statistics terms is a canonical example: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. -- Denis Diderot, 1755 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 (The History of Information is an absolute treasure of a website, BTW.)
PaulHoule 10y ago
There is no research distillation because scientists don't get grants to do it.
- colah3 10y ago
  And because it doesn't lead to jobs or lots of citations. Fixing that is basically the goal of Distill: build an ecosystem where this kind of work is supported and rewarded.
  - kd0amg 10y ago
    I worry that these will be citations (and publications) that "don't really count" in heavily career-impacting decisions. Just getting citations to appear won't make funding agencies, tenure committees, etc. value distillation itself -- they will definitely know the difference between a survey paper and a novel result.
    - colah3 10y ago
      Yep. That's why a big part of Distill, behind the scenes, is a campaign of talking to senior faculty, scientific funders, and leaders of industry research groups, to build consensus that this is important. I'm not sure how successful we'll be, but we're taking it seriously.
  - llimllib 10y ago
    Narrowly construed, it is of course even beneficial to hoard knowledge; makes it more likely that your self/lab/friends are the ones that will publish the next advance in your field.
  - timdellinger 10y ago
    Scientists are supported and rewarded by the people who control the money in the ecosystem that they already live in. I'm not sure that you'll be able to convince people to devote time and energy to a completely different ecosystem... one that their current ecosystem doesn't care about.
cs702 10y ago
Yes. Yes. Yes. A million times yes. I can't count how many times I've invested meaningful time and effort to grok the key ideas and intuition of a new AI/DL/ML paper, only to feel that those ideas and intuitions could have been explained much better, less formally, with a couple of napkin diagrams. Alas, authors normally have no incentive (or time, for that matter!) to publish nice concise explanations of their intuitions with easy-to-follow diagrams and clear notation... so the mountain of research debt continues to grow to the detriment of everyone. I LOVE what Olah, Carter et al are trying to do here.
CogitoCogito 10y ago
Article is really good, but it's reference to the pi vs tau debate is kind of silly. It really isn't a big deal. When I did my math phd I wrote 2 pi all the time, but this didn't matter. The tiny convenience gained by changing to tau is totally trivial and doesn't even deserve a mention compared to the rest of the things in the article.
- colah3 10y ago
  2 pi doesn't seem like a big deal to you because you've internalized the notation. You paid the cost a long time ago (and perhaps it was a small one for you). I think it can be hard to empathize with what it's like to be a beginner. I learned about the pi definition debate a few years after I learned trigonometry -- there were a bunch of essays prior to the tauday one -- and it seemed tremendously better. I was also still in high school at that point, and I saw students struggling daily with these ideas and it seemed like part of the pi definition was the stumbling block. So, of course the pi vs 2 pi thing looks trivial to a mature mathematician: we aren't the people paying the cost.
  - CogitoCogito 10y ago
    That argument _may_ apply to very young learners. I.e. students in high school or younger. It certainly does _not_ apply to the people the original article is talking about (i.e. researchers). Anyone who can't handle the circumference of a circle being 2 pi has no chance at understanding modern mathematical research no matter how simplified it becomes. It's not even on the radar. By the way I simply am not convinced by this 2 pi vs tau debate. Now the area of a unit circle would become tau / 2. The original problem doesn't go away it just changes. The argument can be that you write write tau more than you'd write tau / 2, but the fundamental difficulty remains. Notation in mathematics is _extremely_ important, but pi vs tau is so far down the rabbit hole of diminishing returns, that I just see the debate as a total waste of time (and that's before I consider the fact that it won't ever change due to momentum...).
    - buzzybee 10y ago
      I see tau as a thing that's mostly useful to programmers because writing "2*Math.PI" (or equivalents) everywhere is a good way to bloat up a trig-intensive algorithm. I have no comment on its applicability to other uses of mathematics.
RSchaeffer 10y ago
Chris, will Distill support community editing of articles like Wikipedia does?
- colah3 10y ago
  Each Distill article is a github repository, so people can make pull requests, but we mostly encourage people to use that to make corrections. If it's technically feasible to do community editing of articles, why don't we encourage that? It's actually a pretty deep question about how you think about research distillation. It's tempting to see distillation as putting a layer of polish on ideas -- something that people can just jump into and do. But I think it's much more about deeply internally digesting ideas, perhaps with a few collaborators, and putting it together into a framework of thinking. For that, you want a small number of people with a strong vision and a deep investment in the article. If other people have a different vision, they can write a different article. (My impression is that wikipedia works very well for getting lots of facts onto a page, but does a much more mediocre job of distilling ideas.)
  - bfirsh 10y ago
    Wikipedia seems to be the closest thing we have to broad distillation right now. It works pretty well if you are researching a subject in depth. The technical articles tend to be written by experts for experts and they have lots of links to primary sources. But, as you hint at, they are poor quality because they are being written by a committee. I would love to see a collection of community written distillation articles, as you describe. Perhaps with some kind of taxonomy like Wikipedia's.
haddr 10y ago
Brilliant thing! As a person pursuing a PhD I'd something that is in my opinion the best way to avoid research debt: have a good tutor or a good group (peers). This way you can learn new things (or ask for something you don't understand) and really get to the peak sooner that doing everything alone.
adamsea 10y ago
One thing I believe to be of great value which is not made explicit in this article (which I think is an awesome article), is that research debt, as they describe it, is basically _education_. In other words, improve the educational resources for complex subjects. In our age where we're blessed with cheap printing of books and the possibility of creating complex interactive media, I think the question of designing user-friendly, powerful, and beautiful educational resources is a huge opportunity and pressing question. Not just for people seeking to achieve a research-level understanding of a complex subject, but for all subjects and all people. Consider the social value of beautiful, well-designed and nontrivial educational material for mathematics or basic science being widely available for all classes of people at all ages. I'd argue that when news organizations use infographics or interactive journalism at its best, they are also performing this educational function. Sorry for the long post, but to summarize, I think it's useful to recognize research debt as a specific case of the art and practice of creating media for education.
Drup 10y ago
As an (aspirant) programming language theorist, we have a really great advantage in this field: advances in the field of prog lang have a natural distillation process: getting into a "real" programming language. And it's great, it means I can toy with features and consider "what could I do if it was in a real language ?". Also, we can observe idioms and usage that gets developed when some advanced feature start being used by "normal" programmers. Computer science, in general, does have the advantage that the distance to applications is quite often much shorter than math, which forces part of this distillation process to proceed a bit quicker. On the other hand, the formalization is highly non-uniform, due to how young it is as a science.
beambot 10y ago
A lot of this seems to be a problem with academic publishing, peer review, and the pedantry contained therein. I tried (twice!) to publish a paper that was scientifically sound, but written such that it could be understood by a lay audience. It was rejected; quoting a reviewer: "This paper lacks math." That sentiment made me lose a lot of faith in academia. Now, I simply refuse to contribute any more time to writing papers or performing peer review (esp. in non-open publications). I'm sure I'm not alone; I know of at least one "seminal" robotics paper that was rejected from top venues multiple times for "simplicity" (lack of mathematics content) that went on to become a foundational paper in the field after appearing in a lower-tier venue years later. The irony: it takes researchers a lot of time to make a paper dense & concise. If they "showed all steps", it would probably improve researcher productivity & make the material more approachable to newcomers. Instead publishers enforce length restrictions... for which authors dedicate upto 25% to related work (some of which is useful; much of which is pandering to likely peer reviewers in small, niche fields). Length restrictions seem equally foolish in the age of digital publishing. And again, inadvertent pedantry is the only explanation I can imagine... but happy to be wrong.
- neltnerb 10y ago
  And perversely, this makes it so that people feel compelled to add mathy things that add no additional explanatory power to the results. I've frequently heard complaints that people in some CS subfields in particular will just add complicated math because they have to rather than because it helps. It sucks because the authors don't have that great a grasp on the math anyway, the readers don't care about the math -- they just care about the intuition and process, and communication suffers overall. My best papers had at most like two equations, and they were just there to clarify models for fits and the like in case the reader wasn't familiar with terms like "Arrhenius relation". So, you know, to actually make reading it less burdensome rather than just making it look more sophisticated.
  - beambot 10y ago
    Exactly! In the end, we ended up just publishing on arXiv.org and writing up a blog post [1]. It's not earth shattering... just an entirely new idea being demonstrated for the first time. The mathy background certainly exists, and was explained in other cited papers, but wasn't necessary to explain the new ideas. [1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/08/10/mobile-robots-and-long-range-uhf-rfid-sensor-tags-internet-things http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/08/10/mobile-robots-and-long...
killjoywashere 10y ago
3blue1brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series on YouTube should get some sort of honorary inclusion in Distill. There have been many "visualization of algorithms" posts on HN over the years. A collection of those would be good as well.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dluan 10y ago
There are 'distillers' of large bodies of scientific research. Traditionally, they are science communicators, and more specifically science journalists. The goal of a practicing scientist is very much at odds with someone whose job is to translate science into larger audiences. I've had very well-intentioned rational research scientists tell me with a straight face that "my job is to produce science results, not to communicate it. that's someone else's job", usually with the attitude that it's less respected or somehow self-aggrandizing. "The best science will be self-evident" attitude that all researchers secretly aspire for, not realizing that 99% of impactful science has had effort spent to promote, frame, or distribute it. This weird stereotype is somehow beaten into scientists from the very beginning, and I haven't been able to figure out where this comes from. Obviously, yes, it's a lack of tools and accessibility into letting scientists also become distillers themselves. But the motivations and incentives at the center of the whole system is what's making this whole imbalance. I think there are parts of our research system that actually say "No, you cannot and should not distill your science". Ultimately, for me, it gets back to funding. If review articles and outreach weighed just as much as citation count in tenure and grant committees, then maybe this could start to change. Yet, these committees still don't value open access, and look how tough that battle has been. Also - this solution is really great and commendable, but I don't see how this works outside of ML/CS where research outputs are more like software development - gists, snippets, prototypes that are immediately shared, pushed, forked. More science fields like ecology, synthetic biology, anthropology, will look like this, but it will take a few human generations.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  I think you miss the point. The article proposes a path for distillers whose target audience is researchers, not the lay public. Science journalists are fairly poor distillers of knowledge, actually. What's needed is more like a way for senior researchers to write more and better review papers that lay out and summarize all of the issues around a particular sub-field, for active researchers in that field.
- bloaf 10y ago
  Science communicators/journalists can turn "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." into "Scientists find that falling down makes babies cry" but they're less good at expressing concepts like "math equation forms the basis for all current modeling, papers A, B, and C each use a different special case of the equation to reach their conclusions."
amelius 10y ago
I think one of the biggest things missing is a means to communicate openly about published research. What I'd like to see is a forum for every paper, and this forum should be properly moderated (perhaps by a peer-review system). Such a forum could make it much easier to decipher published work, and to fill in details which were missing. Also, errors in publications become clear more quickly.
- unboxed_type 10y ago
  Sounds interesting! I would definitely join that forum. This sounds like a new kind of sci resource with well-defined purpose.
gburt 10y ago
This is a really awesome perspective.
mfsch 10y ago
I agree 100% that it is way too hard to climb the mountains of knowledge, that it could be much easier, and that there is little incentive and cultural support in academia to work on these topics. Time and time again I see examples of where outcomes are not limited by the existing knowledge, but by the accessibility of said knowledge. I would gladly devote most of my time to distilling knowledge if I saw a viable career path for it. Over the last years, I gave a lot of thought to the topic of conveying information. I see research as the process in which knowledge is created. This knowledge then has to be “encoded” in a format that allows for the transmission to other people. This encoding can be optimized in different ways. Research articles have the advantage that they are close to “lossless” in that they are supposed to contain all information necessary to build up that knowledge. This makes them well suited for archival, especially as they can be stored as a stack of paper. However, research articles are often not optimized for building up that knowledge in an efficient way. I believe that the “encoding” optimized for learning & understanding should be more like a progressive image codec, in that it provides a comprehensive view as soon as possible, filling in further details along the way. This also makes it possible to stop whenever you have reached the level of detail that is relevant to you. The challenge in creating these encodings is to extract the information that provides the most clear & useful picture as soon as possible. I like the word “to distill” for that process, as it is really about extracting the essence of a body of information. Doing this work for research articles is how I understand the goal of distill.pub, which seems extremely valuable to me. However, I think this is just the first step. What is the most useful distillation of all of deep neural networks? Of all of machine learning? Of all of computer science? As others mentioned, there are some forms of publications (review articles, textbooks) that do part of this distillation process, but they only cover part of the spectrum. Preciously few textbook contain a well thought-out summary of their contents and not just an introduction. In my experience, often the least amount of thought is given to the highest level of abstraction (e.g. what is the essence of mathematics?), even though they are the most fundamental ones. It would be great if there was more focus on extracting useful understanding from the ocean of knowledge we already have (useful both in the sense of being applicable on its own as well as being a solid foundation to build more knowledge on). It looks like distill.pub is a step in that direction, and I really hope it will bring more attention and recognition to this kind of work.
intrasight 10y ago
How about we just abstract to "Intellectual Debt"? A subclass that I've recently encountered is "Learning Debt". I think all these types of debt can equally apply to learning - as in formal education. Came to mind while reading "Undigested Ideas" because I recently had a conversation with my daughter (sophomore at Yale) that a bad test grade means that you may have Intellectual Debt that needs to be retired by taking time after the test to make sure you understand what you did wrong.
jeyoor 10y ago
Kudos to this team for dogfooding their platform. That choice makes me far more likely to evaluate and eventually use it.
euske 10y ago
When I hear things like this, I always think of Richard Feynman. He was simply a distilling genius to me.
- zevyoura 10y ago
  One of the greats; luckily a lot of it is available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/j3mhkYbznBk?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas&t=359 https://youtu.be/j3mhkYbznBk?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6M...
stuartaxelowen 10y ago
One take away I got from this is the immense value of great content marketing. Especially for software, the best content marketing is an immense value to the community, helping it understand core ideas and adopt new technology more easily.
tominous 10y ago
Isaac Asimov anticipated the idea of a research distiller in "The Dead Past" with the character of Nimmo, a professional science writer: "Nimmo received his first assignment at the age of twenty-five, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been out in the field for less than three months. It came in the shape of a clotted manuscript whose language would impart no glimmering of understanding to any reader, however qualified, without careful study and some inspired guesswork. Nimmo took it apart and put it together again (after five long and exasperating interviews with the authors, who were biophysicists), making the language taut and meaningful and smoothing the style to a pleasant gloss." In the story Nimmo has less prestige than a "real researcher" but the role pays well and he is in high demand.
nnonynous 10y ago
This is nonsense. Here is a (well-publicized) post which only serves to hype up and stake a claim on what is already valued and practiced, the exposition of research. The message seeks to capture an ignorant readership and practitioners with short-term memory, and have them walk away with the thought "This is the place where good research expositions will be." The machine learning learning community has already benefited from the myriad great expositions provided online for free, in addition to the locations where even source code is given alongside research findings. I will not link to these sites, in hopes to not seem a salesman, but if you've taken an interest in the field and taken some time to search on a topic (for example neural nets), you will have likely already found one of several free, helpful resources. This includes online courses, online books, blogs, videos, &c. These individuals give examples of already well-written expositions going back years (associating these well-received expositions with their own endeavour), yet the theme is one of "newness", helped by the usage of terms like "distillers" and "research debt". In Silicon Valley, it seems that if something's been given enough press and sounds new, you should at least hop on the bandwagon for a while, lest you risk missing out on being an "early adopter". Publishers are not a new conception either. They're a funnel which selects what you see. In an era where the larger population is beginning to see how much power publishers have over what they think, new efforts should strengthen decentralization. Playing to the tune of publishers has gotten us into the mess we're in. Peer review is a mainstay of science, and I am in complete support of it, but peer review and publishers do not need to coexist. I and others will happily use a decentralized system with peer review, additionally and crucially providing transparency. Good exposition should occur. Good exposition does occur. Indeed, people are learning: Ask yourself when you last learned from someone's writing. Audiences get their information from many sources, and if they can't understand those sources, they don't go to them. Addendum. I will not discuss at length the repercussions of teaching the population how to create intelligent systems, but that is a dangerous road for all of us, and not one easily traversed. Companies and other powerful persons have a strong interest in guaranteeing they have a large pool of subordinates who have skills that they can profit greatly from, so it's obvious why the push for software engineering and artificial intelligence teaching is so strong (the promise and hype has been strong). But this is heavy-handed and short-sighted. Businesses have functioned with this approach in the past however, so I wager they assume past performance can be used for prediction in this case as well. If anyone's doing any thinking at all.
mballantyne 10y ago
When I've talked to senior researchers about these problems, they say that they have no problem finding distilled information about new results; they get it from in-person conversations at conferences that they attend frequently. The publishing of distilled research would most benefit low-status, newer researchers (like Ph.D. students), but it needs to be valued by senior researchers to make it into the incentive systems of hiring and grant funding. It seems like a tricky problem to fix the incentives here.
PeterStuer 10y ago
Unfortunately arcane notations are an effective tool to obfuscate the shallowness of some ideas.
fmap 10y ago
In my experience this is already being practiced. Maybe it's different in machine learning, but in type theory simpler explanations are well worth publishing and are published all the time even in high impact venues. As far as I can tell, progress towards eliminating "research debt" takes two forms: on the one hand there is a place for good exposition, typically in the form of textbooks, and on the other hand concepts get better understood over time and people come up with simpler explanations. In both cases the results can already be published... Is the situation in machine learning really so bad that nobody is going to publish simpler explanations of known results?
erikb 10y ago
What I think is funny is that so many people complain about how bad science has become and how the papers and funding institutions enforce a very ineffective way of doing it. Why is nobody attempting or proposing new ways to make money with science? E.g. have people tried to do science in a subscription based model (like artists)? Or using free pappers+consulting on how to replicate the experiments or apply them in real projects (like open source)?
tomkat0789 10y ago
My scientific writing was transformed by Rafeal Luna's "Art of Scientific Storytelling". I'm on my phone, so I can't do it justice here, but I think that style will be crucial for the distillation TFA is discussing.
therealdrag0 10y ago
In terms of clear communication, I highly recommend "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" by Steven Pinker
safeandsound 10y ago
Perhaps distillers should be the reviewers of top publishers so they can have more power.

508 points by wwilson 10y ago

pcrh 10y ago

I like the ideas put forth in this article. I wonder, though, if "distillation" is a re-casting of "scholarship" as considered by the humanities. People studying topics ranging from Biblical Studies to History to Literature often do not create new source material, unlike in STEM. Yet there is a large degree of effort taken to "distill" existing facts through new lenses, producing novel concepts and interpretations. These efforts can transform our understanding of many areas of human endeavour.

colah3 10y ago
That's a nice connection -- it does have a similar flavor to that kind of humanities scholarship. :)

RangerScience 10y ago

Ooooh. I've actually been working on a blog post where I try reading a science paper (knowing only a little about the science) and learn / explain as I go. This seems like the better way to do it (my way is taking way to many words) - something like better science reporting. My concern is the act of writing - Medium has a real nice web editor. What can I use to write an article using this HTML/CSS/JS without literally writing the HTML?

thanatropism 10y ago
I wanted to have a Medium blog because some friends were writing think-pieces and the design looked cool but... no math equations, no deal. So what are you doing, generating images by hand?
sacheendra 10y ago
Have you checked out Adrian Colyer's Morning Paper. You might get some insight from how he does it.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Looks like an awesome resource https://blog.acolyer.org https://blog.acolyer.org
Tyr42 10y ago
I am using one of the Markdown -> Static website converters. Pretty good, and you can use MathJax for the LaTeX
elvinyung 10y ago
Shameless self promotion: I've been doing the same thing, for systemsy papers. http://blog.elvinyung.com/ http://blog.elvinyung.com/ I genuinely think it's really unfortunate that academic research are often so hard to approach without getting used to it. Often the concepts underneath are very cool and useful, and aren't actually that complicated. There is much to benefit from bridging the gap between academia and the wider community.

cing 10y ago

I don't see anything wrong with the "textbook" -> "review" -> "article" strategy to climbing a mountain of debt. A good review paper should hit a sweet spot in terms of exposition, digestion, abstraction, and noise filtering. Transformative new ways of visual thinking, well, that's a different story. The problem is just that the pace of research in the authors field is too fast at the moment. What's the hurry? Over time, the citation graph will reveal the most significant work, and the community will naturally distill that research for maximum effect. The danger is that beautiful distillation of an extremely "niche topic" will not change the fact that it has limited scope and may even limit abstraction. Of course, I say danger with tounge-in-cheek...

colah3 10y ago
You're right that reviews and textbooks do valuable distillation, but I'd claim we can do much much better. I think we can distill things massively better -- create massively better explanations and ways of thinking about ideas -- if only we invested more in it. It isn't just when the distillation happens, it's the quality. That's a really bold claim and all I can do is point to the occasional example where someone put effort into distilling and did something wonderful. My intuition is that these aren't one-off miracles, but are the expected result when the community takes this really seriously. The problem is that distillation is requires focused energy. Reviews and textbooks give us a bit, but it's diffuse. I think we can do much better, and I hope we'll be able to demonstrate that with Distill.
- mncharity 10y ago
  > distillation [] requires focused energy As well as an underappreciated magnitude of expertise. You might like my "Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content" http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 . > create massively better explanations and ways of thinking about ideas Agreed. My hobby project this month is: assuming it's possible to teach size down to atoms in early primary school [1], could we then leverage that to do a multi-scale interdisciplinary "nucleons-up" introduction to atoms and materials. Current content is so notably incoherent, and leaves both students and teachers so very steeped in misconceptions, that there seems an opportunity for supplemental content, if it can be shaped to work. [1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE "Remembering Sizes 2015" - the approach seemed promising... the videos didn't.

debtor123 10y ago

This abstraction of debt doesn't really work for me...

treehau5 10y ago
Great! Do you mind expanding on why it doesn't work for you with emphasis on the relevant, objectifiable aspects? (as objectifiable as you can be for an anecdote, of course!)
- debtor123 10y ago
  I thought I was being clever, since the author mentioned bad abstractions as a kind of research debt...
- milesvp 10y ago
  I'll take a shot. What's actually being described in the article is entropy. Entropy counts always go up, and it takes energy to fight entropy. Or to put it another way, it takes more effort to produce simple writings, than it does to make complicated writings (especially for things that appear inherently complex). This means that debt isn't the right term here, because debt is something that must be paid back by the individual, or organization that took out the loan. It also requires a lender, which, if we're talking about technical debt, is usually future you. In terms of publishing papers, the author isn't borrowing effort from his own future, he's simply not doing work that he doens't need to do. The problem the article is talking about is that others have to do work because the author didn't do work. This is not debt, it's something else (I'm sure there's a term for it in economics, the closest I can think of would be some subtle variant of a negative externality). While I agree that research would be easier if authors spent more time distilling their ideas, that effort is a public good, and effort that will largely not have a positive expected ROI for the author, even if there is a huge ROI from a community collective point of view.
  - colah3 10y ago
    I agree that when you think about individual researchers it's a negative externality -- in many cases, the researcher doesn't pay, but other members of the research community do. This is true in programming as well: often the technical debt falls on your collaborators. You understand that crazy code you wrote and didn't document, but no one else does. For the debt perspective to really work, you need to think of the research community as a team working together to advance science. Individual members of that team take out debt to advance their work faster, but in the long run it costs the team more.

akyu 10y ago

I really love this effort. Research papers are low bandwidth way to get information into our brains. They take a lot of effort to read, even if the ideas are not particularly complicated. Often when reading complicated material, I have to come up with metaphors in my mind to make sense of it. This is somewhat of a wasted effort, as the author who wrote the material surely had metaphors for their own mind when writing, but too often they don't share these metaphors, and stick to purely technical writing. I think this is one reason why ideas like general relativity are so popular, even though the material is actually quite complicated. The average educated person can give a reasonable explanation of general relativity because the metaphors used to explain it are so powerful, even though its very unlikely they understand any of the math involved.

sdenton4 10y ago
I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper. The talk is very often the distillation of the ideas in the paper, as conducted by one of the involved researchers. Indeed, one of the main points of conferences is to allow us to trade these distilled versions of our research with one another and place them in the context of everything else going on...
- cing 10y ago
  Research posters too (which sometimes end up on FigShare). At least there are several journals that accept video abstracts, like: http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630/videoabstract/list/10/1 http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630/videoabstract/li...
- jessriedel 10y ago
  > I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper. This has been in the idea pipeline for a while, but the arXiv is slow-moving. (They probably wouldn't host the actual video files for cost reasons, but that's not a big deal.) http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/09/02/additional-material-on-the-arxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/09/02/additional-material-on...

eddotman 10y ago

Pretty compelling arguments. I do think that the ML / CS / etc. community is actually more open than other academic fields, and so this is definitely the right subfield to start in. Putting open access preprints online is not common practice in all disciplines, although it really should be. I wonder if it makes sense for Distill to also publish on fields outside of pure ML - e.g. as applied to specific problems in other domains. I work in materials informatics, and I suspect that research in such fields (ML + applied sciences) might benefit quite a bit from having key results 'distilled' in this format.

colah3 10y ago
In the very long run, I'd like to see Distill or Distill-like journals cover all of math/cs/science. But I think the right approach is to start with a narrow topic and do really well there. I guess startup people would say that we're focusing on a single vertical. :) We haven't done very good line drawing for journal scope yet, and I'm not sure how we'll handle cross-disciplinary work.

btown 10y ago

"What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?" The above quote is from Ted Chiang's short story "The Evolution of Human Science," originally published in Nature as "Catching crumbs from the table" [0]. It's a brilliant depiction of this very problem: when new developments contribute to an increasing gap between those who can make new developments, and those attempting to understand the state of the art, the entire process of scientific inquiry becomes less efficient. In fact, the scenario depicted is one where the majority of researchers become "distillers," to use the language of the original post. While Chiang posits a science-fiction reason for the divide, "normal" research/technical debt is insidious as well. Without incentives to reduce debt, the knowledge gap widens until only a handful of experts can make significant contributions. It's a problem that needs to be tackled head-on in both research and engineering. I'd love to see more initiatives like Distill. [0] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a... - a highly recommended companion piece to the original post.

cs702 10y ago
There's another subtle aspect to this: the same or very similar ideas, methods, and tools show up or are reinvented again and again, under different guises, in different disciplines and subfields that have their own jargon, unnecessarily making human comprehension even harder. Tibshirani's "glossary" of ML and Statistics terms is a canonical example: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. -- Denis Diderot, 1755 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 (The History of Information is an absolute treasure of a website, BTW.)

PaulHoule 10y ago

There is no research distillation because scientists don't get grants to do it.

colah3 10y ago
And because it doesn't lead to jobs or lots of citations. Fixing that is basically the goal of Distill: build an ecosystem where this kind of work is supported and rewarded.
- kd0amg 10y ago
  I worry that these will be citations (and publications) that "don't really count" in heavily career-impacting decisions. Just getting citations to appear won't make funding agencies, tenure committees, etc. value distillation itself -- they will definitely know the difference between a survey paper and a novel result.
  - colah3 10y ago
    Yep. That's why a big part of Distill, behind the scenes, is a campaign of talking to senior faculty, scientific funders, and leaders of industry research groups, to build consensus that this is important. I'm not sure how successful we'll be, but we're taking it seriously.
- llimllib 10y ago
  Narrowly construed, it is of course even beneficial to hoard knowledge; makes it more likely that your self/lab/friends are the ones that will publish the next advance in your field.
- timdellinger 10y ago
  Scientists are supported and rewarded by the people who control the money in the ecosystem that they already live in. I'm not sure that you'll be able to convince people to devote time and energy to a completely different ecosystem... one that their current ecosystem doesn't care about.

cs702 10y ago

Yes. Yes. Yes. A million times yes. I can't count how many times I've invested meaningful time and effort to grok the key ideas and intuition of a new AI/DL/ML paper, only to feel that those ideas and intuitions could have been explained much better, less formally, with a couple of napkin diagrams. Alas, authors normally have no incentive (or time, for that matter!) to publish nice concise explanations of their intuitions with easy-to-follow diagrams and clear notation... so the mountain of research debt continues to grow to the detriment of everyone. I LOVE what Olah, Carter et al are trying to do here.

CogitoCogito 10y ago

Article is really good, but it's reference to the pi vs tau debate is kind of silly. It really isn't a big deal. When I did my math phd I wrote 2 pi all the time, but this didn't matter. The tiny convenience gained by changing to tau is totally trivial and doesn't even deserve a mention compared to the rest of the things in the article.

colah3 10y ago
2 pi doesn't seem like a big deal to you because you've internalized the notation. You paid the cost a long time ago (and perhaps it was a small one for you). I think it can be hard to empathize with what it's like to be a beginner. I learned about the pi definition debate a few years after I learned trigonometry -- there were a bunch of essays prior to the tauday one -- and it seemed tremendously better. I was also still in high school at that point, and I saw students struggling daily with these ideas and it seemed like part of the pi definition was the stumbling block. So, of course the pi vs 2 pi thing looks trivial to a mature mathematician: we aren't the people paying the cost.
- CogitoCogito 10y ago
  That argument _may_ apply to very young learners. I.e. students in high school or younger. It certainly does _not_ apply to the people the original article is talking about (i.e. researchers). Anyone who can't handle the circumference of a circle being 2 pi has no chance at understanding modern mathematical research no matter how simplified it becomes. It's not even on the radar. By the way I simply am not convinced by this 2 pi vs tau debate. Now the area of a unit circle would become tau / 2. The original problem doesn't go away it just changes. The argument can be that you write write tau more than you'd write tau / 2, but the fundamental difficulty remains. Notation in mathematics is _extremely_ important, but pi vs tau is so far down the rabbit hole of diminishing returns, that I just see the debate as a total waste of time (and that's before I consider the fact that it won't ever change due to momentum...).
  - buzzybee 10y ago
    I see tau as a thing that's mostly useful to programmers because writing "2*Math.PI" (or equivalents) everywhere is a good way to bloat up a trig-intensive algorithm. I have no comment on its applicability to other uses of mathematics.

RSchaeffer 10y ago

Chris, will Distill support community editing of articles like Wikipedia does?

colah3 10y ago
Each Distill article is a github repository, so people can make pull requests, but we mostly encourage people to use that to make corrections. If it's technically feasible to do community editing of articles, why don't we encourage that? It's actually a pretty deep question about how you think about research distillation. It's tempting to see distillation as putting a layer of polish on ideas -- something that people can just jump into and do. But I think it's much more about deeply internally digesting ideas, perhaps with a few collaborators, and putting it together into a framework of thinking. For that, you want a small number of people with a strong vision and a deep investment in the article. If other people have a different vision, they can write a different article. (My impression is that wikipedia works very well for getting lots of facts onto a page, but does a much more mediocre job of distilling ideas.)
- bfirsh 10y ago
  Wikipedia seems to be the closest thing we have to broad distillation right now. It works pretty well if you are researching a subject in depth. The technical articles tend to be written by experts for experts and they have lots of links to primary sources. But, as you hint at, they are poor quality because they are being written by a committee. I would love to see a collection of community written distillation articles, as you describe. Perhaps with some kind of taxonomy like Wikipedia's.

haddr 10y ago

Brilliant thing! As a person pursuing a PhD I'd something that is in my opinion the best way to avoid research debt: have a good tutor or a good group (peers). This way you can learn new things (or ask for something you don't understand) and really get to the peak sooner that doing everything alone.

adamsea 10y ago

One thing I believe to be of great value which is not made explicit in this article (which I think is an awesome article), is that research debt, as they describe it, is basically _education_. In other words, improve the educational resources for complex subjects. In our age where we're blessed with cheap printing of books and the possibility of creating complex interactive media, I think the question of designing user-friendly, powerful, and beautiful educational resources is a huge opportunity and pressing question. Not just for people seeking to achieve a research-level understanding of a complex subject, but for all subjects and all people. Consider the social value of beautiful, well-designed and nontrivial educational material for mathematics or basic science being widely available for all classes of people at all ages. I'd argue that when news organizations use infographics or interactive journalism at its best, they are also performing this educational function. Sorry for the long post, but to summarize, I think it's useful to recognize research debt as a specific case of the art and practice of creating media for education.

Drup 10y ago

As an (aspirant) programming language theorist, we have a really great advantage in this field: advances in the field of prog lang have a natural distillation process: getting into a "real" programming language. And it's great, it means I can toy with features and consider "what could I do if it was in a real language ?". Also, we can observe idioms and usage that gets developed when some advanced feature start being used by "normal" programmers. Computer science, in general, does have the advantage that the distance to applications is quite often much shorter than math, which forces part of this distillation process to proceed a bit quicker. On the other hand, the formalization is highly non-uniform, due to how young it is as a science.

beambot 10y ago

A lot of this seems to be a problem with academic publishing, peer review, and the pedantry contained therein. I tried (twice!) to publish a paper that was scientifically sound, but written such that it could be understood by a lay audience. It was rejected; quoting a reviewer: "This paper lacks math." That sentiment made me lose a lot of faith in academia. Now, I simply refuse to contribute any more time to writing papers or performing peer review (esp. in non-open publications). I'm sure I'm not alone; I know of at least one "seminal" robotics paper that was rejected from top venues multiple times for "simplicity" (lack of mathematics content) that went on to become a foundational paper in the field after appearing in a lower-tier venue years later. The irony: it takes researchers a lot of time to make a paper dense & concise. If they "showed all steps", it would probably improve researcher productivity & make the material more approachable to newcomers. Instead publishers enforce length restrictions... for which authors dedicate upto 25% to related work (some of which is useful; much of which is pandering to likely peer reviewers in small, niche fields). Length restrictions seem equally foolish in the age of digital publishing. And again, inadvertent pedantry is the only explanation I can imagine... but happy to be wrong.

neltnerb 10y ago
And perversely, this makes it so that people feel compelled to add mathy things that add no additional explanatory power to the results. I've frequently heard complaints that people in some CS subfields in particular will just add complicated math because they have to rather than because it helps. It sucks because the authors don't have that great a grasp on the math anyway, the readers don't care about the math -- they just care about the intuition and process, and communication suffers overall. My best papers had at most like two equations, and they were just there to clarify models for fits and the like in case the reader wasn't familiar with terms like "Arrhenius relation". So, you know, to actually make reading it less burdensome rather than just making it look more sophisticated.
- beambot 10y ago
  Exactly! In the end, we ended up just publishing on arXiv.org and writing up a blog post [1]. It's not earth shattering... just an entirely new idea being demonstrated for the first time. The mathy background certainly exists, and was explained in other cited papers, but wasn't necessary to explain the new ideas. [1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/08/10/mobile-robots-and-long-range-uhf-rfid-sensor-tags-internet-things http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/08/10/mobile-robots-and-long...

killjoywashere 10y ago

3blue1brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series on YouTube should get some sort of honorary inclusion in Distill. There have been many "visualization of algorithms" posts on HN over the years. A collection of those would be good as well.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dluan 10y ago

There are 'distillers' of large bodies of scientific research. Traditionally, they are science communicators, and more specifically science journalists. The goal of a practicing scientist is very much at odds with someone whose job is to translate science into larger audiences. I've had very well-intentioned rational research scientists tell me with a straight face that "my job is to produce science results, not to communicate it. that's someone else's job", usually with the attitude that it's less respected or somehow self-aggrandizing. "The best science will be self-evident" attitude that all researchers secretly aspire for, not realizing that 99% of impactful science has had effort spent to promote, frame, or distribute it. This weird stereotype is somehow beaten into scientists from the very beginning, and I haven't been able to figure out where this comes from. Obviously, yes, it's a lack of tools and accessibility into letting scientists also become distillers themselves. But the motivations and incentives at the center of the whole system is what's making this whole imbalance. I think there are parts of our research system that actually say "No, you cannot and should not distill your science". Ultimately, for me, it gets back to funding. If review articles and outreach weighed just as much as citation count in tenure and grant committees, then maybe this could start to change. Yet, these committees still don't value open access, and look how tough that battle has been. Also - this solution is really great and commendable, but I don't see how this works outside of ML/CS where research outputs are more like software development - gists, snippets, prototypes that are immediately shared, pushed, forked. More science fields like ecology, synthetic biology, anthropology, will look like this, but it will take a few human generations.

hprotagonist 10y ago
I think you miss the point. The article proposes a path for distillers whose target audience is researchers, not the lay public. Science journalists are fairly poor distillers of knowledge, actually. What's needed is more like a way for senior researchers to write more and better review papers that lay out and summarize all of the issues around a particular sub-field, for active researchers in that field.
bloaf 10y ago
Science communicators/journalists can turn "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." into "Scientists find that falling down makes babies cry" but they're less good at expressing concepts like "math equation forms the basis for all current modeling, papers A, B, and C each use a different special case of the equation to reach their conclusions."

amelius 10y ago

I think one of the biggest things missing is a means to communicate openly about published research. What I'd like to see is a forum for every paper, and this forum should be properly moderated (perhaps by a peer-review system). Such a forum could make it much easier to decipher published work, and to fill in details which were missing. Also, errors in publications become clear more quickly.

unboxed_type 10y ago
Sounds interesting! I would definitely join that forum. This sounds like a new kind of sci resource with well-defined purpose.

gburt 10y ago

This is a really awesome perspective.

mfsch 10y ago

I agree 100% that it is way too hard to climb the mountains of knowledge, that it could be much easier, and that there is little incentive and cultural support in academia to work on these topics. Time and time again I see examples of where outcomes are not limited by the existing knowledge, but by the accessibility of said knowledge. I would gladly devote most of my time to distilling knowledge if I saw a viable career path for it. Over the last years, I gave a lot of thought to the topic of conveying information. I see research as the process in which knowledge is created. This knowledge then has to be “encoded” in a format that allows for the transmission to other people. This encoding can be optimized in different ways. Research articles have the advantage that they are close to “lossless” in that they are supposed to contain all information necessary to build up that knowledge. This makes them well suited for archival, especially as they can be stored as a stack of paper. However, research articles are often not optimized for building up that knowledge in an efficient way. I believe that the “encoding” optimized for learning & understanding should be more like a progressive image codec, in that it provides a comprehensive view as soon as possible, filling in further details along the way. This also makes it possible to stop whenever you have reached the level of detail that is relevant to you. The challenge in creating these encodings is to extract the information that provides the most clear & useful picture as soon as possible. I like the word “to distill” for that process, as it is really about extracting the essence of a body of information. Doing this work for research articles is how I understand the goal of distill.pub, which seems extremely valuable to me. However, I think this is just the first step. What is the most useful distillation of all of deep neural networks? Of all of machine learning? Of all of computer science? As others mentioned, there are some forms of publications (review articles, textbooks) that do part of this distillation process, but they only cover part of the spectrum. Preciously few textbook contain a well thought-out summary of their contents and not just an introduction. In my experience, often the least amount of thought is given to the highest level of abstraction (e.g. what is the essence of mathematics?), even though they are the most fundamental ones. It would be great if there was more focus on extracting useful understanding from the ocean of knowledge we already have (useful both in the sense of being applicable on its own as well as being a solid foundation to build more knowledge on). It looks like distill.pub is a step in that direction, and I really hope it will bring more attention and recognition to this kind of work.

intrasight 10y ago

How about we just abstract to "Intellectual Debt"? A subclass that I've recently encountered is "Learning Debt". I think all these types of debt can equally apply to learning - as in formal education. Came to mind while reading "Undigested Ideas" because I recently had a conversation with my daughter (sophomore at Yale) that a bad test grade means that you may have Intellectual Debt that needs to be retired by taking time after the test to make sure you understand what you did wrong.

jeyoor 10y ago

Kudos to this team for dogfooding their platform. That choice makes me far more likely to evaluate and eventually use it.

euske 10y ago

When I hear things like this, I always think of Richard Feynman. He was simply a distilling genius to me.

zevyoura 10y ago
One of the greats; luckily a lot of it is available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/j3mhkYbznBk?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas&t=359 https://youtu.be/j3mhkYbznBk?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6M...

stuartaxelowen 10y ago

One take away I got from this is the immense value of great content marketing. Especially for software, the best content marketing is an immense value to the community, helping it understand core ideas and adopt new technology more easily.

tominous 10y ago

Isaac Asimov anticipated the idea of a research distiller in "The Dead Past" with the character of Nimmo, a professional science writer: "Nimmo received his first assignment at the age of twenty-five, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been out in the field for less than three months. It came in the shape of a clotted manuscript whose language would impart no glimmering of understanding to any reader, however qualified, without careful study and some inspired guesswork. Nimmo took it apart and put it together again (after five long and exasperating interviews with the authors, who were biophysicists), making the language taut and meaningful and smoothing the style to a pleasant gloss." In the story Nimmo has less prestige than a "real researcher" but the role pays well and he is in high demand.

nnonynous 10y ago

This is nonsense. Here is a (well-publicized) post which only serves to hype up and stake a claim on what is already valued and practiced, the exposition of research. The message seeks to capture an ignorant readership and practitioners with short-term memory, and have them walk away with the thought "This is the place where good research expositions will be." The machine learning learning community has already benefited from the myriad great expositions provided online for free, in addition to the locations where even source code is given alongside research findings. I will not link to these sites, in hopes to not seem a salesman, but if you've taken an interest in the field and taken some time to search on a topic (for example neural nets), you will have likely already found one of several free, helpful resources. This includes online courses, online books, blogs, videos, &c. These individuals give examples of already well-written expositions going back years (associating these well-received expositions with their own endeavour), yet the theme is one of "newness", helped by the usage of terms like "distillers" and "research debt". In Silicon Valley, it seems that if something's been given enough press and sounds new, you should at least hop on the bandwagon for a while, lest you risk missing out on being an "early adopter". Publishers are not a new conception either. They're a funnel which selects what you see. In an era where the larger population is beginning to see how much power publishers have over what they think, new efforts should strengthen decentralization. Playing to the tune of publishers has gotten us into the mess we're in. Peer review is a mainstay of science, and I am in complete support of it, but peer review and publishers do not need to coexist. I and others will happily use a decentralized system with peer review, additionally and crucially providing transparency. Good exposition should occur. Good exposition does occur. Indeed, people are learning: Ask yourself when you last learned from someone's writing. Audiences get their information from many sources, and if they can't understand those sources, they don't go to them. Addendum. I will not discuss at length the repercussions of teaching the population how to create intelligent systems, but that is a dangerous road for all of us, and not one easily traversed. Companies and other powerful persons have a strong interest in guaranteeing they have a large pool of subordinates who have skills that they can profit greatly from, so it's obvious why the push for software engineering and artificial intelligence teaching is so strong (the promise and hype has been strong). But this is heavy-handed and short-sighted. Businesses have functioned with this approach in the past however, so I wager they assume past performance can be used for prediction in this case as well. If anyone's doing any thinking at all.

mballantyne 10y ago

When I've talked to senior researchers about these problems, they say that they have no problem finding distilled information about new results; they get it from in-person conversations at conferences that they attend frequently. The publishing of distilled research would most benefit low-status, newer researchers (like Ph.D. students), but it needs to be valued by senior researchers to make it into the incentive systems of hiring and grant funding. It seems like a tricky problem to fix the incentives here.

PeterStuer 10y ago

Unfortunately arcane notations are an effective tool to obfuscate the shallowness of some ideas.

fmap 10y ago

In my experience this is already being practiced. Maybe it's different in machine learning, but in type theory simpler explanations are well worth publishing and are published all the time even in high impact venues. As far as I can tell, progress towards eliminating "research debt" takes two forms: on the one hand there is a place for good exposition, typically in the form of textbooks, and on the other hand concepts get better understood over time and people come up with simpler explanations. In both cases the results can already be published... Is the situation in machine learning really so bad that nobody is going to publish simpler explanations of known results?

erikb 10y ago

What I think is funny is that so many people complain about how bad science has become and how the papers and funding institutions enforce a very ineffective way of doing it. Why is nobody attempting or proposing new ways to make money with science? E.g. have people tried to do science in a subscription based model (like artists)? Or using free pappers+consulting on how to replicate the experiments or apply them in real projects (like open source)?

tomkat0789 10y ago

My scientific writing was transformed by Rafeal Luna's "Art of Scientific Storytelling". I'm on my phone, so I can't do it justice here, but I think that style will be crucial for the distillation TFA is discussing.

therealdrag0 10y ago

In terms of clear communication, I highly recommend "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" by Steven Pinker

safeandsound 10y ago

Perhaps distillers should be the reviewers of top publishers so they can have more power.