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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 anecdot

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.

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.