4 ms·

When programmers talk about technical debt, I understand the analogy. A project has technical debt if it has these early "corner cuts" that need to be paid off

When programmers talk about technical debt, I understand the analogy. A project has technical debt if it has these early "corner cuts" that need to be paid off in order to move forward faster. So wouldn't research debt be something a researcher has accumulated when she "cut corners" and didn't learn all she needed to learn? Who needs to pay off this debt? And distillation as the opposite somehow of debt? Surely a researcher needs to pay off her own research debt by researching. Sorry for nitpicking. It seems like people here enjoy the analogy.

btown 10y ago
Nobody's saying that researchers are cutting corners on their own learning; it's that once they make discoveries, they're not prioritizing effective communication to others in the field. When there's a general understanding that "someone's figured out a set of techniques for the state of the art in niche subfield X, but god help us if we want to actually build on those techniques, or evaluate their approach, because there's barely any learning path to get to that person's level" then research in that niche slows down, because new researchers are more incentivized to find areas where they can realistically push boundaries. So it's not the researcher per say that accumulates debt, it's the research field overall. It's exactly the same problem as if only a few experts in a software engineering group could be trusted to refactor a codebase because there aren't tests or other systems to help others get to their level of knowledge. And whereas engineering management might be able to tell the experts to disseminate their knowledge (pay down technical debt), in academia the experts will often just continue to work with the colleagues and collaborators already at their level. Pedagogy and prodigy don't always go hand in hand.

4 ms·

When programmers talk about technical debt, I understand the analogy. A project has technical debt if it has these early "corner cuts" that need to be paid off

by debtor123 10y ago

btown 10y ago
Nobody's saying that researchers are cutting corners on their own learning; it's that once they make discoveries, they're not prioritizing effective communication to others in the field. When there's a general understanding that "someone's figured out a set of techniques for the state of the art in niche subfield X, but god help us if we want to actually build on those techniques, or evaluate their approach, because there's barely any learning path to get to that person's level" then research in that niche slows down, because new researchers are more incentivized to find areas where they can realistically push boundaries. So it's not the researcher per say that accumulates debt, it's the research field overall. It's exactly the same problem as if only a few experts in a software engineering group could be trusted to refactor a codebase because there aren't tests or other systems to help others get to their level of knowledge. And whereas engineering management might be able to tell the experts to disseminate their knowledge (pay down technical debt), in academia the experts will often just continue to work with the colleagues and collaborators already at their level. Pedagogy and prodigy don't always go hand in hand.