Research debt

https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

Achieving a research-level understanding of most topics is like climbing a mountain. Aspiring researchers must struggle to understand vast bodies of work that came before them, to learn techniques, and to gain intuition. Upon reaching the top, the new researcher begins doing novel work, throwing new stones onto the top of the mountain and making it a little taller for whoever comes next.

The climb isn’t progress: the climb is a mountain of debt.

Interpretive labor

In research, we often have a group of researchers all trying to understand each other. Just like before, the cost of explaining stays constant as the group grows, but the cost of understanding increases with each new member. At some size, the effort to understand everyone else becomes too much. As a defense mechanism, people specialize, focusing on a narrower area of interest. The maintainable size of the field is controlled by how its members trade off the energy between communicating and understanding.

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. The problem is that we often stop at that point. Young ideas aren’t ending points for us to put in a paper and abandon. When we let things stop there the debt piles up. It becomes harder to understand and build on each other’s work and the field fragments.

Clear thinking

Developing good abstractions, notations, visualizations, and so forth, is improving the user interfaces for ideas. This helps both with understanding ideas for the first time and with thinking clearly about them. Conversely, if we can’t explain an idea well, that’s often a sign that we don’t understand it as well as we could.

It shouldn’t be that surprising that these two largely go hand in hand. Part of thinking is having a conversation with ourselves.