Interpretive Labor

• 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.
• That is, really outstanding tutorials, reviews, textbooks, and so on.
• 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.