I use surface area as a fuzzy intuition around “having some model of what’s going on, and understanding of what’s happening in a problem/phenomena”. Which doesn’t necessarily looking like a full understanding, but looks like having a list in my head of confusing phenomena, somewhat useful ideas, and hooks into what I could investigate next.
I find this model useful both to recognise ‘do I have any surface area on this problem’ and to motivate next steps by ‘what could give me more surface area on this problem’ even if it’s not a perfectly robust way.
I use surface area as a fuzzy intuition around “having some model of what’s going on, and understanding of what’s happening in a problem/phenomena”. Which doesn’t necessarily looking like a full understanding, but looks like having a list in my head of confusing phenomena, somewhat useful ideas, and hooks into what I could investigate next.
I find this model useful both to recognise ‘do I have any surface area on this problem’ and to motivate next steps by ‘what could give me more surface area on this problem’ even if it’s not a perfectly robust way.