First and foremost, my confidence in the descriptions of different distillation methods is pretty low. It is a framework I’ve thrown together from discussions on what an optimal science communication landscape would look like. It is in its initial phases and will most likely be imperfect for quite some time as finding the optimal communication landscape is a difficult problem.
Secondly, Great point! I think that my thinking of it, is as a “reinterpretation of existing research.” The basic way of doing this is rewriting a post for higher clarity which is the classical way that a distillation is viewed from.
I think there are more ways of doing this and that the space is underexplored. In terms of the terminology proposed in the course, a “classic” distillation is some combination of what I would describe as propagating and bushwacking.
Bushwacking would be more something like asking, “what the f*ck is going on here?” which might be relevant for things such as infra-bayesianism (I want to learn infra-bayesianism can someone please bushwack this).
Propagating would be more of what Rob Miles is doing.
So what is distillation? What is the superclass of all of these?
I would phrase it like the following “A distillation is a work that takes existing research and reinterprets it in a new light.”
Finally, a meta point in defence of the introduction of new jargon. I think the term distillation is confusing in itself as it can mean a lot of things, and therefore if you say, “I’m bushwhacking this post” you get the idea that “ah, this person is cutting down the weeds of what is a confusing post”. I hope to introduce new methodology so it is easier to understand what type of distillation someone is doing. (I don’t think this terminology is optimal, but it’s a start in the right direction IMO.)
First and foremost, my confidence in the descriptions of different distillation methods is pretty low. It is a framework I’ve thrown together from discussions on what an optimal science communication landscape would look like. It is in its initial phases and will most likely be imperfect for quite some time as finding the optimal communication landscape is a difficult problem.
Secondly, Great point! I think that my thinking of it, is as a “reinterpretation of existing research.” The basic way of doing this is rewriting a post for higher clarity which is the classical way that a distillation is viewed from.
I think there are more ways of doing this and that the space is underexplored. In terms of the terminology proposed in the course, a “classic” distillation is some combination of what I would describe as propagating and bushwacking.
Bushwacking would be more something like asking, “what the f*ck is going on here?” which might be relevant for things such as infra-bayesianism (I want to learn infra-bayesianism can someone please bushwack this).
Propagating would be more of what Rob Miles is doing.
So what is distillation? What is the superclass of all of these?
I would phrase it like the following “A distillation is a work that takes existing research and reinterprets it in a new light.”
Finally, a meta point in defence of the introduction of new jargon. I think the term distillation is confusing in itself as it can mean a lot of things, and therefore if you say, “I’m bushwhacking this post” you get the idea that “ah, this person is cutting down the weeds of what is a confusing post”. I hope to introduce new methodology so it is easier to understand what type of distillation someone is doing. (I don’t think this terminology is optimal, but it’s a start in the right direction IMO.)
You might be interested in this post.