I want to point out what could be a serious problem for anybody attempting to do “distillation” in a public setting. Although here, “distillation” is specifically couched as a way of explicating mathematics, I believe the concept generalizes to any repackaging dry, terse and abstract set of ideas into more intuitive language.
Let me start by giving a specific example of an unpublished piece of writing I produced as a form of distillation. The Handbook of the Biology of Aging is a great intellectual resource on the subject of geroscience, but it’s written in terse, abstract academese. I rewrote chapter 4 in much livelier language, with expanded examples and a slightly reworked structure, and credited the original author with both the ideas and the structure, being clear that I’m not claiming any intellectual novelty in my new version. It was always intended for my blog, not for publication in any peer-reviewed journal. I’m pretty confident that most lay audiences would prefer to absorb the original author’s ideas via my version than via the original.
The problem is plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t just about copying words—it’s also about copying ideas. Although a careful distiller could avoid risk of violating formal policies/laws concerning plagiarism by carefully citing their sources and being clear that their work is not attempting to provide any form of intellectual novelty, it also poses a potential reputational risk to the distiller.
Here, distillation is highlighted in part as a way for students to build into a career as a researcher. However, even if it’s unfair, distillation can look like intellectual laziness—the academic version of an artist copying someone else’s work and displaying it in a gallery. Even if the artist cites the original source, perhaps by labeling the image with the tag “a copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night” displaying their copy in public is likely to undermine their reputation for being capable of original artistry and build their reputation as a “mere copier.” They might be perceived not only as artistically weak, but as a seedy sort of person who may well be on the road to selling art forgeries. A distiller faces the same reputational risk.
Think of it like the difference between an action that violates the law, and an action that could result in being sued. If a lawyer wants to sue you, then even if you ultimately win the case, you might be tied up in court for years, and suffer massive legal expenses. Smart people don’t skirt the edge of being potentially sued, at least not as part of their normal business operations. They steer well clear of this whenever possible. I think that distillation is skirting so close to potential perceptions of plagiarism and intellectual laziness that it creates an analogous risk.
I think this is deeply unfortunate, because distillation has all the benefits described in the OP. A good distillation can make important ideas more accessible, and that might in fact be the bottleneck for creating new intellectual contributions based on those ideas. But unfortunately, academia doesn’t really have a culture of considering distillation as a valuable form of scientific outreach. It will tend to see distillation as somewhere between plagiarism and intellectual laziness. Even if a persistent argument with one particular person who might accuse the distiller of these failings manages to convince them to see the value in the work of distillation, there will be another person right behind them to lobby the same accusation. And then the distiller looks like the sort of person who doesn’t have the judgment to know what’s going to rile up academics and create a perception of plagiarism—and who wants to work with somebody like that?
There’s a difference between a literature review or piece of journalism, which weaves together properly cited ideas from a variety of sources into a fundamentally new structure in a way that everybody can understand is not plagiaristic, and a distillation which, as I understand it, takes the intellectual architecture of a single source and dresses it up in new language. The latter looks a lot like plagiarism to many people.
The difficulty with producing distillation that doesn’t create laziness/plagiarism perceptions is unfortunate. But I think it’s akin to the unfortunate effect of patent law in slowing innovation. Right now, we prioritize the need of intellectuals to protect their intellectual contributions over the need for writers to supply audiences with more accessible versions of those ideas.
So if I was going to leave potential distillers with a takeaway message, it would be this:
Be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in how you write distillations. If you must write them, consider not publishing them. It’s not enough to properly cite your sources. Every time you publish a distillation, you are taking a reputational risk, and in many situations, there isn’t any real personal reward to counterbalance it. Even if you have not plagiarized, and even if you are capable of original thought, you might create a perception that you are an intellectually lazy plagiarizer hiding these failings under the term “distillation.” This might permanently damage your career prospects in academia. Unless you’re very confident that your specific approach to distillation will avoid that reputational risk to yourself, strongly consider keeping your distillation private.
Do you have a particular story that shows the types of negative outcomes that could happen? While it’s not impossible for me to imagine an overly sensitive academic getting angry or annoyed unreasonably, at a distillation, it hardly seems to me like it would be at all likely. I have fairly high confidence in my understanding of academic mindsets, and a single sentence at the top “this is a summary of XYZ’s work on whatever” with a link would in almost all cases be enough. You could even add in another flattering sentence, “I’m very excited about this work because… I find it super exciting so here’s my notes/attempt at understanding it more”
Generally, academics like it when people try to understand their work.
Yes. I posted the description of the aging distillation project I described above on the AskAcademia subreddit, and was met with a firestorm of downvotes and strident claims from multiple respondants that it would be plagiaristic/stealing, and that I was obviously unfit to be a graduate student for even considering it.
One important caveat is that I originally posted that I was going to “publish” this essay, which many respondants seem to have initially taken as meaning “publish in a peer reviewed journal, passing the ideas and structure off as my own.” But even after updating the OP and specifically addressing that point in numerous replies, respondants generally continued to see the idea as a form of intellectual theft and of making no useful contribution to the reader.
It’s entirely possible that my initial post grabbed the attention of a couple redditors who are a few SDs from the mean in terms of sensitivity to plagiarism concerns, and that they got so fired up about that possibility that they couldn’t really make a distinction between the scenario they had imagined I was proposing and what I actually intended to do. But I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of academics would see a thorough rewrite of a specific source in new language as a form of intellectual laziness/theft, even with proper citations, and that people almost never do this for that exact reason. Up close, it might not be plagiarism, but from a distance, it sure looks like it. You have to do a lot of explaining to show why it’s maybe not plagiarism. Even if you convince one person, they might even still feel pressured to accuse you of plagiarism, because otherwise it looks like they’re being soft on crime. And even if not, they might still think you’re a fool for provoking a potentially ugly controversy, and want to distance themselves from you.
There are probably ways to do distillations that avoid this sort of issue, but I think anybody planning to do it ought to have a carefully thought-through plan for how they’re going to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Distillation of a single source is an unconventional format. Conventional formats—the book review, the summary, etc—exist because we, as a culture, have carved out a set of generally acceptable ways for people to respond to the works of other authors. Distillations aren’t really one of them (correct me if I’m wrong and you can point to sources on things like “how to write a distillation” from the wider world). When people write academic works, they might expect a review, a piece of science journalism, or whatever, but not that some stranger will come along and try to write a “distillation” of their entire paper and publish it online. And they might be pissed off to have their expectations violated.
By analogy, it’s a person deciding that since dancing is fun and healthy and they believe in “ask culture,” it’s OK for them to walk up to strangers at the bus stop and ask them to dance. It’s a weird thing to be asked, people will be confused about your motives and get anxious, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you quickly develop a reputation as a creep even if you always politely walk away when you get rejected and never ask the same person twice. We do not have a cultural norm of asking for dances at bus stops, and we don’t have a cultural norm of writing distillations. So at the very least, you should carefully vet the proposed distillation with the original author and be super clear on why, in each specific case, it’s OK for you to be producing one.
I want to point out what could be a serious problem for anybody attempting to do “distillation” in a public setting. Although here, “distillation” is specifically couched as a way of explicating mathematics, I believe the concept generalizes to any repackaging dry, terse and abstract set of ideas into more intuitive language.
Let me start by giving a specific example of an unpublished piece of writing I produced as a form of distillation. The Handbook of the Biology of Aging is a great intellectual resource on the subject of geroscience, but it’s written in terse, abstract academese. I rewrote chapter 4 in much livelier language, with expanded examples and a slightly reworked structure, and credited the original author with both the ideas and the structure, being clear that I’m not claiming any intellectual novelty in my new version. It was always intended for my blog, not for publication in any peer-reviewed journal. I’m pretty confident that most lay audiences would prefer to absorb the original author’s ideas via my version than via the original.
The problem is plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t just about copying words—it’s also about copying ideas. Although a careful distiller could avoid risk of violating formal policies/laws concerning plagiarism by carefully citing their sources and being clear that their work is not attempting to provide any form of intellectual novelty, it also poses a potential reputational risk to the distiller.
Here, distillation is highlighted in part as a way for students to build into a career as a researcher. However, even if it’s unfair, distillation can look like intellectual laziness—the academic version of an artist copying someone else’s work and displaying it in a gallery. Even if the artist cites the original source, perhaps by labeling the image with the tag “a copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night” displaying their copy in public is likely to undermine their reputation for being capable of original artistry and build their reputation as a “mere copier.” They might be perceived not only as artistically weak, but as a seedy sort of person who may well be on the road to selling art forgeries. A distiller faces the same reputational risk.
Think of it like the difference between an action that violates the law, and an action that could result in being sued. If a lawyer wants to sue you, then even if you ultimately win the case, you might be tied up in court for years, and suffer massive legal expenses. Smart people don’t skirt the edge of being potentially sued, at least not as part of their normal business operations. They steer well clear of this whenever possible. I think that distillation is skirting so close to potential perceptions of plagiarism and intellectual laziness that it creates an analogous risk.
I think this is deeply unfortunate, because distillation has all the benefits described in the OP. A good distillation can make important ideas more accessible, and that might in fact be the bottleneck for creating new intellectual contributions based on those ideas. But unfortunately, academia doesn’t really have a culture of considering distillation as a valuable form of scientific outreach. It will tend to see distillation as somewhere between plagiarism and intellectual laziness. Even if a persistent argument with one particular person who might accuse the distiller of these failings manages to convince them to see the value in the work of distillation, there will be another person right behind them to lobby the same accusation. And then the distiller looks like the sort of person who doesn’t have the judgment to know what’s going to rile up academics and create a perception of plagiarism—and who wants to work with somebody like that?
There’s a difference between a literature review or piece of journalism, which weaves together properly cited ideas from a variety of sources into a fundamentally new structure in a way that everybody can understand is not plagiaristic, and a distillation which, as I understand it, takes the intellectual architecture of a single source and dresses it up in new language. The latter looks a lot like plagiarism to many people.
The difficulty with producing distillation that doesn’t create laziness/plagiarism perceptions is unfortunate. But I think it’s akin to the unfortunate effect of patent law in slowing innovation. Right now, we prioritize the need of intellectuals to protect their intellectual contributions over the need for writers to supply audiences with more accessible versions of those ideas.
So if I was going to leave potential distillers with a takeaway message, it would be this:
Be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in how you write distillations. If you must write them, consider not publishing them. It’s not enough to properly cite your sources. Every time you publish a distillation, you are taking a reputational risk, and in many situations, there isn’t any real personal reward to counterbalance it. Even if you have not plagiarized, and even if you are capable of original thought, you might create a perception that you are an intellectually lazy plagiarizer hiding these failings under the term “distillation.” This might permanently damage your career prospects in academia. Unless you’re very confident that your specific approach to distillation will avoid that reputational risk to yourself, strongly consider keeping your distillation private.
Do you have a particular story that shows the types of negative outcomes that could happen? While it’s not impossible for me to imagine an overly sensitive academic getting angry or annoyed unreasonably, at a distillation, it hardly seems to me like it would be at all likely. I have fairly high confidence in my understanding of academic mindsets, and a single sentence at the top “this is a summary of XYZ’s work on whatever” with a link would in almost all cases be enough. You could even add in another flattering sentence, “I’m very excited about this work because… I find it super exciting so here’s my notes/attempt at understanding it more”
Generally, academics like it when people try to understand their work.
Yes. I posted the description of the aging distillation project I described above on the AskAcademia subreddit, and was met with a firestorm of downvotes and strident claims from multiple respondants that it would be plagiaristic/stealing, and that I was obviously unfit to be a graduate student for even considering it.
One important caveat is that I originally posted that I was going to “publish” this essay, which many respondants seem to have initially taken as meaning “publish in a peer reviewed journal, passing the ideas and structure off as my own.” But even after updating the OP and specifically addressing that point in numerous replies, respondants generally continued to see the idea as a form of intellectual theft and of making no useful contribution to the reader.
It’s entirely possible that my initial post grabbed the attention of a couple redditors who are a few SDs from the mean in terms of sensitivity to plagiarism concerns, and that they got so fired up about that possibility that they couldn’t really make a distinction between the scenario they had imagined I was proposing and what I actually intended to do. But I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of academics would see a thorough rewrite of a specific source in new language as a form of intellectual laziness/theft, even with proper citations, and that people almost never do this for that exact reason. Up close, it might not be plagiarism, but from a distance, it sure looks like it. You have to do a lot of explaining to show why it’s maybe not plagiarism. Even if you convince one person, they might even still feel pressured to accuse you of plagiarism, because otherwise it looks like they’re being soft on crime. And even if not, they might still think you’re a fool for provoking a potentially ugly controversy, and want to distance themselves from you.
There are probably ways to do distillations that avoid this sort of issue, but I think anybody planning to do it ought to have a carefully thought-through plan for how they’re going to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Distillation of a single source is an unconventional format. Conventional formats—the book review, the summary, etc—exist because we, as a culture, have carved out a set of generally acceptable ways for people to respond to the works of other authors. Distillations aren’t really one of them (correct me if I’m wrong and you can point to sources on things like “how to write a distillation” from the wider world). When people write academic works, they might expect a review, a piece of science journalism, or whatever, but not that some stranger will come along and try to write a “distillation” of their entire paper and publish it online. And they might be pissed off to have their expectations violated.
By analogy, it’s a person deciding that since dancing is fun and healthy and they believe in “ask culture,” it’s OK for them to walk up to strangers at the bus stop and ask them to dance. It’s a weird thing to be asked, people will be confused about your motives and get anxious, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you quickly develop a reputation as a creep even if you always politely walk away when you get rejected and never ask the same person twice. We do not have a cultural norm of asking for dances at bus stops, and we don’t have a cultural norm of writing distillations. So at the very least, you should carefully vet the proposed distillation with the original author and be super clear on why, in each specific case, it’s OK for you to be producing one.
If reputation is the main concern, why not use a pseudonym?