AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

DirectedEvolution

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A distillation might need to fill in background knowledge

A good summary/distillation has two functions. First, it extracts the most important information. Second, it helps the reader understand that information more efficiently.

Most people think a distillation cuts a source text down to a smaller size. It can do more than that. Sometimes, the most important information in a text requires background knowledge. If the reader doesn't have that background knowledge, a distillation designed for that reader must start by communicating it to them, even if the original source text didn't explain it.

For example, each chapter of the Handbook of the Biology of Aging assumes the reader knows the mechanistic details of the biological processes it's describing. The chapter on genetics assumes the reader is a geneticist. The chapter on DNA repair dysfunction assumes the reader knows how non-homologous end joining works.

One obvious use-case for this Handbook would be to educate an early-career researcher on the field of aging biology to inform choice of lab. It's not easy to use the Handbook for this purpose, since there's no way a student will have all the background necessary to understand it in advance. Requiring them to repeatedly interrupt their reading to independently research each technical subject severely undermines the efficiency of the Handbook as a communication tool. A summary of the Handbook targeting this audience would present enough of that background to facilitate understanding the Handbook's technical material.

2DirectedEvolution4y

How do you define teaching “better” in a way that’s cleanly distinguished from teaching “faster?” Or on a deeper level, how would you operationalize “learning” so that we could talk about better and worse learning with some precision? For example, the equation for beam bending energy in a circular arc is Energy = 0.5EIL (1/R)^2. “Shallow” learning is just being able to plug and chug if given some values to put in. Slightly deeper is to memorize this equation. Deeper still is to give a physical explanation for why this equation includes the variables that it does. Yet we can’t just cut straight to that deepest layer of understanding. We have to pass through the shallower understandings first. That requires time and speed. So teaching faster is what enables teaching better, at least to me. Do you view things differently?

3Jay Bailey4y

This isn't a generalised theory of learning that I've formalised or anything. This is just my way of asking "What's my goal with this distillation?" The way I see it is - you have an article to distill. What's your intended audience? If the intended audience is people who could read and understand the article given, say, 45 minutes - you want to summarise the main points in less time, maybe 5-10 minutes. You're summarising, aka teaching faster. This usually means less, not more, depth. If the intended audience is people who lack the ability to read and understand the article in its current state, people who bounced off of it for some reason, then summarising won't help. So you need to explain the background information and/or explain the ideas of the article better. (which often means more, not less, depth) Thus, your goal is to teach "better". Maybe "better" is the wrong word - maybe the original article was well-suited for an audience who already knows X, and your article is suited for ones that don't. Or maybe the original article just wasn't as well explained as it could have been, so you're rewriting it to resolve people's confusions, which often means adding more detail like concrete examples. What it means to "teach better" is outside the scope of this particular explanation, and I don't have a formal idea, just some general heuristics, like "Identify where people might get confused" and "Start concrete, then go abstract" and "Ask what the existing understanding of your target audience is", but you don't need to have a definition of what it means to "teach better" in order to know that this is your goal with a distillation - not to speed up a process people can do on their own, but to resolve a confusion people might have when trying to read an article independently.

I think that it's good to keep those general heuristics in mind, and I agree with all of them. My goal is to describe the structure of pedagogical text in a way that makes it easier to engineer.

I have a way of thinking about shallowness and depth with a little more formality. Starting with a given reader's background knowledge, explaining idea "C" might require explaining ideas "A" and "B" first, because they are prerequisites to the reader to understand "C."

A longer text that you're going to summarize might present three such "chains" of ideas:

A1 -> B1... (read more)

AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

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AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

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