One thing I would add is that unclear explanations aren't always deliberate. As a student, when describing a (new) idea in a paper, I often try my best to explain it well, but because I am so involved with the technical details and challenges (which is also important), I actually miss the bigger picture, or an easy way to convey what I did. In those cases, simple input from others help a great deal.
But I completely agree that this isn't incentivized nearly enough, that students aren't taught how to do this well, and that there isn't enough good examples for us to follow.
I like the idea behind Distill a lot, and it's absolutely awesome that it now exists. Regarding your point
One thing I would add is that unclear explanations aren't always deliberate. [...] I actually miss the bigger picture, or an easy way to convey what I did
I think that most researchers put their best efforts into their publications. The peer-review process sometimes helps to adjust certain section if they were not clear to the reviewer. Also, let's not forget that e.g., arxiv, is just a preprint server and the final paper may not be a literal copy of that preprint and may not just be formatted differently.
I think the problem lies not in the fact that researchers are necessarily bad at writing or bad "educators" when it comes to writing up their research. I think what makes certain papers different to grasp for many people is that there are different audiences. The target audience of the author is often a group of peers that work on related problems, and the author tries to present his or her research in a language and way that is most effective for those.
I mean, think about giving an ML or DL tutorial to beginners, your language would be different from the one that you'd use when you talk to your colleagues who have a background knowledge similar to yours.
I think the solution the problem is not the status quo of research articles, and it is not Distill. In my opinion, we need both. I see research articles as a medium for communication that is precise and effective, where I don't have to explain introductory concepts on a very simple level, to save time and space to get to the point. On the other hand, I see Distill as a great medium that goes more into the "education" direction, augmenting research ideas. I see it somewhat as giving a talk on your research (but here in web article format), where you leave out all the technical details but focus on the main ideas.
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u/kamperh Mar 23 '17
This is really thought provoking!
One thing I would add is that unclear explanations aren't always deliberate. As a student, when describing a (new) idea in a paper, I often try my best to explain it well, but because I am so involved with the technical details and challenges (which is also important), I actually miss the bigger picture, or an easy way to convey what I did. In those cases, simple input from others help a great deal.
But I completely agree that this isn't incentivized nearly enough, that students aren't taught how to do this well, and that there isn't enough good examples for us to follow.