I consider distillation to have two main possibilities—teach people something faster, or teach people something better. (You can sometimes do both simultaneously, but I suspect that usually requires you to be really good and/or the original text to be really bad)
So, I would separate summarisation (teaching faster) from pedagogy (teaching better) and would say that your idea of providing background knowledge falls under the latter. The difference in our opinions, to me, is that I think it’s best to separate the goal of this from the goal of summarising, and to generally pick one and stick to it for any given distillation—I wouldn’t say pedagogy is part of summarising at all, I’d say if your goal is to teach the reader background knowledge they need for Subject X, you’re no longer “summarising” Subject X. Which is fine. Teaching something better is also a useful skill, even if the post ends up longer than the thing it was distilling.
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.
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 → C1
A2 → B2 → C2 → D2
A3 → B3
It might take 45 minutes to convey all three chains of ideas to their endpoints. Perhaps a 5-10 minute summary can only convey 3 of these ideas. If the most important ideas are A1, A2, and A3, then it will present them. If the most important idea is C1, then it will present A1 → B1 → C1.
If D2 is the most important idea, then the summary will have to leave out this idea, be longer, or find a more efficient way to present its ideas. This is why I see speed and depth as being intrinsically intertwined in a summary. Being able to help the reader construct an understanding of ideas more quickly allows it to go into more depth in a given timeframe.
All the heuristics you mention are important for executing this successfully. For example, “Ask what the existing understanding of your audience is” comes into play if the summary-writer accidentally assumes knowledge of A2, leaves out that idea, and leads off with B2 in order to get to D2 in the given timeframe. “Start concrete, then go abstract” might mean that the writer must spend more time on each point, to give a concrete example, and therefore they can’t get through as many ideas in a given timeframe as they’d hope. “Identify where people might get confused” has a lot to do with how the sentences are written; if people are getting confused, this cuts down on the number of ideas you can effectively present in a given timeframe.
In this simple framework, we can specify the goal of an ideal summary:
Given all the idea-chains in the original text, a reading time limit, and a reader’s background and goals, present the idea-chains that deliver the greatest value such that the reader will be able to understand them within the time limit.
By doing this systematically, we can create a sort of “basic science of summarization,” concretely identifying specific failure modes and inefficiencies for improvement.
I consider distillation to have two main possibilities—teach people something faster, or teach people something better. (You can sometimes do both simultaneously, but I suspect that usually requires you to be really good and/or the original text to be really bad)
So, I would separate summarisation (teaching faster) from pedagogy (teaching better) and would say that your idea of providing background knowledge falls under the latter. The difference in our opinions, to me, is that I think it’s best to separate the goal of this from the goal of summarising, and to generally pick one and stick to it for any given distillation—I wouldn’t say pedagogy is part of summarising at all, I’d say if your goal is to teach the reader background knowledge they need for Subject X, you’re no longer “summarising” Subject X. Which is fine. Teaching something better is also a useful skill, even if the post ends up longer than the thing it was distilling.
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?
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 → C1
A2 → B2 → C2 → D2
A3 → B3
It might take 45 minutes to convey all three chains of ideas to their endpoints. Perhaps a 5-10 minute summary can only convey 3 of these ideas. If the most important ideas are A1, A2, and A3, then it will present them. If the most important idea is C1, then it will present A1 → B1 → C1.
If D2 is the most important idea, then the summary will have to leave out this idea, be longer, or find a more efficient way to present its ideas. This is why I see speed and depth as being intrinsically intertwined in a summary. Being able to help the reader construct an understanding of ideas more quickly allows it to go into more depth in a given timeframe.
All the heuristics you mention are important for executing this successfully. For example, “Ask what the existing understanding of your audience is” comes into play if the summary-writer accidentally assumes knowledge of A2, leaves out that idea, and leads off with B2 in order to get to D2 in the given timeframe. “Start concrete, then go abstract” might mean that the writer must spend more time on each point, to give a concrete example, and therefore they can’t get through as many ideas in a given timeframe as they’d hope. “Identify where people might get confused” has a lot to do with how the sentences are written; if people are getting confused, this cuts down on the number of ideas you can effectively present in a given timeframe.
In this simple framework, we can specify the goal of an ideal summary:
By doing this systematically, we can create a sort of “basic science of summarization,” concretely identifying specific failure modes and inefficiencies for improvement.