I wish I could remember where I read this (or even in what academic field). But some academic once wrote that his most acclaimed, most cited papers were always the ones he thought of as mere summaries of existing knowledge. This made a strong impression on me. In most cases when dealing with high-level ideas, very good restatements of previous research are not only valuable, but likely to make those ideas click for some non-trivial number of readers. A few other thoughts:
This seems strongly related to the notion of inferential distance -- we tend to underestimate it.
This is a good way to sum up the Lukeprog era of Less Wrong: There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in merely doing your research and saying the obvious.
If people are disinclined to say the obvious, I wonder how many conversations on difficult topics consist mostly of talking past one another. Perhaps more than we'd otherwise think.
I can completely believe that these papers were successful (as measured by citations for example), but that does not necessarily mean they were the most useful papers or that people got the most out of them.
In a typical paper, somewhere in the introduction it will be necessary to say some basic "establishing the field" statements. Academics want to support these statements with references. A reference that says some basic thing, in plain words with very little technical hedging, is much easier to find and cite than a series of more targeted and precise poi...
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Related to: Generalizing from One Example, Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help), Beware the Unsurprised
The idea of this article is something I've talked about a couple of times in comments. It seems to require more attention.
As a general rule, what is obvious to some people may not be obvious to others. Is this obvious to you? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't, and you thought it was because of hindsight bias.
Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list.
Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy. The implicit deduction goes like this: "I found <concept> obvious. Thus, <concept> is inherently obvious." The problem is that obviousness, like probability, is in the mind.
The stigma of "obvious" ideas has another problem in preventing things from being said at all. I don't know how common this is, but I've actually been afraid of saying things that I thought were obvious, even though ignoring this fear and just posting has yet to result in a poorly-received comment. (That is, in fact, why I'm writing this.)
Even tautologies, which are always obvious in retrospect, can be hard to spot. How many of us would have explicitly realized the weak anthropic principle without Nick Bostrom's help?
And what about implications of beliefs you already hold? These should be obvious, and sometimes are, but our brains are notoriously bad at putting two and two together. Luke's example was not realizing that an intelligence explosion was imminent until he read the I.J. Good paragraph. I'm glad he provided that example, as it has saved me the trouble of making one.
This is not (to paraphrase Eliezer) a thunderbolt of insight. I bring it up because I propose a few community norms based on the idea:
I'm not sure if these are good ideas, but I think implementing them would decrease the volume of thoughts we cannot think and things we can't say.