distillation

Type: kb/types/tag-readme.md · Status: current

Targeted extraction from a larger body of reasoning into a focused artifact shaped by use case, context budget, or consumer. Orthogonal to constraining — you can distil without constraining (extract a skill, still underspecified) or constrain without distilling (store an output, no extraction). A child of learning-theory.

Notes

• distillation — the definition: the rhetorical mode shifts to match the target (argumentative → procedural, exploratory → assertive); the dominant mechanism in knowledge work
• constraining and distillation both trade generality for reliability, speed, and cost — the two mechanisms compared: same trade, different operation (narrowing vs extracting) and different compound yield
• evolving understanding needs re-distillation, not composition — when the source understanding moves, the distilled artifact must be re-derived; stacking patches composes errors
• an accepted edit verifies the change, not the rule — why extracting a reusable rule from an accepted edit is a separate distillation step with a weaker oracle than the edit itself
• reverse-compression is when LLM output expands without adding information — the failure mode: expansion without new extractable structure, the inverse of distillation
• information value is observer-relative — why distillation creates value at all: deterministic transformations add zero classical information yet make structure accessible to bounded observers
• minimum viable vocabulary — the naming set that most reduces extraction cost for a bounded observer; synthesizes information-value, discovery, and distillation