Comment by Twisol

Yes, I would like to see more efforts out there like Distill in making cutting-edge research more accessible. I don't think we can wish away the significant gap in expertise and knowledge embodied by research, though. Somebody has to put in the effort to understand it for themselves and then unpack it for others. What may be one page in a research paper could easily turn into dozens.

I myself have been studying category theory (CT) off and on for a few years now, trying to get enough of an understanding to be able to explain it to others in the software engineering (SE) field. I think there's a lot to gain from CT, but it's so strongly founded on distant mathematical fields like algebraic topology that it's very hard to get at its essence and find tractable connections from an SE perspective.

Finding good explanations is really a hard research problem of its own; it just isn't funded that way.

> That means that I can either become an expert myself

I don't think there's any way around this. If you understand a topic, you have obtained some amount of expertise thereof. An expert cannot simply translate for you; it's not a merely notational difference. There's a body of knowledge that must be transferred.

I would recommend finding an expert who's willing to correspond with you on occasion, and look for more introductory materials like textbooks and position papers in the field. If there's a particular goal you have in mind -- say there's a specific paper that achieves something you have an interest in -- be up front about that; it helps focus the explanations and recommendations.

Being an expert doesn't mean you have to have a very broad base of expertise. In fact, it could be argued that most experts are expert in a very, very small and focused niche. The smaller the niche, the less you need to digest; but the more rarefied the niche, the more stable the successive foundations below you need to be.