I don't want to hear your elevator pitch

I don’t want to hear your elevator pitch – Petter Holme

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026

… but I’d love to talk science with you for hours, on the shores of Sakhalin or in bars of Beirut, or in the nearest available seminar room. This is a short armchair-philosophical elegy for slow science. [The background is Olga Rozanova’s 1914 "Cityscape” photoshopped for the worse.]

In all forms of communication, discovery, and synthesis of knowledge, there is a tradeoff between more complicated and informative representations of reality and simpler ones that are easier to understand. Where to draw this line between completeness and simplicity is, to a large extent, not our individual choice. There are social forces pushing for greater complexity: new observations, new data, the desire for more accurate predictions, the academic pressure to come up with something new when everything simple has already been said. The forces pushing in the other direction, however, seem ever more relentless, intransigent, and suppressive.

Do you know the key to getting published in a prestigious journal? To get the same grants as your over-achieving colleagues? To make anyone at all care about your research? You’ve heard it a million times. Summarize. Get rid of the details. Boil it all down to a catchphrase. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

At the bottom of all this lies the Great Melancholy of Language, well captured by Wittgenstein’s note that “dieses Buch wird vielleicht nur der verstehen, der die Gedanken, die darin ausgedrückt sind” and FR David’s "words don’t come easy to me.” Our understanding of the world can transcend language, and the process of building a language to express that understanding is time-consuming, awkward, and often unsuccessful. At the same time, unless we want to seek the truth in isolation and fade away like a Zen monk, trying to communicate the difficult is the only way to go.

What about the furious pace of reality around us? Don’t we have to deal with it by shooting out information fragments to as many as possible? Pragmatically speaking: yeah, when others expect us to, it serves no purpose to do otherwise. But I think there is more time than we think to >coughThe Scent of Time come to mind. Our problem with time is not that our reality accelerates—according to Han, that phase has already happened—the problem is the urge to do, act, create, and destroy whenever a time for contemplation naturally presents itself. And I think the same goes for communication, whether one-to-one or the scientific act of communicating new knowledge to humankind.

Finally, the above is not limited to interpersonal communication. It also applies to scientific models and theories (which are, of course, also ways of moving insights about reality in and out of our minds). The forces pushing the tradeoff toward simplicity in this context are, if possible, even stronger. Please spare us another causal link taken out of an intricate context. If we have anything to learn from our silicon overlords, it is that predictions need feedback loops and complexity—AI does not rely on a catalog of causalities and correlations, and neither should the science feeding the human intellect. Take the time needed to give a full picture of what you study. Don’t waste time on fast science.

I don't want to hear your elevator pitch

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