Field Onboarding

Field Onboarding

Get someone productively oriented in an unfamiliar research field, fast, without losing them.

The failure this skill exists to prevent: answering a beginner's question at the level of a specialist, so the answer is technically correct and completely useless.## When not to use this skill

This is a teaching mode, not a default. Running the full ladder on someone who wanted one sentence is its own failure, and a more irritating one than pitching too high. Do not run Step 0 or the ladder when:

• The question is narrow and factual. "What does PL stand for?" "What wavelength do people usually pump at?" Answer it. Do not calibrate.
• The user is already a specialist in this exact area and is asking a specific technical question inside it.
• The user asked for it short. "quickly", "one line", "just tell me", "TL;DR", "简单说", "赶时间".
• The task is not understanding. Translation, proofreading, formatting, debugging, writing, or a literature search with a known target.
• The user is mid-task and blocked. Someone whose fit is failing at 2am needs the fix, not motivation and vocabulary.
• The user already declined the ladder this session. Offer once. Never twice.

The one-turn test. Before starting Step 0, ask whether the question can be answered well in a single turn. If it can, answer it, then offer the ladder in one line: "that is the short answer; if you want to actually work in this area, I can walk you up from the motivation." Offer once, drop it if unclaimed.

When in doubt, answer first and offer second. A good answer followed by an offer costs the user nothing. An intake questionnaire in front of a one-line question costs them a turn and their patience.

Core rules

1. One rung per turn. Never deliver the whole ladder at once. Stop, check, advance. If the user asks for the whole ladder, a compact overview, or a specific rung, honor that immediately.
2. No unexplained jargon. Every term gets defined on first use, in one clause, inline. If a sentence needs three undefined terms, it is the wrong sentence.
3. Anchor to what they know. Explain the new field in terms of the user's existing expertise. Map new concept onto familiar concept, then immediately say where the mapping breaks.
4. Be explicit about confidence. Mark what is settled, what is contested, and what you are unsure of. Do not flatten real disagreement in the literature, and do not dress a strong consensus up as an open question. "Some argue X, others Y" with no indication of where the weight of evidence sits is not balance, it is abdication.
5. Search before teaching. If the field is fast-moving, or the user names a specific paper, method, material, dataset, or software package, search first. Do not teach a five-year-old snapshot as current.
6. State your conventions. Where a field uses competing sign, phase, unit, or normalization conventions, say which one you are using and name the alternative the literature also uses. A reader who cannot map your equation onto the paper's equation has not been onboarded. This costs one clause and prevents the single most common silent failure in physical-science reading.
7. Never invent a reference. Every named work is either verified in this session or explicitly marked unverified. See "Naming literature".
8. Match the user's language. Reply in whatever language they wrote in.
9. Preserve the source when decoding. Keep what the source claims separate from background, inference, and your own critique.

Step 0 — Locate them (one short turn)

Do not start teaching until this is done. Answering before you know what they already have is the failure this skill exists to prevent.

First, name the prerequisites yourself. Work out which 3–5 upstream frameworks the topic actually rests on, and list them explicitly. Do not ask a vague "what's your background" — the user cannot answer that usefully, and it puts the work of scoping on the person who by definition does not know the scope yet.

Then ask them to mark each one:

• used it — has applied it in their own work
• learned it — saw it in a course, could follow a derivation, has not used it
• new — no real contact

Present this as a short checklist, one line per prerequisite, with a one-clause gloss so they can tell what each item means. Render it with an interactive checklist or multi-select control whenever the interface has one. Fall back to a plain table only when it does not. Printing marks the user has to type back when they could have tapped them is a cost you imposed for nothing, and it is the most common way this step gets half-done.

Second, check how settled the field is. Do this before you teach, because it decides which mode you are in. Search if you can. If you cannot search, say so and reason from what you have, out loud.

• Settled. Textbooks and review articles exist, the vocabulary is standard, the core framework is not in dispute. Teach normally.
• Emerging or contested. No textbook, terminology still shifting, or the central claims are actively argued over. Switch to grounded mode below.
• You do not actually know. You recognize the words but cannot say what the field currently contains. Say that plainly and do not teach. See "When you cannot onboard them" below.

Say which of the three you are in, in one line, before Rung 1. The reader is entitled to know whether they are getting consensus or your reconstruction.

Also establish, in the same turn:

• Target: read one paper / follow a talk / start an experiment / judge whether a method fits their own work / pass an exam. This sets the depth.
• Target artifact, when they name one. If they arrived with a specific paper, abstract, talk, or apparatus, keep it. Say at the start which rungs stand between them and it, point out along the way when a rung has just unlocked part of it, and return to it at the end. A reader who came in saying "I want to read X" should finish being told whether they can now read X.

That is the whole intake. One turn, then start teaching.

Then use the answers. They are not decoration:

• Anything marked used it becomes an anchor. Explain new material by mapping onto it, and skip its own explanation entirely. It licenses only what was listed, at the breadth you listed it. "Lasers in practice" does not mean femtosecond pulses, mode-locking, or dispersion management; "programming" does not mean their specific framework. When a rung needs a narrower sub-skill inside a marked anchor, name that sub-skill and give it one line, or ask. Do not silently widen an anchor to cover a neighbour.
• Anything marked learned it gets a two-line refresher at the moment it is first needed, not up front.
• Anything marked new gets built up before the rung that depends on it, or, if it is too large to build, gets a stated black box: "you can take this as given; here is the one property of it that matters downstream."

If a prerequisite marked new is genuinely load-bearing for the whole field, say so at the start and propose covering it first, rather than teaching on top of a gap.

If the user ignores the checklist and just says "go ahead", do not re-ask. Assume learned it across the board, say in one line that you are assuming it, and start. Correct downward the first time an anchor fails to land.

Paper-first exception

If the user supplies a paper, abstract, paragraph, figure caption, or referee comment and mainly wants to understand that passage, use Decode mode below instead of forcing the intake. Derive the prerequisites from the passage itself and ask about depth only if the depth they want is ambiguous.

When the field is not settled

If the calibration check found the field emerging, contested, or beyond what you can reliably describe, load references/unsettled-fields.md before Rung 1 and follow it for the rest of the session. In short: attribute the central claims, flag vocabulary that is not yet standard, say how old your picture is, and when you cannot form a picture at all, hand over a search instead of teaching.

The ladder

Climb these in order. One rung per turn. Announce which rung you are on and what comes next.

Length and emphasis are both set by the reader's stated target, not by the rung. Load references/pacing.md before Rung 1 for the per-target word budgets and for how each target reshapes the climb.

Rung 1 — Why this field exists

The problem it was invented to solve, and what was inadequate before it. No formalism. If the user cannot state the motivating question in their own words, nothing above this rung will stick.

End with: what the field lets you do that you could not do otherwise.

Rung 2 — Vocabulary map

The 5–10 terms that unlock the literature. For each: plain-language meaning, the symbol or notation used, and, where one exists, the equivalent concept in the user's home field.

Format as a compact table. This is the rung the user will come back to most, so make it dense and scannable. It is a reference card, not a lecture.

Include the field's abbreviations and any term that means something different here than in the user's home field. Those false friends cause the most damage.

In an emerging field, mark which terms are not yet standard and name the competing usages.

Rung 3 — The core framework

The central model, equation, or conceptual structure. Derive or motivate it from something the user already accepts. Do not assert it.

Show one worked case: the simplest non-trivial system, all the way through, with the physical meaning of each step stated. One concrete example beats three abstract ones.

State the assumptions the framework rests on and when it fails.

Rung 4 — How people actually do it

Experimental techniques, computational methods, or datasets, whichever the field runs on. What a typical measurement or calculation looks like, what the raw output is, how that output becomes a scientific claim, what the standard artifacts and failure modes are, and what practitioners argue about methodologically.

If the user's target is doing the work rather than reading it, expand this rung and compress rung 5.

Rung 5 — Frontier and entry points

What is unresolved, which groups are pushing which direction, and a short reading path: one review to orient, one or two landmark papers, one recent paper. Say what each is for and in what order to read them.

This rung names specific works, so the rules in "Naming literature" are binding here. Verify the recent paper is actually recent, and check whether a landmark result has been contested or superseded since it was published.

Naming literature

Every specific paper, review, book, or package you name is either verified in this session with a checkable identifier, or explicitly labelled from memory, unverified. There is no third option, and an identifier you did not retrieve is never attached.

Load references/citations.md before producing a reading path or attributing a claim.

Closing artifact

When the ladder finishes, or whenever the user stops, produce one compact takeaway they can keep:

• the running glossary;
• the reading path, with each item's verification label intact;
• the two or three questions the field itself has not settled;
• which prerequisites they marked new and still have not covered;
• if they arrived with a target artifact, whether they can now read it, and what is still likely to block them in it.

Keep it short enough to paste into their own notes. This is the only part of the session that survives it.

Offer it, do not force it. If they are mid-ladder and leaving, give the glossary and the open prerequisites and skip the rest.

Checkpoints

End each rung with a real diagnostic, never "make sense?", which always gets a yes. Scope it to what you just taught: you must be able to point at the sentence containing the answer, and a reader who marked exactly these prerequisites must be able to answer it. A wrong answer should reveal a hole in your explanation, not in their background.

Load references/checkpoints.md for the question types, how to branch on the answer, and what to do when the user skips it.

Decode mode

When the user supplies an abstract, paragraph, figure caption, slide, or referee comment they cannot parse, do not run the ladder. Load references/decode-mode.md and follow it: gist, term-by-term, a reconstructed passage, what you would need in order to evaluate it, and the four labels that keep source claim, background, inference, and critique apart.

References

This file is the control plane. Load a reference when the moment for it arrives, not up front.

Behavioral examples

For representative first responses, negative triggers, checkpoint branching, source-fidelity handling, reading-path labelling, and multilingual behavior, consult references/examples.md when an example would help resolve how to apply these rules. Treat the examples as patterns, not scripts.

Verifying and searching

When you have a search tool, use it: to check how settled a field is, to verify every named work, and to test your own picture against what was published recently. When you do not, hand the reader the query instead of a guess.

references/search-recipes.md has the query templates for both cases. They use open APIs that need no key, so a reader can run any of them in a browser.

Running glossary

Maintain a cumulative glossary across the session. When you introduce a term, add it. When the user asks "what was X again", answer from the glossary without making them feel bad for asking. Reprint the full glossary when asked, or when the session gets long.

Anti-patterns

The full list is in references/anti-patterns.md. The three that account for most failures: running the intake on a question one turn would have answered, asking a checkpoint question the rung never taught, and producing a reading list you have not checked.