What you're saying essentially is that the only times digestion of input would benefit from the things Bret Victor talks about is when those inputs are others' output. It seems that this suggestion would have only come from someone who finds themselves dealing almost entirely with the output of others and trying to make sense of it, rather than any original research or thought. What's more, is that I feel like I'm in some sort of Escherian loop here, because to anyone for whom is the case, they'd never have been interested in trying to make the suggestion that these tools wouldn't necessarily help elsewhere (having no "elsewhere" to contrast it to.)
The types of tools Bret focuses on are as important if not moreso for solo endeavors of research/discovery/understanding as they are for trying to achieve person-to-person communication with the smallest possible time-to-understanding penalty.
