Are you looking for an open problem which is sub-dividable into many smaller open problems? Or for one small open problem which is a part of a larger open problem?
The first one. As long as you can decompose the open problem into tractable, bite-sized pieces, it’s good.
Vanessa mentioned some strategies that might generalize to other open problems: group decomposition (we decide how to break a problem up), programming to empirically verify X, and literature reviews.
I’m unclear on how to apply this filter. Can you give an example of what you mean by decomposable, and an example of not? (Perhaps not from alignment.)
If you only had access to people who can google, program, and notice confusion, how could you utilize that to make conceptual progress on a topic you care about?
Decomposable: Make a simple first person shooter. Could be decomposed into creating asset models, and various parts of the actual code can be decomposed (input-mapping, getting/dealing damage).
Non-decomposable: Help me write an awesome piano song. Although this can be decomposed, I don’t expect anyone to have the skills required (and acquiring the skills requires too much overhead).
Let’s operationalize “too much overhead” to mean “takes more than 10 hours to do useful, meaningful tasks”.
Am I correct that the real generating rule here is something like “I have a group of people who’d like to work on some alignment open problems, and want a problem that is a) easy to give my group, and b) easy to subdivide once given to my group?”
Are you looking for an open problem which is sub-dividable into many smaller open problems? Or for one small open problem which is a part of a larger open problem?
The first one. As long as you can decompose the open problem into tractable, bite-sized pieces, it’s good.
Vanessa mentioned some strategies that might generalize to other open problems: group decomposition (we decide how to break a problem up), programming to empirically verify X, and literature reviews.
I’m unclear on how to apply this filter. Can you give an example of what you mean by decomposable, and an example of not? (Perhaps not from alignment.)
If you only had access to people who can google, program, and notice confusion, how could you utilize that to make conceptual progress on a topic you care about?
Decomposable: Make a simple first person shooter. Could be decomposed into creating asset models, and various parts of the actual code can be decomposed (input-mapping, getting/dealing damage).
Non-decomposable: Help me write an awesome piano song. Although this can be decomposed, I don’t expect anyone to have the skills required (and acquiring the skills requires too much overhead).
Let’s operationalize “too much overhead” to mean “takes more than 10 hours to do useful, meaningful tasks”.
Am I correct that the real generating rule here is something like “I have a group of people who’d like to work on some alignment open problems, and want a problem that is a) easy to give my group, and b) easy to subdivide once given to my group?”
b) seems right. I’m unsure what (a) could mean (not much overhead?).
I feel confused to think about decomposability w/o considering the capabilities of the people I’m handing the tasks off to. I would only add:
since that makes the capabilities explicit.