Nod. But, I think you are also wrong about the “you can hire hire experts” causal model, and “we tried this and it’s harder than you think” is entangled with why, and it didn’t seem that useful to argue the point more if you weren’t making more of an explicit effort to figure out where your model was wrong.
Normally, people can hire try to hire experts, but, it often doesn’t work very well. (I can’t find the relevant Paul Graham essay, but, if you don’t have the good taste to know what expertise looks like, you are going to end up hiring people who are good at persuading you they are experts, rather than actual experts).
It can work in vert well understood domains where it’s obvious what success looks like.
In domains where there is no consensus on what an expert would look like (and, since no one has solved the problem, expertise basically “doesn’t exist”).
(Note you didn’t actually argue that hiring experts works, just asserted it)
I agree it’d be nice to have a clearly written history of what has been tried. An awful lot of things have been tried though, and different people coming in would probably want different histories tailored for different goals, and it’s fairly hard to summarize. It could totally be done, but the people equipped to do a good job of it often have other important things to do and it’s not obviously the right call.
If you want to contribute to the overall situation I do think you should expect to need to have a pretty good understanding of the object level problem as well as what meta-level solutions have been tried. A lot of the reason meta-level solutions have failed is that people didn’t understand the object level problem well enough and scaled the wrong thing.
(try searching “postmortem” and maybe skim some of the things that come up, especially higher karma ones?)
Nod. But, I think you are also wrong about the “you can hire hire experts” causal model, and “we tried this and it’s harder than you think” is entangled with why, and it didn’t seem that useful to argue the point more if you weren’t making more of an explicit effort to figure out where your model was wrong.
Normally, people can hire try to hire experts, but, it often doesn’t work very well. (I can’t find the relevant Paul Graham essay, but, if you don’t have the good taste to know what expertise looks like, you are going to end up hiring people who are good at persuading you they are experts, rather than actual experts).
It can work in vert well understood domains where it’s obvious what success looks like.
In domains where there is no consensus on what an expert would look like (and, since no one has solved the problem, expertise basically “doesn’t exist”).
(Note you didn’t actually argue that hiring experts works, just asserted it)
I agree it’d be nice to have a clearly written history of what has been tried. An awful lot of things have been tried though, and different people coming in would probably want different histories tailored for different goals, and it’s fairly hard to summarize. It could totally be done, but the people equipped to do a good job of it often have other important things to do and it’s not obviously the right call.
If you want to contribute to the overall situation I do think you should expect to need to have a pretty good understanding of the object level problem as well as what meta-level solutions have been tried. A lot of the reason meta-level solutions have failed is that people didn’t understand the object level problem well enough and scaled the wrong thing.
(try searching “postmortem” and maybe skim some of the things that come up, especially higher karma ones?)