My immediate reaction is: why do you think the real and not the toy problems you are trying to solve are factorizable?
To take an example from your link, “What does a field theory look like in which supersymmetry is spontaneously broken?” does not appear to be an easily factorizable question. One needs to have 6+ years of intensive math and theoretical physics education to even understand properly what the question means and why it is worth answering. (Hint: it may not be worth answering, given that there are no experimentally detected super partners and there is no indication that any might exist below Planck scale.)
Provided you have reached the required level of understanding the problem, why do you think that the task of partitioning the question is any easier than actually solving the question? Currently the approach in academia is hiring a small number of relatively well supervised graduate students, maybe an occasional upper undergrad, to assist in solving a subproblem. I have seen just one case with a large number of grad students, and that was when the problem had already been well partitioned and what was needed was warm bodies to explore the parameter spaces and add small tweaks to a known solution.
I do not know how much research has been done on factorizability, but that seems like a natural place to start, so that you avoid going down the paths where your chosen approach is unlikely to succeed.
My immediate reaction is: why do you think the real and not the toy problems you are trying to solve are factorizable?
My immediate reaction is: why do you ask this question here? Wouldn’t it be better placed under an authoritative article like this rather than my clumsy little exploration?
why do you think that the task of partitioning the question is any easier than actually solving the question? Currently the approach in academia is hiring a small number of relatively well supervised graduate students, maybe an occasional upper undergrad, to assist in solving a subproblem.
To me this looks like you’re answering your own question. What am I not understanding? If I saw the above Physics questions and knew something about the topic, I would probably come up with a list of questions or approaches. Someone else could then work on each of those. The biggest issue that I see is that so much information is lost and friction introduced when unraveling a big question into short sub-questions. It might not be possible to recover from that.
I do not know how much research has been done on factorizability
This is part of what Ought is doing, as far as I understand. From the Progress Update Winter 2018:
‘Feasibility of factored cognition: I’m hesitant to draw object-level conclusions from the experiments so far, but if I had to say something, I’d say that factored cognition seems neither surprisingly easy nor surprisingly hard. I feel confident that our participants could learn to reliably solve the SAT reading comprehension questions with a bit more iteration and more total time per question, but it has taken iteration on this specific problem to get there, and it’s likely that these experiments haven’t gotten at the hard core of factored cognition yet.’
My immediate reaction is: why do you think the real and not the toy problems you are trying to solve are factorizable?
To take an example from your link, “What does a field theory look like in which supersymmetry is spontaneously broken?” does not appear to be an easily factorizable question. One needs to have 6+ years of intensive math and theoretical physics education to even understand properly what the question means and why it is worth answering. (Hint: it may not be worth answering, given that there are no experimentally detected super partners and there is no indication that any might exist below Planck scale.)
Provided you have reached the required level of understanding the problem, why do you think that the task of partitioning the question is any easier than actually solving the question? Currently the approach in academia is hiring a small number of relatively well supervised graduate students, maybe an occasional upper undergrad, to assist in solving a subproblem. I have seen just one case with a large number of grad students, and that was when the problem had already been well partitioned and what was needed was warm bodies to explore the parameter spaces and add small tweaks to a known solution.
I do not know how much research has been done on factorizability, but that seems like a natural place to start, so that you avoid going down the paths where your chosen approach is unlikely to succeed.
My immediate reaction is: why do you ask this question here? Wouldn’t it be better placed under an authoritative article like this rather than my clumsy little exploration?
To me this looks like you’re answering your own question. What am I not understanding? If I saw the above Physics questions and knew something about the topic, I would probably come up with a list of questions or approaches. Someone else could then work on each of those. The biggest issue that I see is that so much information is lost and friction introduced when unraveling a big question into short sub-questions. It might not be possible to recover from that.
This is part of what Ought is doing, as far as I understand. From the Progress Update Winter 2018: ‘Feasibility of factored cognition: I’m hesitant to draw object-level conclusions from the experiments so far, but if I had to say something, I’d say that factored cognition seems neither surprisingly easy nor surprisingly hard. I feel confident that our participants could learn to reliably solve the SAT reading comprehension questions with a bit more iteration and more total time per question, but it has taken iteration on this specific problem to get there, and it’s likely that these experiments haven’t gotten at the hard core of factored cognition yet.’