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 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.’