At the overcoming bias meetup a couple days ago, Robin Hanson mentioned that the singularity institute should devote half its people to working on AI problems and the other half to improving the tools used by the first half. Any way we could turn this into a heuristic?
Some questions: Should the tool-improving group also split itself in half so that half of them can help with the tools used by the tool-improvers? Has there been any academic research on what the right ratio of workers to tool-improvers is? How do things change when the group consists of one person dividing their time between working on hard problems and analyzing how they can work smarter? Does it make sense for such person to find a like-minded individual so they can take turns analyzing each other’s work habits?
I’ve always thought of this in terms of “improving the first derivative”, or working not only on current knowledge but on the rate at which we are acquiring knowledge. Improved tools are a great way to increase the rate of change. Some other techniques are improving understanding of foundational topics (dependencies), inventing better representations of the problem domain (e.g., notation in mathematics and computer science), improving one’s health (so as to operate at peak efficiency) through things like good diet and exercise (there are many cognitive benefits of exercise), and to the extent that fluid intelligence may be malleable, working to improve intelligence itself (e.g., dual n-back as in the 2008 Jaeggi et al. study).
Exploiting the resources, tools, techniques etc. that you presently have, and coming up with better ones for the future, are both important and neither should be neglected. “50/50 split” obviously shouldn’t be taken too literally, the point is that it shouldn’t be 1⁄99 or 99⁄1.
At the overcoming bias meetup a couple days ago, Robin Hanson mentioned that the singularity institute should devote half its people to working on AI problems and the other half to improving the tools used by the first half. Any way we could turn this into a heuristic?
Some questions: Should the tool-improving group also split itself in half so that half of them can help with the tools used by the tool-improvers? Has there been any academic research on what the right ratio of workers to tool-improvers is? How do things change when the group consists of one person dividing their time between working on hard problems and analyzing how they can work smarter? Does it make sense for such person to find a like-minded individual so they can take turns analyzing each other’s work habits?
I’ve always thought of this in terms of “improving the first derivative”, or working not only on current knowledge but on the rate at which we are acquiring knowledge. Improved tools are a great way to increase the rate of change. Some other techniques are improving understanding of foundational topics (dependencies), inventing better representations of the problem domain (e.g., notation in mathematics and computer science), improving one’s health (so as to operate at peak efficiency) through things like good diet and exercise (there are many cognitive benefits of exercise), and to the extent that fluid intelligence may be malleable, working to improve intelligence itself (e.g., dual n-back as in the 2008 Jaeggi et al. study).
How about this for a heuristic:
Exploiting the resources, tools, techniques etc. that you presently have, and coming up with better ones for the future, are both important and neither should be neglected. “50/50 split” obviously shouldn’t be taken too literally, the point is that it shouldn’t be 1⁄99 or 99⁄1.