One of the main problems I think about is how science and engineering are able to achieve such efficient progress despite the very high dimensionality of our world—and how we can more systematically leverage whatever techniques provide that efficiency. One broad class of techniques I think about a lot involves switching between search-for-designs and search-for-constraints—like proof and counterexample in math, or path and path-of-walls in a maze.
My own writing on the topic is usually pretty abstract; I’m thinking about it algorithmic terms, as a search process, and asking about big-O efficiency with respect to the dimensionality of the system. People then ask: “ok, but what does this look like in practice?”.
This post is what it looks like in practice. We have inventors/engineers who build things and try new designs. We have scientists who characterize the constraints on these designs, the rules which govern them. The magic is in shuttling back-and-forth between those two processes, and Crawford gives a concrete example of what that looks like, in one of history’s major innovative events.
One of the main problems I think about is how science and engineering are able to achieve such efficient progress despite the very high dimensionality of our world—and how we can more systematically leverage whatever techniques provide that efficiency. One broad class of techniques I think about a lot involves switching between search-for-designs and search-for-constraints—like proof and counterexample in math, or path and path-of-walls in a maze.
My own writing on the topic is usually pretty abstract; I’m thinking about it algorithmic terms, as a search process, and asking about big-O efficiency with respect to the dimensionality of the system. People then ask: “ok, but what does this look like in practice?”.
This post is what it looks like in practice. We have inventors/engineers who build things and try new designs. We have scientists who characterize the constraints on these designs, the rules which govern them. The magic is in shuttling back-and-forth between those two processes, and Crawford gives a concrete example of what that looks like, in one of history’s major innovative events.