So, I have an internal sense that I have overcome “idea scarcity”, as a result of systematized creativity practice (mostly related to TRIZ), and I have a suspicion that this is both learnable and useful (as a complement to the domain-specific approach of “read a lot about the SOTA of alignment”), but I don’t know how useful; do you have a sense that this particular problem is a bottleneck in alignment?
I can imagine a few ways this might be the case:
Junior researchers come up with one great idea and then burn out (where they might have been able to come up with 2 or 3 otherwise); most researchers are junior in such a new field, so fixing this would nearly double or triple the number of great ideas, increasing the chance that one of them succeeds (plus positive second-order effects).
Researchers waste effort working on an idea after it’s no longer promising because they worry they won’t come up with a new one (where without the fear, they would have shifted back to “explore” sooner); back-of-the-envelope, I imagine this would save about 10% of researcher time (again, with positive second-order effects).
As a field, we’re doing too little work to find fatal flaws in ideas, in part because there is a shortage and it would be too demotivating, which leads to a similar dynamic as above, where execution effort is spent on ideas that should have been shelved.
So, I have an internal sense that I have overcome “idea scarcity”, as a result of systematized creativity practice (mostly related to TRIZ), and I have a suspicion that this is both learnable and useful (as a complement to the domain-specific approach of “read a lot about the SOTA of alignment”), but I don’t know how useful; do you have a sense that this particular problem is a bottleneck in alignment?
I can imagine a few ways this might be the case:
Junior researchers come up with one great idea and then burn out (where they might have been able to come up with 2 or 3 otherwise); most researchers are junior in such a new field, so fixing this would nearly double or triple the number of great ideas, increasing the chance that one of them succeeds (plus positive second-order effects).
Researchers waste effort working on an idea after it’s no longer promising because they worry they won’t come up with a new one (where without the fear, they would have shifted back to “explore” sooner); back-of-the-envelope, I imagine this would save about 10% of researcher time (again, with positive second-order effects).
As a field, we’re doing too little work to find fatal flaws in ideas, in part because there is a shortage and it would be too demotivating, which leads to a similar dynamic as above, where execution effort is spent on ideas that should have been shelved.