That looks like a useful way of decreasing this failure mode, which I suspect we LWers are especially susceptible to.
Does anyone know any useful measures (or better yet heuristics) for how many gears are inside various black boxes? Kolmogorov complexity (from Solomonoff induction) is useless here, but I have this vague idea that chaos theory systems > weather forecasting > average physics simulation > simple math problems I can solve exactly by hand
However, that’s not really useful if I want to know how long it would take to do something novel. For example, I’m currently curious how long it would take to design a system for doing useful computation using more abstract functions instead of simple Boolean logic. Is this a weekend of tinkering for someone who knows what they are doing? Or a thousand people working for a thousand years?
I could look at how long it took to design some of the first binary or ternary computers, and then nudge it up by an order of magnitude or two. However, I could also look at how long it takes to write a simple lambda-calculus compiler, and nudge up from that. So, that doesn’t narrow it down much.
How should I even go about making a Fermi approximation here? And, by extension, what generalized principles can we apply to estimate the size of such black boxes, without knowing about any specific gears inside?
That looks like a useful way of decreasing this failure mode, which I suspect we LWers are especially susceptible to.
Does anyone know any useful measures (or better yet heuristics) for how many gears are inside various black boxes? Kolmogorov complexity (from Solomonoff induction) is useless here, but I have this vague idea that
chaos theory systems > weather forecasting > average physics simulation > simple math problems I can solve exactly by handHowever, that’s not really useful if I want to know how long it would take to do something novel. For example, I’m currently curious how long it would take to design a system for doing useful computation using more abstract functions instead of simple Boolean logic. Is this a weekend of tinkering for someone who knows what they are doing? Or a thousand people working for a thousand years?
I could look at how long it took to design some of the first binary or ternary computers, and then nudge it up by an order of magnitude or two. However, I could also look at how long it takes to write a simple lambda-calculus compiler, and nudge up from that. So, that doesn’t narrow it down much.
How should I even go about making a Fermi approximation here? And, by extension, what generalized principles can we apply to estimate the size of such black boxes, without knowing about any specific gears inside?