Came here to comment that. It seems much more efficient to learn the cognitive strategies smart people use than to try to figure them out from scratch. Ideally, you would have people of different skill levels solve problems (and maybe even do research) while thinking out loud and describing or drawing the images they are manipulating. I know this has been done at least for chess, and it would be nice to have it for domains with more structure. Then you could catalog these strategies and measure the effectiveness of teaching the system 2 process (the whole process they use, not only the winning path) and explicitly train in isolation the individual system 1 steps that make it up.
Yeah, although notably: the goal here is to become confidently good at solving domains where there are no established experts (with the motivating case being AI alignment, though I think lots of high-impact-but-vague fields are relevant). I think this does require developing the ability to invent new ways of thinking, and check for yourself which ways of thinking apply to a situation.
I think the optimal curriculum will include some amount of learning-for-yourself and some amount of learning from others.
Came here to comment that. It seems much more efficient to learn the cognitive strategies smart people use than to try to figure them out from scratch. Ideally, you would have people of different skill levels solve problems (and maybe even do research) while thinking out loud and describing or drawing the images they are manipulating. I know this has been done at least for chess, and it would be nice to have it for domains with more structure. Then you could catalog these strategies and measure the effectiveness of teaching the system 2 process (the whole process they use, not only the winning path) and explicitly train in isolation the individual system 1 steps that make it up.
Yeah, although notably: the goal here is to become confidently good at solving domains where there are no established experts (with the motivating case being AI alignment, though I think lots of high-impact-but-vague fields are relevant). I think this does require developing the ability to invent new ways of thinking, and check for yourself which ways of thinking apply to a situation.
I think the optimal curriculum will include some amount of learning-for-yourself and some amount of learning from others.