I agree. My comment here on Rohin and John’s thread is a poor attempt at saying something similar, but also observing that having the machinery to do the ‘find the good heuristics’ thing is itself a (somewhat necessary?) property of ‘recursive-ish search’ (at least of the flavour applicable to high-dimensional ‘difficult’ problem-spaces). In humans and animals I think this thing is something like ‘motivated exploration’ aka ‘science’ aka ‘experimentation’, plus magic abstraction-formation and -recomposition.
I think it’s worth trying to understand better how these pieces fit together, and to what extent these burdens can (or will) be overcome by compute and training scale.
I agree. My comment here on Rohin and John’s thread is a poor attempt at saying something similar, but also observing that having the machinery to do the ‘find the good heuristics’ thing is itself a (somewhat necessary?) property of ‘recursive-ish search’ (at least of the flavour applicable to high-dimensional ‘difficult’ problem-spaces). In humans and animals I think this thing is something like ‘motivated exploration’ aka ‘science’ aka ‘experimentation’, plus magic abstraction-formation and -recomposition.
I think it’s worth trying to understand better how these pieces fit together, and to what extent these burdens can (or will) be overcome by compute and training scale.