I see a few comments focusing on the metric as a valuation of understanding, I suppose a few people may have missed this:
It is useful to think of someone as a level above you if they can generate novel ideas that you can only understand, but could not have produced from scratch.
Bearing this portion of the claim in mind, here are my initial thoughts:
It seems a bit (only a very, very little bit) better to me than simply understanding an idea, but this whole ‘levels’ business seems far too vague to be useful, especially if we don’t have any sort of objective metric for determining exactly how difficult a novel idea is to generate.
Intuitively it seems like the task of creating such a metric would require an understanding of all (or at least most) of the (cognitive and extra-cognitive) factors that play into idea generation, which makes it a very non-trivial task.
On top of the issue of having an objective metric for idea evaluation, we have to determine a valid metric for idea generation potential, because as it stands it appears to me that all we have to go on is the feeling that something is too hard to do, which does not seem even remotely reliable.
Further still, if we want to distinguish between “mutable” and “immutable” levels, it seems that we would have to determine what factors that go into idea generation can be effectively hacked in a reasonable period of time, which is yet another highly non-trivial problem. Bearing in mind these issues, it seems that the “levels” would almost certainly need to be significantly more gradated than this Level += 1, Mutable/Immutable structure.
In addition, even taking into account the reductionist concerns pointed out by komonisto, it seems very likely that bottom-level cognitive features would play into idea generation in various ways such that even if individual tasks were not level-separable (in the sense that gjm is talking about), some sets of tasks likely would be (or at least very nearly be, even if the division isn’t always totally clean).
I see a few comments focusing on the metric as a valuation of understanding, I suppose a few people may have missed this:
Bearing this portion of the claim in mind, here are my initial thoughts:
It seems a bit (only a very, very little bit) better to me than simply understanding an idea, but this whole ‘levels’ business seems far too vague to be useful, especially if we don’t have any sort of objective metric for determining exactly how difficult a novel idea is to generate.
Intuitively it seems like the task of creating such a metric would require an understanding of all (or at least most) of the (cognitive and extra-cognitive) factors that play into idea generation, which makes it a very non-trivial task.
On top of the issue of having an objective metric for idea evaluation, we have to determine a valid metric for idea generation potential, because as it stands it appears to me that all we have to go on is the feeling that something is too hard to do, which does not seem even remotely reliable.
Further still, if we want to distinguish between “mutable” and “immutable” levels, it seems that we would have to determine what factors that go into idea generation can be effectively hacked in a reasonable period of time, which is yet another highly non-trivial problem. Bearing in mind these issues, it seems that the “levels” would almost certainly need to be significantly more gradated than this Level += 1, Mutable/Immutable structure.
In addition, even taking into account the reductionist concerns pointed out by komonisto, it seems very likely that bottom-level cognitive features would play into idea generation in various ways such that even if individual tasks were not level-separable (in the sense that gjm is talking about), some sets of tasks likely would be (or at least very nearly be, even if the division isn’t always totally clean).