This is a fantastic post, immediately leaping into the top 25 of my favorite LessWrong posts all-time, at least.
I have a concrete suggestion for this issue:
They end up spending quite a lot of effort and attention on loudly reiterating why it was impossible, and ~0 effort on figuring how they could have solved it anyway.
I propose switching gears at this point to make “Why is the problem impossible?” the actual focus of their efforts for the remainder of the time period. I predict this will consistently yield partial progress among at least a chunk of the participants.
I suggest thinking about the question of why it is impossible deliberately because I experienced great progress on an idea I had through exactly that mechanism, in a similar condition of not having the relevant physics knowledge. The short version of the story is that I had the idea, almost immediately hit upon a problem that seemed impossible, and then concluded it would never work. Walking down the stairs after right after having concluded it was impossible, I thought to myself “But why is it impossible?” and spent a lot of time following up on that thread. The whole investigation was iterations of that theme—an impossible blocker would appear, I would insist on understanding the impossibility, and every time it would eventually yield (in the sense of a new path forward at least; rarely was it just directly possible instead). As it stands I now have definite concrete angles of attack to make it work, which is the current phase.
My core intuition for why this worked:
Impossibility requires grappling with fundamentals; there is no alternative.
It naturally distinguishes between the problem the approach to the problem.
I gesture in the direction of things like the speed of light, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the halting problem to make the claim that fundamental limits are good practice to think about.
Yeah, a lot of my work recently has gone into figuring out how to teach this specific skill. I have another blogpost about it in the works. “Recursively asking ‘Why exactly is this impossible?’”
This is a fantastic post, immediately leaping into the top 25 of my favorite LessWrong posts all-time, at least.
I have a concrete suggestion for this issue:
I propose switching gears at this point to make “Why is the problem impossible?” the actual focus of their efforts for the remainder of the time period. I predict this will consistently yield partial progress among at least a chunk of the participants.
I suggest thinking about the question of why it is impossible deliberately because I experienced great progress on an idea I had through exactly that mechanism, in a similar condition of not having the relevant physics knowledge. The short version of the story is that I had the idea, almost immediately hit upon a problem that seemed impossible, and then concluded it would never work. Walking down the stairs after right after having concluded it was impossible, I thought to myself “But why is it impossible?” and spent a lot of time following up on that thread. The whole investigation was iterations of that theme—an impossible blocker would appear, I would insist on understanding the impossibility, and every time it would eventually yield (in the sense of a new path forward at least; rarely was it just directly possible instead). As it stands I now have definite concrete angles of attack to make it work, which is the current phase.
My core intuition for why this worked:
Impossibility requires grappling with fundamentals; there is no alternative.
It naturally distinguishes between the problem the approach to the problem.
I gesture in the direction of things like the speed of light, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the halting problem to make the claim that fundamental limits are good practice to think about.
Yeah, a lot of my work recently has gone into figuring out how to teach this specific skill. I have another blogpost about it in the works. “Recursively asking ‘Why exactly is this impossible?’”