Cool that this is (hopefully) being done! I have had this on my reading list for a while and since this is about the kind of problems I also spend much time thinking about, I definitely have to understand it better at some point. I guess I can snooze it for a bit now. :P Some suggestions:
Maybe someone could write an FAQ page? Also, a somewhat generic idea is to write something that is more example based, perhaps even something that just solely gives examples. Part of why I suggest these two is that I think they can be written relatively mechanically and therefore wouldn’t take that much time and insight to write. Also, maybe Vanessa or Alex could also record a talk? (Typically one explains things differently in talks/on a whiteboard and some people claim that one generally does so better than in writing.)
I think for me the kind of writeup that would have been most helpful (and maybe still is) would be some relatively short (5-15 pages), clean, self-contained article that communicates the main insight(s), perhaps at the cost of losing generality and leaving some things informal. So somewhere in between the original intro post / the content in the AXRP episode / Rohin’s summary (all of which explain the main idea but are very informal) and the actual sequence (which seems to require wading through a lot of intrinsically not that interesting things before getting to the juicy bits). I don’t know to what extent this is feasible, given that I haven’t read any of the technical parts yet. (Of course, a lot of projects have this presentation problem, but I think usually there’s some way to address this. E.g., compare the logical induction paper, which probably has a number of important technical aspects that I still don’t understand or forgot at this point. But where by making a lot of things a bit informal, the main idea can be grasped from the short version, or from a talk.)
Cool that this is (hopefully) being done! I have had this on my reading list for a while and since this is about the kind of problems I also spend much time thinking about, I definitely have to understand it better at some point. I guess I can snooze it for a bit now. :P Some suggestions:
Maybe someone could write an FAQ page? Also, a somewhat generic idea is to write something that is more example based, perhaps even something that just solely gives examples. Part of why I suggest these two is that I think they can be written relatively mechanically and therefore wouldn’t take that much time and insight to write. Also, maybe Vanessa or Alex could also record a talk? (Typically one explains things differently in talks/on a whiteboard and some people claim that one generally does so better than in writing.)
I think for me the kind of writeup that would have been most helpful (and maybe still is) would be some relatively short (5-15 pages), clean, self-contained article that communicates the main insight(s), perhaps at the cost of losing generality and leaving some things informal. So somewhere in between the original intro post / the content in the AXRP episode / Rohin’s summary (all of which explain the main idea but are very informal) and the actual sequence (which seems to require wading through a lot of intrinsically not that interesting things before getting to the juicy bits). I don’t know to what extent this is feasible, given that I haven’t read any of the technical parts yet. (Of course, a lot of projects have this presentation problem, but I think usually there’s some way to address this. E.g., compare the logical induction paper, which probably has a number of important technical aspects that I still don’t understand or forgot at this point. But where by making a lot of things a bit informal, the main idea can be grasped from the short version, or from a talk.)