Even in experiments, I think most of the value is usually from observing lots of stuff, more than from carefully controlling things.
I think I mostly agree with you but have the “observing lots of stuff” categorized as “exploratory studies” which are badly controlled affairs where you just try to collect more observations to inform your actual eventual experiment. If you want to pin down a fact about reality, you’d still need to devise a well-controlled experiment that actually shows the effect you hypothesize to exist from your observations so far.
If you actually go look at how science is practiced, i.e. the things successful researchers actually pick up during PhD’s, there’s multiple load-bearing pieces besides just that.
Fair!
Note that a much simpler first-pass on all these is just “spend a lot more time reading others’ work, and writing up and distilling our own”.
I agree, but if people were both good at finding necessary info as an individual and we had better tools for coordinating (e.g.,finding each other and relevant material faster) then that would speed up research even further. And I’d argue that any gains in speed of research is as valuable as the same proportional delay in developing AGI.
I think I mostly agree with you but have the “observing lots of stuff” categorized as “exploratory studies” which are badly controlled affairs where you just try to collect more observations to inform your actual eventual experiment. If you want to pin down a fact about reality, you’d still need to devise a well-controlled experiment that actually shows the effect you hypothesize to exist from your observations so far.
Fair!
I agree, but if people were both good at finding necessary info as an individual and we had better tools for coordinating (e.g.,finding each other and relevant material faster) then that would speed up research even further. And I’d argue that any gains in speed of research is as valuable as the same proportional delay in developing AGI.