Ray thinks this is like, 40-60% of the skill of making better plans (generating them in the first place)
Here’s a slightly more nuanced take:
I think, when I get/invent the “metacognition textbook from the future”, there will turn out to be ~5 meta strategies that are simple english prompts that work for most people, that accomplish like 50-85% of the value of “learn the whole-ass skill of metastrategic brainstorming”, for most people, who are solving problems that are only moderately hard.
I predict[1] if you are solving Really Quite Difficult problems (such as navigating a singularity that might be coming in 3-10 years. Or, probably founding most companies and doing most openended research), I think the full skill of “successfully generate a new metastrategy you haven’t thought of before, on the fly, in less-than-a-minute” will be pretty important, and probably 40-60% of the value. Although a large reason for that is that what you’ll actually need is [some other particular specific thing], and metastrategic brainstorming is the swiss-army-knife tool that is likely to help you find that thing.
Some clarification of fine points:
Here’s a slightly more nuanced take:
I think, when I get/invent the “metacognition textbook from the future”, there will turn out to be ~5 meta strategies that are simple english prompts that work for most people, that accomplish like 50-85% of the value of “learn the whole-ass skill of metastrategic brainstorming”, for most people, who are solving problems that are only moderately hard.
I predict[1] if you are solving Really Quite Difficult problems (such as navigating a singularity that might be coming in 3-10 years. Or, probably founding most companies and doing most openended research), I think the full skill of “successfully generate a new metastrategy you haven’t thought of before, on the fly, in less-than-a-minute” will be pretty important, and probably 40-60% of the value. Although a large reason for that is that what you’ll actually need is [some other particular specific thing], and metastrategic brainstorming is the swiss-army-knife tool that is likely to help you find that thing.
This is me making some kind of bet, I don’t have empirics to back this up. If you disagree I’d be happy to operationalize a more specific bet.