This experiment reminded me of Scott’s story about Alchemy, where each generation of Alchemists had to spend the first N years of their life learning, and could only make progress after they were caught up.
In the story, the art of Alchemy is advanced by running previous knowledge through layers of redactors, who make it faster for the alchemists to catch up to the current knowledge.
In the experiment, there seems to be some level of redaction that was attempted:
where some of the subsequent rounds were spent cleaning up these notes and formulating clear next steps.
In the experiment it seemed there were some problems that couldn’t be solved in the “participants lifespan” of 10 minutes. I’m curious as to whether problems can go from “not solvable” to “solvable” if every Nth participant was explicitly instructed to focus only on organizing information and making it easier for the next participants to get up to speed quickly.
I’m imagining explicit instruction to be important because if the default mode is to code, the participant would be reading the document to try to get to place where they can make progress, get frustrated, then decide to reorganize part of the document, which would lose them time. Explicit instruction to reorganize information seems potentially many times more efficient, especially if that participant is a skilled technical writer.
Yes, participating in it, it kinda felt like that!
I remember in at least 1 document, people actually came up with the meta-strategy that you mention at the end and wrote it out in the doc!
Personally, I felt that beyond just organizing the information, it was helpful if the steps to solving the problem were broken down into self-contained problems, each of which doesn’t need understanding of the full problem. This wasn’t always possible (e.g. understanding where a bug is often requires understanding both the problem and implementation), but when it happened I think it really helped with progress.
This experiment reminded me of Scott’s story about Alchemy, where each generation of Alchemists had to spend the first N years of their life learning, and could only make progress after they were caught up.
In the story, the art of Alchemy is advanced by running previous knowledge through layers of redactors, who make it faster for the alchemists to catch up to the current knowledge.
In the experiment, there seems to be some level of redaction that was attempted:
In the experiment it seemed there were some problems that couldn’t be solved in the “participants lifespan” of 10 minutes. I’m curious as to whether problems can go from “not solvable” to “solvable” if every Nth participant was explicitly instructed to focus only on organizing information and making it easier for the next participants to get up to speed quickly.
I’m imagining explicit instruction to be important because if the default mode is to code, the participant would be reading the document to try to get to place where they can make progress, get frustrated, then decide to reorganize part of the document, which would lose them time. Explicit instruction to reorganize information seems potentially many times more efficient, especially if that participant is a skilled technical writer.
It also reminds me a bit of Sam Hughes’s Antimemetics Division stories (particularly, “Introductory Antimemetics”), which are a good read. Acausal coordination problems with yourself and others, etc.
Yes, participating in it, it kinda felt like that!
I remember in at least 1 document, people actually came up with the meta-strategy that you mention at the end and wrote it out in the doc!
Personally, I felt that beyond just organizing the information, it was helpful if the steps to solving the problem were broken down into self-contained problems, each of which doesn’t need understanding of the full problem. This wasn’t always possible (e.g. understanding where a bug is often requires understanding both the problem and implementation), but when it happened I think it really helped with progress.