I’ve been thinking about this recently, noticeing that my more experienced coworkers have a good deal of expereince that tends to trump my intelligence and rationality in some cases.
I think you could relate this to the observation in machine learning that a mediocre algorthm trained on 10 times as much data is often superior to a more sophisticated one with less data.
As for appliability to FAI, it might generalize and account for the implications of this in the usual consequentialist fashion.
One general benefit of experience is that it leads to the accumulation of tacit knowledge. I would guess that most tacit knowledge is domain-specific, though (my main experience with tacit knowledge is in mathematics). Do you have evidence that your more experienced coworkers are better at things outside of the workplace?
No serious evidence of outside-workplace competence.
Usual politics is mindkiller stuff (november), lack of strategic life planning, lack of big thinking, but can’t seriously expect that stuff from non-LWers.
It is plausible that their wisdom is mostly in-field. Though the field of “working in an engineering startup” is pretty broad.
On technical matters, like fluid mechanics, I usually understand the theory better and can work through new problems faster, but the older engineer I work closely with has a bigger bag of heuristics and standard designs (like when to use resistor-network approximations, what the general qualitative shape of this function is, how to solve this problem, etc).
One guy has a big bag of approximately the same advice we derive on LW, but it appears to be derived from practical experience (ideas are not attched to people, do lots of experiments, etc).
It’s hard to lay out specific examples that illustrate because each small occurance is more or less unconnected (because they don’t have underlying theory), and each occurance is relatively unenlightening.
Anyways, I’ve updated in the direction of “experience/wisdom beats intelligence/rationality, at least at first”.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, noticeing that my more experienced coworkers have a good deal of expereince that tends to trump my intelligence and rationality in some cases.
I think you could relate this to the observation in machine learning that a mediocre algorthm trained on 10 times as much data is often superior to a more sophisticated one with less data.
As for appliability to FAI, it might generalize and account for the implications of this in the usual consequentialist fashion.
One general benefit of experience is that it leads to the accumulation of tacit knowledge. I would guess that most tacit knowledge is domain-specific, though (my main experience with tacit knowledge is in mathematics). Do you have evidence that your more experienced coworkers are better at things outside of the workplace?
No serious evidence of outside-workplace competence.
Usual politics is mindkiller stuff (november), lack of strategic life planning, lack of big thinking, but can’t seriously expect that stuff from non-LWers.
It is plausible that their wisdom is mostly in-field. Though the field of “working in an engineering startup” is pretty broad.
Can you give an example of your co-workers doing this?
On technical matters, like fluid mechanics, I usually understand the theory better and can work through new problems faster, but the older engineer I work closely with has a bigger bag of heuristics and standard designs (like when to use resistor-network approximations, what the general qualitative shape of this function is, how to solve this problem, etc).
One guy has a big bag of approximately the same advice we derive on LW, but it appears to be derived from practical experience (ideas are not attched to people, do lots of experiments, etc).
It’s hard to lay out specific examples that illustrate because each small occurance is more or less unconnected (because they don’t have underlying theory), and each occurance is relatively unenlightening.
Anyways, I’ve updated in the direction of “experience/wisdom beats intelligence/rationality, at least at first”.