Curated. I found this a clearer explanation of “how to think about bottlenecks, and things that are not-especially-bottlenecks-but-might-be-helpful” than I previously had.
Previously, I had thought about major bottlenecks, and I had some vague sense of “well, there definitely seems like there should be more ways to be helpful than just tackling central bottlenecks, but a lot of ways to do that misguidedly.” But I didn’t have any particular models for thinking about it, and I don’t think I could have explained it very well.
I think there are better ways of doing forward-chaining and backward-chaining than listed here (but which roughly correspond to “the one who thought about it a bit,” but with a bit more technique for getting traction).
I do think the question of “to what degree is your field shaped like ‘there’s a central bottleneck that is to a first approximation the only thing that matters here’?” is an important question that hasn’t really been argued for here. (I can’t recall offhand if John has previously written a post exactly doing that in those terms, although the Gears Which Turn the World sequence is at least looking at the same problemspace)
Curated. I found this a clearer explanation of “how to think about bottlenecks, and things that are not-especially-bottlenecks-but-might-be-helpful” than I previously had.
Previously, I had thought about major bottlenecks, and I had some vague sense of “well, there definitely seems like there should be more ways to be helpful than just tackling central bottlenecks, but a lot of ways to do that misguidedly.” But I didn’t have any particular models for thinking about it, and I don’t think I could have explained it very well.
I think there are better ways of doing forward-chaining and backward-chaining than listed here (but which roughly correspond to “the one who thought about it a bit,” but with a bit more technique for getting traction).
I do think the question of “to what degree is your field shaped like ‘there’s a central bottleneck that is to a first approximation the only thing that matters here’?” is an important question that hasn’t really been argued for here. (I can’t recall offhand if John has previously written a post exactly doing that in those terms, although the Gears Which Turn the World sequence is at least looking at the same problemspace)