If I was asked any question of the form ‘what’s the least impressive X that you are very confident cannot be done in the next Y years?’, I would hesitate for a long time because it would take me a long time to parse the sentence and work out what a reply would even consist of.
I think that I am unusually dumb at parsing abstract sentences like this, so that may not apply to any people on the panel, but I’m not certain of that. (I have a physics PhD, so being dumb at parsing abstract sentences hasn’t excluded me from quantitative fields.)
I notice that I’m currently unable to intuitively hold the sense of this sentence in my head in one go, but I am able to generate answers anyway, by the method of coming up with a bunch of Xs that I think couldn’t be done in two years, and then looking for the least impressive such one. It feels kind of unsatisfying doing that when I can’t hold the sense of the whole problem in my head, and that slows me down.
If I was put on the spot in front of lots of people, though, I might just panic about being asked to parse an abstract sentence rather than doing any useful cognitive work, and not come up with much at all.
If I was asked any question of the form ‘what’s the least impressive X that you are very confident cannot be done in the next Y years?’, I would hesitate for a long time because it would take me a long time to parse the sentence and work out what a reply would even consist of.
I think that I am unusually dumb at parsing abstract sentences like this, so that may not apply to any people on the panel, but I’m not certain of that. (I have a physics PhD, so being dumb at parsing abstract sentences hasn’t excluded me from quantitative fields.)
I notice that I’m currently unable to intuitively hold the sense of this sentence in my head in one go, but I am able to generate answers anyway, by the method of coming up with a bunch of Xs that I think couldn’t be done in two years, and then looking for the least impressive such one. It feels kind of unsatisfying doing that when I can’t hold the sense of the whole problem in my head, and that slows me down.
If I was put on the spot in front of lots of people, though, I might just panic about being asked to parse an abstract sentence rather than doing any useful cognitive work, and not come up with much at all.