Yuppers. Yeah, the idea I’m trying to get at here could be conceptualized as “take the underlyinggenerator that outputs Research Debt, and then lean hard into using it as an explanatory theory, and see that other hypotheses turn up when you take that seriously.”
(I’d already read research debt too at the time Oli first explained this concept to me. I think Oli’s additional contribution was thinking in terms of chunks being a limiting factor. He didn’t specific working memory precisely as the constraint. I later thought about the intersection of working-memory-in-particular after writing You Have About Five Words and later thinking about some implications on this comment here)
Oli had left the number of chunks available deliberately vague, and I’m now concretely predicting that people can only build theories systems that don’t require them to hold more than 4-10* chunks at once.
*where “10” is an ass-pulled number for “how much your working memory can really be improved via writing things done.”
[I don’t know if Oli thinks working-memory-in-particular makes sense to think of as the bottleneck]
This seems highly related to Chris Olah’s Research Debt.
(That was indeed the piece that crystallized this intuition for me, and I think Ray got this broader concept from me)
Yuppers. Yeah, the idea I’m trying to get at here could be conceptualized as “take the underlying generator that outputs Research Debt, and then lean hard into using it as an explanatory theory, and see that other hypotheses turn up when you take that seriously.”
(I’d already read research debt too at the time Oli first explained this concept to me. I think Oli’s additional contribution was thinking in terms of chunks being a limiting factor. He didn’t specific working memory precisely as the constraint. I later thought about the intersection of working-memory-in-particular after writing You Have About Five Words and later thinking about some implications on this comment here)
Oli had left the number of chunks available deliberately vague, and I’m now concretely predicting that people can only build theories systems that don’t require them to hold more than 4-10* chunks at once.
*where “10” is an ass-pulled number for “how much your working memory can really be improved via writing things done.”
[I don’t know if Oli thinks working-memory-in-particular makes sense to think of as the bottleneck]