A very reasonable suggestion, and I’m not just saying that because I have a PhD. I’m saying it because it’s so easy to reinvent the wheel and think you’re doing original research when you’re really just re-discovering other people’s work in a different context. It’s very hard to root out these sorts of errors; when I was doing a PhD I thought the work I was doing in developmental biology was new and unique until about a year later I found that the ‘new’ mathematical problems I had solved had actually been widely used in polymer science for years. I just wasn’t able to find the research because none of the search terms matched.
A link to the wider academic community would do a lot to help in MIRIs goals, and a very good way to do this would be undertaking PhDs. It should be a snap for the MIRI folks...
Eliminate context, reduce problems to their abstract fundamentals, collaborate with other people who might have a chance of having been exposed to similar problems in other domains.
A very reasonable suggestion, and I’m not just saying that because I have a PhD. I’m saying it because it’s so easy to reinvent the wheel and think you’re doing original research when you’re really just re-discovering other people’s work in a different context. It’s very hard to root out these sorts of errors; when I was doing a PhD I thought the work I was doing in developmental biology was new and unique until about a year later I found that the ‘new’ mathematical problems I had solved had actually been widely used in polymer science for years. I just wasn’t able to find the research because none of the search terms matched.
A link to the wider academic community would do a lot to help in MIRIs goals, and a very good way to do this would be undertaking PhDs. It should be a snap for the MIRI folks...
Do you have any ideas about how it could be made easier to find out whether you’re just rediscovering previous work?
Eliminate context, reduce problems to their abstract fundamentals, collaborate with other people who might have a chance of having been exposed to similar problems in other domains.