One of the main things that stops me from writing about things—FAI included—is that if something feels very important, anxiety kicks in and inhibits the thought-to-keyboard process. If that problem is at all common, then a thin veil of frivolity will do wonders for research productivity.
That seems fair, but I’d say that unless you’re already intelligent enough to do important, original work in the field of FAI (or any other field of mathematics, really), a productivity boost won’t help much. To use an analogy: a car whose engine is broken won’t run no matter how much gasoline you put in its tank.
(Not to imply that the people who frequent /r/hpmor are unintelligent, just that the bar for doing successful FAI research is really, really high, and unless you can clear that bar, increasing the number of people working on the problem isn’t likely to help—in my view, anyway. I could be wrong.)
One of the main things that stops me from writing about things—FAI included—is that if something feels very important, anxiety kicks in and inhibits the thought-to-keyboard process. If that problem is at all common, then a thin veil of frivolity will do wonders for research productivity.
That seems fair, but I’d say that unless you’re already intelligent enough to do important, original work in the field of FAI (or any other field of mathematics, really), a productivity boost won’t help much. To use an analogy: a car whose engine is broken won’t run no matter how much gasoline you put in its tank.
(Not to imply that the people who frequent /r/hpmor are unintelligent, just that the bar for doing successful FAI research is really, really high, and unless you can clear that bar, increasing the number of people working on the problem isn’t likely to help—in my view, anyway. I could be wrong.)