I agree with you and Ruby that this is a big part of how paradigms are born. I also like your decomposition, even if it looks obvious, because that creates exactly the kind of standards you mention. Or to be cheeky, defining new open problems is an open problem, and you provided part of a standard for a solution.
Personally, I love open problems and research agendas. My research, both during my thesis on distributed computing and now on AI Alignment, basically focuses around finding such problems and expressing them. I’m just better at that than at actually solving clean and concrete problems that are already stated.
And that makes me want to point something missing from your post or Ruby’s comment: how ridiculously hard it is to get people to care about your new open problem if you don’t already have status. Or put differently, there’s no status reward for writing an open problem. I’m not even talking about whether people want to work on it; just having any feedback whatsoever on what they think about it is incredibly difficult.
This has two negative consequences: first, the big status researchers are usually busy doing their own research, and so they don’t have the time to write an open problem; and second, starting/budding researchers with potential ideas but no status either censor themselves or receive no feedback on their ideas. Once again, I’m not saying that all such ideas are good, merely that they have to wait because they come from someone that hasn’t payed their dues.
Nice post and model!
I agree with you and Ruby that this is a big part of how paradigms are born. I also like your decomposition, even if it looks obvious, because that creates exactly the kind of standards you mention. Or to be cheeky, defining new open problems is an open problem, and you provided part of a standard for a solution.
Personally, I love open problems and research agendas. My research, both during my thesis on distributed computing and now on AI Alignment, basically focuses around finding such problems and expressing them. I’m just better at that than at actually solving clean and concrete problems that are already stated.
And that makes me want to point something missing from your post or Ruby’s comment: how ridiculously hard it is to get people to care about your new open problem if you don’t already have status. Or put differently, there’s no status reward for writing an open problem. I’m not even talking about whether people want to work on it; just having any feedback whatsoever on what they think about it is incredibly difficult.
This has two negative consequences: first, the big status researchers are usually busy doing their own research, and so they don’t have the time to write an open problem; and second, starting/budding researchers with potential ideas but no status either censor themselves or receive no feedback on their ideas. Once again, I’m not saying that all such ideas are good, merely that they have to wait because they come from someone that hasn’t payed their dues.