A man asks one of the members of the tribe to find him some kindling so that he may start a fire. A few hours pass, and the second man returns, walking with a large elephant.
“I asked for kindling.” Says the first.
“Yes.” Says the second.
“Where is it?” Asks the first, trying to ignore the large pachyderm in the room.
The second gestures at the elephant, grinning.
“That’s an elephant.”
“I see that you are uninformed. You see, elephants are quite combustible, despite their appearance. Once heat reaches the right temperature, its skin, muscles, all of it will burn. Right down to its bones.”
“What is the ignition temperature for an elephant”
“I don’t know, perhaps 300-400°C”
The first held up two stones.
“This is all I have to start a fire.” He says, “It will only create a few sparks at best… I’m not even sure how I can get it to consistently do that much, given how hard this will be for people thousands of years from now to replicate.”
“That is the challenge.” The second nodded solemnly, “I’m glad you understand the scope of this. We will have to search for ways to generate sparks at 400° so that we can solve the Elephant Kindling Problem.”
“I think I know why you chose the elephant. I think you didn’t initially understand that almost everything is combustible, but only notice things are combustible once you pay enough attention to them. You looked around the Savana, and didn’t understand that dry leaves would be far more combustible, and your eyes immediately went to the elephant. Because elephants are interesting. They’re big and have trunks. Working on an Elephant Problem just felt way more interesting than a Dry Leaves Problem, so you zeroed all of your attention on elephants, using the excuse that elephants are technically combustible, failing to see the elegant beauty in the efficient combustibility of leaves and their low ignition temperature.”
“Leaves might be combustible. But think of how fast they burn out. And how many you would have to gather to start a fire. An elephant is very big. It might take longer to get it properly lit, but once you do, you will have several tons of kindling! You could start any number of fires with it!”
“Would you have really made these conclusions if you had searched all the possible combustible materials in the Savana, instead of immediately focusing on elephants?”
“Listen, we can’t waste too much time on search. There are thousands of things in the Savana! If we tested the combustibility and ignition temperature of every single one of them, we’d never get around to starting any fires. Are elephants the most combustible things in the Universe? Probably not. But should I waste time testing every possible material instead of focusing on how to get one material to burn? We have finite time, and finite resources to search for combustible materials. It’s better to pick one and figure out how to do it well.”
“I still think you only chose elephants because they’re big and interesting.”
“I imagine that ‘big’ and ‘useful as kindling material’ are not orthogonal. We shouldn’t get distracted by the small, easy problems, such as how to burn leaves. These are low hanging fruit that anyone can pick. But my surveys of the tribe have found that figuring out the combustibility of elephants remains extremely neglected.”
“What about the guy who brought me a giraffe yesterday?”
“A giraffe is not an elephant! I doubt anything useful will ever come from giraffe combustibility. Their necks are so long that they will not even fit inside our caves!”
“What I am saying is that others have brought in big, interesting-looking animals, and tried to figure out how to turn them into kindling. Sure, no one else is working on the Elephant Kindling Problem. But that’s also what the guy with the giraffe said, and the zebra, and the python.”
“Excuse me,” Said a third, poking his head into the cave, “But the Python Kindling Problem is very different from the Elephant one. Elephants are too girthy to be useful. But with a python, you can roll it into a coil, which will make it extremely efficient kindling material.”
The second scratched his chin for a moment, looking a bit troubled.
“What if we combined the two?” He asked. “If we wound the python around a leg of the elephant, the heat could be transferred somewhat efficiently.”
“No, no, no.”, argued the third, “I agree combining these two problems might be useful. But it would be far better to just cut the trunk off the elephant, and intertwine it with the python. This could be very useful, since elephant hide is very thick and might burn slower. This gives us the pros of a fast-burning amount of kindling, mixed with a more sustained blaze from the elephant.”
“Might I interject.” Said a fourth voice, who had been watching quietly from the corner, but now stepped forward, “I have been hard at work on the Giraffe Kindling problem, but think that we are actually working on similar things. The main issue has always been the necks. They simply won’t fit inside the cave. We need a solution that works in all edge cases, after all. If it’s raining, we can’t start a fire outside. But if we use the python and the elephant trunk to tie the neck of the giraffe against the rest of its body, we could fit the whole thing in!”
“I think this will be a very fruitful collaboration.” Said the second, “While at first it seemed as though we were all working on different problems, it turns out by combining them, we have found an elegant solution.”
“But we still can’t generate sparks hot enough to combust any of them!” Shouted the first, “All you’ve done is made this even more complicated and messy!”
“I am aware it might seem that way to a novice.” Said the second, “But we have all gained great knowledge in our own domains. And now it is time for our fields to evolve into a true science. We are not amateurs anymore, simply playing around with fire. We are now establishing expertise, creating sub-domains, arriving at a general consensus of the problem and its underlying structure! To an outsider, it will probably look daunting. But so does every scientific field once it matures. And we will continue to make new ground by standing on the shoulders of elephants!”
“Giraffes.” Corrected the fourth.
“Zebras.” Answered a fifth.
sigh Protests last year, barricading this year, I’ve already mentally prepared myself for someone next year throwing soup at a human-generated painting while shouting about AI. This is the kind of stuff that makes no one in the Valley want to associate with you. It makes the cause look low-status, unintelligent, lazy, and uninformed.