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This is: The Apprentice Experiment, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
About two months ago, someone asked me what I would do with more funding. Other than the obvious (i.e. generally improve my own quality-of-life in minor ways), my main answer was: take on an apprentice. I have some models about how best to train people for this sort of work, and an apprentice would allow me to test those models while also supporting my own research. I started laying groundwork for that plan - in particular, Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand laid out my main background model.
Then, about a month ago, Aysajan put up a short post titled “Can I be Your Apprentice?” - essentially an open call to people on LW doing cool work. We talked, it seemed like a good fit, so the apprentice experiment kicked off ~3 weeks ago.
This post will provide more detail on models, motivation, the plan, etc, including a section for Aysajan to introduce himself.
Background Models
First background model: Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand. Problems-we-don’t-understand are similar to each other in a way which problems-we-do-understand are not. In the context of scientific research, preparadigmatic research in different fields is similar in a way which research within a paradigm is not. There are general skills and knowledge useful for finding/creating structure de novo, as opposed to working within some already-mapped structure.
Furthermore, while problems-we-don’t-understand may require some specialized knowledge, specialized knowledge of the field is never the rate-limiting step; if it were, then the problem would already be tractable to people steeped in the existing specialized knowledge of the field. If a problem is tractable within the current paradigm, then it isn’t preparadigmatic. Broad, generalizable skills/knowledge are much more important for problems-we-don’t-understand than for problems-we-do-understand.
The linked post goes into more detail on how one can train and specialize in problems-we-don’t-understand.
Second background model: Selection Has A Quality Ceiling. If we want people with a lot of skill in a lot of areas, trying to hire such people directly is Hard, in a big-O sense. As the number of traits we’re filtering for increases, the number of people we have to test in order to find one with all the requisite traits increases exponentially. The big-O requirements training skills are much better: as long as learning one skill doesn’t make another harder, the time required to train all of them should increase at-most linearly with the number skills.
Alas, most schools/companies today seem to mostly select, rather than train. Which makes sense - most companies don’t really need people with lots of skill in lots of areas, they just need people who will pick up the particulars of their industry quickly as-needed. But for problems-we-don’t-understand, people with lots of skill in lots of areas are exactly what we want.
Third background model: illegible skills. A lot of key skills/knowledge are hard to transmit by direct explanation. They’re not necessarily things which a teacher would even notice enough to consider important - just background skills or knowledge which is so ingrained that it becomes invisible. This sort of skill/knowledge is most easily transmitted by exposure: demonstration by the teacher, experimentation by the student, and feedback, ideally on a day-to-day basis. Thus the importance of an apprenticeship-like structure: high exposure and one-on-one interaction helps transmit illegible skills/knowledge.
(I suspect that this also relates to Bloom’s two-sigma problem: one-on-one tutoring works about two standard deviations better than anything else in education. Regardless of whether illegible skill transmission is actually a core part of that phenomenon, ...
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