daenerys comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong

48 Post author: lukeprog 01 December 2011 01:26PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 01:58:59AM *  26 points [-]

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration," said Thomas Edison, and he should've known: It took him hundreds of tweaks to get his incandescent light bulb to work well, and he was already building on the work of 22 earlier inventors of incandescent lights.

On the other hand, Nikola Tesla had this to say about Edison's methodology:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened... [...] I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

Even allowing for a significant bias against Edison on Tesla's part, it does seem like he relied on perspiration to an extraordinary degree among high achievers. Of course, even that diligence wouldn't have been of much use if it hadn't come together with a very considerable talent.

More generally, there are two problems with the general message of this article:

  1. It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems. (Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.) There is such a thing as innate talent, and doing useful work on some things requires an extraordinary degree of it.

  2. There is also a nasty failure mode for organized scientific effort when manpower and money are thrown at problems that seem impossibly hard, hoping that "hacking away at the edges" will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. Instead of progress, or even an honest pessimistic assessment of the situation, this may easily create perverse incentives for cargo-cult work that will turn the entire field into a vast heap of nonsense.

Comment author: Louie 02 December 2011 09:29:39AM *  24 points [-]

It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.

It's damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.

Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.

Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn't think mundane work was trivial, we'd get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".

As another example, I've had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do "anything" or "whatever helped the most". SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it... therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I've personally asked over 100 people to help with it.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2011 04:59:17PM *  13 points [-]

SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it.

I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren't engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.

General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you'd see instead are "no experience necessary" job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.

(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)

Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn't "oh, this is too mundane", but rather was "wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that "computer people" know how to do. Not something for me. I don't have the knowledge or skill-set"

Comment author: lukeprog 03 December 2011 10:41:14AM *  14 points [-]

The reason people aren't engaging in [SEO] is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.

Not really. The link-building tutorial page Louie links to at the Singularity Volunteers site contains several examples of link-building tasks that require little experience:

Comment on blogs and in forums. Although some blogs still utilize “nofollow” tags on outbound comment links, it is not a trend that I foresee continuing as long as comment spam protection keeps improving. Therefore, I recommend leaving high-quality insightful comments on other blogs, which will create a backlink and could entice blog owners to link back to your site in the future. Also, you have a far better chance of acquiring a back link if you’ve contributed something to someone else’s blog first.

[Submit] your website to various niche, local, and general directories...

The other pages linked at the bottom of that page provide lots of other examples.

Also, Louie is entirely right about this:

Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible... Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".

I've spent enough time cleaning rooms and moving boxes and furniture and so on at Singularity Institute (including an entire day just last week) that I could have written and published 1-3 more papers by now if I hadn't done any of that.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people get the idea that mundane work is "trivial."

If you want to do mundane tasks for me so I can write more papers on Friendly AI like this one, please contact me: luke [at] singularity.org.

Props to John Maxwell for being the latest person to actually do something mundane and high value for me, freeing up my time so I can work on an intelligence explosion book chapter tonight.

Comment author: nerzhin 02 December 2011 08:16:24PM 6 points [-]

You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.

With payroll taxes and insurance, I would expect this to cost at least $12000 a year.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2011 08:37:10PM 2 points [-]

Good point! I would still say it is worth it, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2011 06:25:05AM 5 points [-]

SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it's zero-sum. You're competing against all the other people doing SEO.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 December 2011 02:18:11PM 8 points [-]

This is probably less relevant for "technological singularity" than it is for, say, "cheap air fare."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2011 07:19:37AM 3 points [-]

How many people who aren't already familiar with SIAI search for "technological singularity"?

Comment author: gwern 04 December 2011 08:20:08AM 5 points [-]

Probably quite a few. Wikipedia records roughly 2,000 daily readers for that article; someone already familiar with SIAI probably isn't going to be going there thinking 'what was that "singularity" thing again?'

Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 December 2011 03:04:13PM 0 points [-]

I don't know.

I do know that SIAI thinks "technological singularity" is a search string it's valuable to SEO for, since it's on their list of search strings to SEO for.

Comment author: kpreid 05 December 2011 01:20:07PM 4 points [-]

In principle, “good” SEO is not entirely zero-sum: it improves the quality of search results, by making sites, and pages within those sites, which are relevant to the user's query more likely to show up in results than irrelevant sites and pages, and the results for those pages to be more clear about what they’re about.

Successful SEO is zero-sum to the degree that it is done by sites competing against each other which are fungible to the searcher, as TheOtherDave hints. There's also a lot of advice and offers for doing this sort of SEO because that's where the perceived money is.

There's making your site look good (to the search engine), and then there's making your site be good.

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