orthonormal comments on Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows - Less Wrong
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That is an excellent question. I would love to and I probably can, but it will take a fair amount of thinking to articulate in something unlike this overly cute way, and therefore time. In the meantime, if anyone has thoughts about what I probably ought to mean by "build and distribute flashlights", please do share.
Flashlights could be a bunch of portable methods and heuristics that can help on a wide range of problems, not just under one streetlight. Polya's book is an example, as are some of the methods of statistical learning and Feynman's "visualize a hairy green sphere" trick.
What's the hairy green sphere? My search engine gives this page as first result.
Really? When I google
feynman hairy green sphere, I get as the second hit a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! which runs:Clicking through reveals the whole story, of course. And the third hit is a blog post which excerpts the key summary:
It's the "hairy green ball" from "Surely you are joking...":
Science itself would be a major "flashlight", I guess?