Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Underconstrained Abstractions - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 December 2008 01:58PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2008 01:41:52AM 3 points [-]

Also, while economists have many abstractions for modeling details of labor teams and labor markets, our standard is that the simplest versions should be of just a single aggregate quantity of labor. This one parameter of course implicitly combines the number of workers, the number of hours each work, how fast each thinks, how well trained they are, etc.

If one woman can have a baby in nine months, nine women can have a baby in one month? Having a hundred times as many people does not seem to scale even close to the same way as the effect of working for a hundred times as many years. This is a thoroughly vetted truth in the field of software management.

In science, time scales as the cycle of picking the best ideas in each generation and building on them; population would probably scale more like the right end of the curve generating what will be the best ideas of that generation.

Suppose Moore's Law to be endogenous in research. If I have new research-running CPUs with a hundred times the speed, I can use that to run the same number of researchers a hundred times as fast, or I can use it to run a hundred times as many researchers, or any mix thereof which I choose. I will choose the mix that maximizes my speed, of course. So the effect has to be at least as strong as speeding up time by a factor of 100. If you want to use a labor model that gives results stronger than that, go ahead...