Clearly the chronophone thought experiment failed as a pedagogic device, since most of the comments to the article were completely confused about what it was getting at.
But I think part of what makes it confusing is that the distinction between cached thoughts and cognitive strategies is not as clear-cut as you might think. For example, consider Polya's How to Solve It. This book is just a collection of cached thoughts -- "Hm, I seem to be stuck, I guess I should... think of a related, more accessible problem". But at the same time, it is also a cognitive strategy -- in fact, it's like a high-level description of an algorithm for solving math problems.
Similarly, the premise of the chronophone experiment is that we cannot transmit the Scientific Method back in time, because it's merely an idea, not a strategy for coming up with an idea. But consider how we will strive to do better in the future than today -- the Scientific Method (and related ideas, like "try to work quantitatively") will be absolutely crucial. They are the best way we know to make our reasoning approximate the Bayesian ideal. On the other hand, it is not clear a priori that the process that invented the Scientific Method is going to be very important -- for all we know that process could just have been "try any random thing".
I guess what my complaint boils down to is that the thought experiment undervalues ideas. It makes them seem like an epiphenomenon, the noises we make after we have already arrived at a conclusion via some other (unspecified) cognitive strategy. But ideas is the way our culture implements cognitive strategies.
But I think part of what makes it confusing is that the distinction between cached thoughts and cognitive strategies is not as clear-cut as you might think.
Clarifies some vague feelings I had while reading the article. Good work.
You might think of Cached Thoughts (CTs) as organized into a rough hierarchy:
Today's post, Archimedes's Chronophone was originally published on March 23, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Useless Medical Disclaimers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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