= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
BrienneYudkowsky comments on How to Measure Anything - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (48)
Wow, this is really exciting. I thought at first, "Man, quantifying my progress on math research sounds really difficult. I don't know how to make it more than a measure of how happy I feel about what I've done."
But I'm only through step one of this post, and I've already pinned down the variables defining "progress on math research" such that measuring these periodically will almost certainly keep me directly on track toward the answer. I can probably make it better (suggestions welcome), but even this first pass saves me lots of grief. Wasted motion is probably my biggest problem with learning math right now, so this totally rocks. Check it out!
Progress is reduction of expected work remaining.
-Number of new things I understand (by proposition). -Change in degree to which I understand old things. -How central these things are to the problem. -Number of things (namely propositions, definitions, rules/instructions) I’ve written down that seem likely to be useful reference later. -Probability that they will be important. -Amount of material produced (in propositions or subsections of proof) that, if correct, will actually be part of my answer in the end. -Number of actions I’ve taken that will increase the values of the above variables. -Degree to which they’ll increase those values.
Thanks, Luke!
No it isn't. Those things are often correlated but not equivalent. New information can be gained that increases the expected work remaining despite additional valuable work having been done.
Progress is reduction of expected work remaining compared to your revised expectation of how much work remained yesterday.
That seems to be a better fit for the impression of progress. You wouldn't tend, in retrospect, to call it progress if you realised you'd been going in completely the wrong direction.
This would fit with progress simply be the reduction of work remaining.
Right. I think this is more an operationalization than a strict definition.
Yes, what RobbBB said.
|New information can be gained that increases the expected work remaining despite additional valuable work having been done.
That's progress.
Yes. That is the point.