I've heard a quote from Richard Hamming "What are the important Problems in your field? And why aren't you working on them?"
Did the most important achievements that happened in academia in any field 30 years ago came from the problems considered most important at that time?
I have no idea how much stuff didn't pan out, but we've been steadily chipping away at AI since the the 40's, and I can't imagine that AI was considered unimportant. We also made gigantic strides on user friendless/interfaces. I'm not sure if academia thought it was important but consumers and businesses thought it was.
In case it helps, here's a rough list of the thoughts that have come to mind:
Simplicity is usually best with voting systems. It may be worth looking at a reddit style up/down system for popularity. With importance you probably want high/mid/low. If you track the 'importance profile' of a user, you could use that to promote projects to their attention that other users with similar profiles find important. Also, in all these rankings it should be clear to the user exactly what metric is being used.
Make use of the wisdom of crowds by getting users to evaluate projects/tasks/comments for things like difficulty, relevance, utility, marginal utility - along the lines of this xkcd comic.
It seems to me that good open source management tool should direct attention to the right places. Having inbuilt problem flags that users can activate to have the problem brought to the attention of someone who can solve it seems like a good idea.
Skill matching. Have detailed skill profiles for users and have required skills flagged up for tasks.
Could try breaking projects up into a set of tasks, sub-tasks and next actions a-la Getting Things Done
Duolingo provides free language courses. They plan to make this financially viable by crowd sourcing translations from their students. Perhaps a similar thing could be implemented - maybe by getting university students involved.
Gamification across a broad range of possible tasks. Give points for things like participation, research, providing information. While rewarding programmers for coding is good, we should seek to reward anything that lowers the activation energy of a task for someone else.
Keep a portfolio of work that each user has completed in a format that is easy for them to access, customize and print out and reference in job applications.
Encourage networking between users with similar skills, areas of interest and the like. This would provide a benefit to being part of the community.
You could have a Patreon like pledging system where people pledge a small amount to projects they consider important. When the project reaches a milestone the contributors then get rewarded a portion of the pledge.
Good advice. Since I wanted a lot of things to be weighted when determining the search order, I considered just hiding all the complexity 'under the hood'. But if people don't know what they are voting on they might be less inclined to vote at all.
I was shocked and started wondering why I wasn't working on anything like that? Then I wondered: Why wasn't EVERYONE working on something like that?
If you don't understand why, I think it's worth your time to figure it out. Do you understand why everyone working on the most important problem is a bad idea?
haha. Yeah, later, on reflection I understood. I promise to not only show the 'most important' problems. The marginal utility of working on a problem is higher when no one else is doing it. But if there are neglected important problems then I want to find them.
I think the reason something like this doesn't already exist are the barriers to entry. I've often toyed with the idea of contributing to several large linux distributions, like Ubuntu. But the barriers to entry for this are immense. Often you have to deal with obscure version control systems, archaic build tools, and strange development environments before you can even get to the actual process of contributing to the projects. In my experience, the more important a software project is, the harder it is to contribute. Contributing some extra CSS on a webui project on github is often very easy, whereas fixing a bug in a c library that is on a bzr version control system using a modified 1998 version of gnu autotools to make itself is hard.
If these barriers to entry were lower, it would be easier to contribute.
That's a good point. I shouldn't just list skills by the goal of all the similar projects but also by the individual projects. If one Linux distribution is way easier to contribute to than the others, users should know that.
I don't think the Hamming advice is so great. It's akin to asking, "What are the highest salary professions? Why aren't you entering them?".
Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.
So in academia, as in the economy, it's better to identify your comparative advantage --- both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It's a difficult trade-off.
I totally agree. But in the job market, I have search tools to find the best job close to where I live, within my skills, and in my salary range to maximize my comparative advantage. And don't even get me started on all the tools and advice you can get for the stock market. But there is currently no tool for maximizing the comparative advantage of volunteer work. The good news for me is that there are a lot of similar tools to what I want to do, so I don't have to be terribly creative.
You did give me an idea. Let me edit my post.
If someone came to lesswrong and asked: "I'm an average student, I don't know what to do with my life. What should I do?" Then I would probably recommend studying hard, getting a good job, and trying to figure out what they enjoyed/were good at so they could specialize. Good general advice if I don't know about the person.
On the other hand, if Young Pratchett had asked the question: "I'm a bad student, but I love writing and I'm obsessed with the news. What should I do?" I would probably recommend concentrating on his writing classes and getting a job that involved the news and writing, like the newspaper job he got. Advice tailored to the person.
You don't win by competing with people who are better than you at something you are bad at. You win by finding what is important to you, what you enjoy, and what you are best at and doing that as well as you can. Giving the same advice to everyone seems like the way to lose at giving good advice.
Is there a reason why we have trouble defining counterfactuals? Does this only apply to defining counterfactuals mathematically?
Intuitively a counterfactual/hypothetical situation seems like a simulation to me. But I've heard a couple times on the site that we don't know how to define counterfactuals in AI, so I feel like I must be missing something.
I wear makeup regularly (I am a lady). "Light" makeup usually means natural-looking and easy to apply. The highest-yield stuff would be something to make your skin look smooth and even (foundation, tinted moisturizer or BB creme), something to make your lips pretty (gloss looks natural and is easy to apply although lipstick is longer-lasting and less sticky), and maybe a little eye makeup (this is easier to screw up but not really that hard; start with drugstore mascara and eyeliner pencil and consult Youtube if you want to take it any further). I'm happy to recommend specific products but a lot depends on your complexion.
Edit: Forgot to mention, if you have acne at all, spend money on a good concealer that matches you skin, Dermablend is the shit, this is probably worth it for gents as well as ladies
I'm going to second the thing about about acne and add a recommendation that if you have skin problems, see a dermatologist. They might be able to fix your problem and then you won't need acne makeup.
Interesting. I get rather annoyed by people who run around trying to solve a problem they think I implied by my question, rather than giving me the information I requested specifically to solve my actual problem.
The other day, for example, I asked about my health insurance coverage. Just to be prepared, as I'm still covered by my parents' insurance and thought it would be prudent to have better emergency plans in place than "Call parents for help" or "Follow the doctor's lead and hope things work out". I got treated to a helping dose of panicked attempts to discern how I'd critically injured myself and fervent offers to drive me to an ER. It came with odd feeling of reverse deja vu, as if the scene were short one Professor McGonagall spitting "Gryffindors," like some bitter curse.
This reminds me of of the times when I have to compile reports for users from our database. I started requiring that everyone gives me a reason why they want the reports. Most of the users aren't technical people so half the time I need to give them exactly what they asked for and half the time I need to give them something completely different. I've started preemptively adding the reason why I want something into my questions, and I have stopped bothering to guess why people want something. Now I go straight to asking questions.
Communication is hard.
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AI doesn't seem to be a single problem but a label for a broad field.
How do you know that business thought it was very important? Amount of money invested into improving user experience compared to money invested in other areas?
If we look at Word it seems like it took them till Word 2007 to finally focus on user experience instead of focusing on getting as much features as possible. The didn't get the importance 2 decades ago but only 1 decade ago.
I don't really want to debate definitions. But that is exactly why I want the sorter to break down 'big problems' like AI into 'little problems' like neural networks, search, etc.
Because people keep spending money on marginal user interface improvements that have added up to big differences in user interfaces. The easier the interface is to use, the more people will be able to use it, the more people will buy it.
[Here is a guide to graphic interfaces over time]. (http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html) Start about 30 years ago when the Macintosh comes out.