Oatmeal Agitante

idea: as long as throwing more neurons at a problem to solve it is cheap, a mind is disincentivized from figuring out higher-level structure

a smaller brain will need more insight to solve the same problem, a larger brain may "understand" less

a similar idea is in complexity theory (runtime of an algorithm vs its description size), but doesn't deal in incentives

how do you figure out, at a glance, whether to optimize or to bruteforce - is there an optimal way to do this?

nah, still too obvious a question, probably answered in some paper about impl-ing Prolog; meta: quicker to figure out or to find the paper?

had similar thoughts when alpha go won. I think practically brute force & understanding are not distinct activities.

if you're wondering whether you're spending too much time trying to understand without just doing it, answer is yes