Also, this is the n-step version of google and twitter prompting
Conversation
There is something here about growth rates. Stepbystepism is slower initially but accelerates to big momentum if it works. Uncritical trial and error is fast initially but either plateaus or crashes. And just vibing in one-shot ways just finds clever intutions without growing.
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Zooming out to extreme macro, the growth vs. degrowth may be ill-posed. What if step-by-step is the DNA of tortoise like growth that doesn't backslide or crash as much? What if net, the tortoise IS faster than the hare?
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Hmm... now that I think of it, my "sparring partner" approach is a step-by-step alternative to trying to "do" one-shot strategy. Instead of a fully-formed strategy being designed out of 2 days of leadership retreat BS, it emerges gradually, contour by contour
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In any single sparring conversation, you might take 1-2 steps at most, but they add up over time. The strategy "takes shape" at the rate of actual alpha being uncovered in the situation, like a thing gradually revealing its full structure.
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I'm unhappy with the term stepbystepism. I need to know the True Name of this thing.
Possibly asynchronous sequentialism, as an antidote to the growing synchronous parallelism of the last few decades.
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Prompt thread of examples
Quote Tweet
What’s a thing you do mindfully “step by step” very often?
Eg: making pour-over coffee
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Oh shot just figured out the True Name of this thing. It’s not step-by-step, it’s loop-by-loop! Or better still, loopchaining.
You don’t move to the next loop until current loop gets to 99.9% and you retest all atomic and subchain loops each time you extend the loopchain.
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This is easily NP complete. To add loop n+1, you have to requalify minimum n loops again and max 2^n loops. If you don’t have nonlinear payoffs and/or “loop fusion” where substrings chunk-up somehow, it’s an intractable way to learn.
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Worse. Each loop is an OODA loop, and the chain only works when the orientations are aligned. Which means potentially n^2 or higher misalignment modes. And this is under non-adversarial supervision.
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You have to keep trying a step till you can get it right 99% of the time before moving on to the adding the next step
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At my peak as an improv teacher, I absolutely felt like I could prescribe combinations of warmups to address a variety of performance goals, culminating in spontaneous musical narratives. Atomic skills included rhyming single syllables, yes and, raising stakes, gradually combine,
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