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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models

A followup to Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring:

Imagine scientists venturing off in some research direction. At the dawn of history, they don\\u2019t need to venture very far before discovering a new truth. As time goes on, they need to go further and further.

Actually, scratch that, nobody has good intuitions for truth-space. Imagine some foragers who have just set up a new camp. The first day, they forage in the immediate vicinity of the camp, leaving the ground bare. The next day, they go a little further, and so on. There\\u2019s no point in traveling miles and miles away when there are still tasty roots and grubs nearby. But as time goes on, the radius of denuded ground will get wider and wider. Eventually, the foragers will have to embark on long expeditions with skilled guides just to make it to the nearest productive land.

Let\\u2019s add intelligence to this model. Imagine there are fruit trees scattered around, and especially tall people can pick fruits that shorter people can\\u2019t reach. If you are the first person ever to be seven feet tall, then even if the usual foraging horizon is very far from camp, you can forage very close to camp, picking the seven-foot-high-up fruits that no previous forager could get. So there are actually many different horizons: a distant horizon for ordinary-height people, a nearer horizon for tallish people, and a horizon so close as to be almost irrelevant for giants.

Finally, let\\u2019s add the human lifespan. At night, the wolves come out and eat anyone who hasn\\u2019t returned to camp. So the the maximum distance anyone will ever be able to forage is a day\\u2019s walk from camp (technically half a day, so I guess let\\u2019s imagine that everyone can teleport back to camp whenever they want).

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