Once upon a time, in ye olden days of strange names and before google maps, seven friends needed to figure out a driving route from their parking lot in San Francisco (SF) down south to their hotel in Los Angeles (LA).

The first friend, Alice, tackled the “central bottleneck” of the problem: she figured out that they probably wanted to take the I-5 highway most of the way (the blue 5's in the map above). But it took Alice a little while to figure that out, so in the meantime, the rest of the friends each tried to make some small marginal progress on the route planning.

The second friend, The Subproblem Solver, decided to find a route from Monterey to San Louis Obispo (SLO), figuring that SLO is much closer to LA than Monterey is, so a route from Monterey to SLO would be helpful. Alas, once Alice [...]

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Outline:

(03:33) The Generalizable Lesson

(04:39) Application:

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

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First published:
February 7th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hgj84BSitfSQnfwW6/so-you-want-to-make-marginal-progress

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“So You Want To Make Marginal Progress...” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“So You Want To Make Marginal Progress...” by johnswentworth