# Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments — John Wentworth

Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nEBbw2Bc2CnN2RMxy/gears-level-models-are-capital-investments . Verbatim excerpts cached for the skill.

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> This is a general feature of gears-level models: figuring out a system's gears takes extra work up-front, but yields dividends forever. The alternative, typically, is a black-box strategy: use a method which works without needing to understand the internals of the system. The black-box approach is cheaper for one-off tasks, but usually doesn't yield any insights which will generalize to new tasks using the same system - it's context-dependent.

On the "valley of bad theory" experiment (optimizing without understanding):

> Given the opportunity to test things out, subjects would often iterate their way to optimal settings - but they didn't iterate their way to correct theories. [...] This is black-box optimization: optimization was achieved, but insight into the system was not.