Terence Tao: evaluation

Transcript context

…But you’re generally, that is a break that you can take, is to step away and look at a different problem? Yeah, yeah. You can modify the problem too. I mean, you can ask some cheater if there’s a specific thing that’s blocking you that some bad case keeps showing up, that for which your tool doesn’t work. You can just assume by fiat this bad case doesn’t occur. So you do some magical thinking, but strategically okay for the point to see if the rest of the argument goes through. If there’s multiple problems with your approach, then maybe you just give up. But if this is the only problem but everything else checks out, then it’s still worth fighting. So yeah, you have to do some forward reconnaissance sometimes too. And that is sometimes productive to assume like, “Okay, we’ll figure it out eventually”?…

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