Cool idea and initiative to make such a calculator :) Although it doesn’t quite reflect how I make estimations myself (I might make a more complicated calculator of my own at some point that does).
The way I see it, the work that is done now will be the most valuable per person, and the amount of people working on this towards the end may not be so indicative (nine women cannot make a baby in a month, etc).
Agree that we are missing some things here. My guess is that this one is not too large (less than an order of magnitude), in significant part because we’re just using ‘eventual size’ as a convenient proxy, and increases to the size there seem likely to be highly correlated with increases at intermediate times.
That said, it’s great to look for things we may be missing, and see if we can reach consensus about which could change the answer crucially.
Thanks! :) After our conversation Owen jumped right into the write-up, and I pitched in with the javascript—it was fun to just charge ahead and execute a small idea like this.
It’s true that this calculator doesn’t take field-steering or paradigm-defining effects of early research into account, nor problems of inherent seriality vs parallelizable work. These might be interesting to incorporate into a future model, at some risk of over-complicating what will always be a pretty rough estimate.
Cool idea and initiative to make such a calculator :) Although it doesn’t quite reflect how I make estimations myself (I might make a more complicated calculator of my own at some point that does).
The way I see it, the work that is done now will be the most valuable per person, and the amount of people working on this towards the end may not be so indicative (nine women cannot make a baby in a month, etc).
Agree that we are missing some things here. My guess is that this one is not too large (less than an order of magnitude), in significant part because we’re just using ‘eventual size’ as a convenient proxy, and increases to the size there seem likely to be highly correlated with increases at intermediate times.
That said, it’s great to look for things we may be missing, and see if we can reach consensus about which could change the answer crucially.
Thanks! :) After our conversation Owen jumped right into the write-up, and I pitched in with the javascript—it was fun to just charge ahead and execute a small idea like this.
It’s true that this calculator doesn’t take field-steering or paradigm-defining effects of early research into account, nor problems of inherent seriality vs parallelizable work. These might be interesting to incorporate into a future model, at some risk of over-complicating what will always be a pretty rough estimate.