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Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

  Don't hire a straight-A student, unless it's to take exams; or a professor, unless it's to write papers.
 -- Nassim Taleb

How interesting that Anthropic and OpenAI are full of professors and straight-A students!

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Don't quote Nassim Taleb, unless it's to be an arrogant dick.

-- Me

-- Michael Scott

imbecile!

It’s unclear to me what point you’re making here - can you elaborate?

Solving test questions well doesn’t necessarily translate into productive outcomes in the real world.

So education is useless?

No, more like the average can be more important than some outlier's impact, at least for steady progress. So while you do need the Mozart and Einstein, a more productive effort would be to raise the general population's education level.

Humans learn in the side effect of education, nobody is busting out some poor method that schools teach to solve antiquated problems in the real world.

Neither does being unable to solve test questions. That's probably even worse.

If you track the best students futures and look the best workers pasts, there is not nearly as much overlap as society generally believes.

A lot of people have been surprised by the interest that AI companies have in solving maths problems without obvious applications, as well as in the financially precarious state of these companies. I imagine that they thought that these companies were helmed by mere bean-counters, like at Boeing. But no, I reckon that they're still academics at heart, and so they work on Navier-Stokes and L=BPL, instead of on how to maximise value for their (soon to be) shareholders.

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