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Comment by shimon | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of hacker writing in 10 paragraphs the sort of thing that has often been diluted into a 250-page business book.

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The amazing thing is that there is a lot of repetition even at 10 paragraphs. Some of the other comments here sum it up in twitter-sized chunks.

The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized.

"The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized."

If you read the literature on selective breeding they have extensive methodologies for avoiding genetic problems. If you just want a quick overview, Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation" has a couple of really entertaining chapters on the subject.

That book looks hugely interesting--thanks for the recommendation!

We've been using biological metaphors in this discussion, but I'm not sure we can extend them this far.

Didn't Andy Grove say something like this? However he couched it in terms of paranoia.

It's also a good example of someone taking 10 paragraphs to say "don't overfit"...which might be a bit terse for non-AI people, but the article still feels long-winded.

Yeah. "Overfit" is more of a ML concept than AI concept though. Many ML people don't believe in AI at all.

I didn't mean Spielberg AI...rather, AI as the umbrella term for things like ML, vision, heuristic search, some parts of robotics, etc. But yes, more specifically, it's a ML term.

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