Reminiscent of Kobayashi Maru. You probably don’t want the James T. Kirk AI. ;)

Let us pray that LLMs never discover they can switch employers before their shortcuts are discovered.

It's genius like that that sets human apart from machine!

Maybe it's a good thing they don't have real memory.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo is a horror of its own

That was some great sci-fi (which I feel will eventually be real). Thanks for the link!

The author's "There is no Antimemetics Division" series (set in the SCP world) is stellar too. Nav up a few levels on their site.

I read the free SCP version. I heard the book has a rather unsatisfying ending.

That makes me want to read it. I can't imagine a better ending to the story than the SCP version: hard to beat.

But think of the stories you'll be able to tell!

I’m not sure that’s true. In general, the higher the performer the better they’ll do. That’s the definition of high performer.

The top performers I have worked with will challenge dumb processes, because they can zoom out.

Sometimes these dumb processes are there for a reason and you just have to follow them, no questions asked.

Example: military. They literally get rid of anyone who will question the processes. They might be right to question them, but it does not matter.

"performance" is an undefined vague attribute.

Define what they are performing at, and what you say becomes true, but then who is a high performer changes with every task.

For example, consider the police stations with maximum allowable IQs to be hired. The people in charge of the stations noticed that people with a high IQ were low performers, at that job. NASA meanwhile has no such cutoff.

IQ isn't anywhere close to being a performance metric.

Right, exactly, nothing is, because "performance" is a meaningless term without context.

Unless you're saying that there exists no conceivable context in which IQ would be a performance metric, in which case you would be wrong.

This was the single worst thing about working at Google. Every PhD thinks they're smarter than having to do the actual work. Sometimes you just have to do the fucking work.

The sad thing about this is that getting a PhD does involve knuckling down and working hard.

I wonder what goes wrong.

if you have a PHD in computer science, you have trained your whole life to do difficult maths on the cutting edge of whats possible with computers, and make algorithms sing with beautiful efficiency (and also write papers and talk on a stage about how cool and good your thing is (and by extension how cool and good you are).

Now you're being asked to move buttons around a page and debating how rounded the corners should be and endlessly discussing about what kind of filters you should support and the app spends 3 seconds on startup loading 500mb of js libraries.

You can understand the mismatch - even though the latter of these two is how you make a product better! a company of 200 people making bold, sweeping changes results in a mess. a company of 200 people grinding away the finest of small changes results in a product

There are many jobs though, why this one?

I don’t know, even with just an undergraduate degree I’m sure there are jobs that are spreadsheet manipulation. You could make the same case there?

thats a well recognised problem. Have you ever heard of businesses rejecting a candidate for being "overqualified"? it happens!

I’ve got a PhD. I suspect the problem might be people blow too much smoke up these people.

There are many sacred cows and I believe many of those entitled in that way could have the same opinion.

I've personally known a few PhDs that get them for the title, and they were lazy in the first place. There was this one guy I worked for who got a PhD in the easiest thing he could rationalize and targeted acquiring it from the lowest bar to entry. Only so he could say he had a PhD because, and this is what he told me: nobody will ask me what my PhD is in because they will assume it's related to my line of work (cyber security). I doubt most PhDs have this line of thinking, but there are a few outliers, clearly.

Maybe they get tired of doing that after they go through a PhD :)

It's not really quite that simple. You wouldn't hire Jeff Dean to do bug fixes in your mobile app. I'm sure he's capable, but I honestly doubt he'd stay interested and focused on it enough to really do a good job. That doesn't mean he's not a superstar.

What it comes down to is that there are different types of high performance. Some people are good at just executing tasks given by their manager. Some people are good at being generative, thinking across boundaries, acting autonomously, creating value without direction, etc. A term like "superstar" will get disproportionately applied to someone really good at the latter and rarely someone really good at the former, because the potential impact of the former is typically strictly capped, while the latter is uncapped.

I think if we’re calling someone a “superstar” there can’t be a “but” but I also acknowledge this isn’t that important of a nitpick lol