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Comment · 1 year ago
Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?

The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?

I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.

And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.

Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.

Comment · 1 year ago
Right, that's exactly what I'm saying.

>The point is to measure fluid intelligence in a way which supports comparisons between models and between models and humans. It's not the obligation of the test to be tailored to the form of model that's most popular now.

The problem is that the test may not be giving an accurate comparison because the test is problematic when used to assess LLMs, which are the kind of model that people are most interested in assessing for general capabilities.

Comment · 1 year ago

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