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Productivity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Productivity

#251

Post by gridspy »

Robotbeat wrote: post #175
badpun wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.

IQ can be changed, if you work hard enough: http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-you-can-change-your-... This is true especially in your teenage years. It could change by more than 20 points. Can someone with high motivation and with an IQ of 110 make useful contributions to theoretical physics? I fail to see why not. IQ is determined by a test that's ultimately measuring skills. And skills can be learned. Even if…

The point of an IQ test is to measure brain damage, by comparing prior results against later results.

Any other use is just Pop Sci.

So naturally you can change the measured IQ, but you're abusing the test.

Re: Productivity

#252

Post by philwelch »

deltron3030 wrote: post #231
philwelch wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which programmer enjoys typing, or which builder enjoys the physical activity itself? That's actually a reason to get better at these things, though--the better your fundamentals are, the less attention you have to pay to them and the more attention you have left over for actually thinking about what you're doing. When I'm coding, typing is the last thing on my mind--I just think code and my muscle memory translate…

But wouldn't you prefer to just being able to connect your tested UI prototype and data model without having to translate it into code yourself? That's what I'm doing when I code, I translate things that already exists into a different language. I'd rather focus on other things if I could.

Maybe if you could type faster, the tedious parts of your work won't take as long :)

Re: Productivity

#253

Post by moduspol »

gideon_b wrote: post #179
badpun wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.

IQ can be raised by a full standard deviation with a few months of training [1]. IQ is only stable over time because most people don't work continuously to improve it. IQ can be learned, just like everything else. [1] Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160801...

The abstract for your source covers only children. Is there evidence of the same claim in adults?

Re: Productivity

#254

Post by akamaka »

pi-squared wrote: post #63

Why are posts by Sam Altman and Paul Graham upvoted unconditionally? I know, it's yc domain but is everything they write so good that it always require an upvote or is it because they are the bosses? Maybe I don't understand something about news.ycombinator.com, a.k.a. hacker news or I joined too late - was it originally posts only for yc funded startups and it eventually became general techie/science news and thus a…

Sam’s posts aren’t upvoted unconditionally. See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=samaltman.com

Re: Productivity

#255

Post by remir »

badpun wrote: post #143
philwelch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really only two things you need to do in order to be really good at basically anything: 1. Care a lot. 2. Work on continuously improving your skills. That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement. And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, cari…

What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.

"Caring a lot", in this context, means you have the intention to get better at planing your day, improve your workflow, are not afraid to reconsider your methods and find what works based on experimentation. This is what Altman did. His intention was to improve his productivity.

Re: Productivity

#256

Post by jdminhbg »

fogzen wrote: post #242
eloff wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This applies to your 9-5 as well. Working on the right problems is critical to anything you do, even in your personal relationships.

The person that serves Sam espresso in the morning, why would they choose to make minimum wage? Because they have no other options that’s why. “Do what you love” “work on important things” is so incredibly tone-deaf it’s insulting. It’s not helpful either.

Do you know whether Sam buys or makes his own espresso?

Do you know that any given barista makes minimum wage?

Do you know that any given barista has no other options than being a barista?

In two sentences, you made more unsupported assumptions than either the original article or the comment you're replying to, yet you seem to find them tone-deaf and insulting. How do you think a student working a morning barista shift for decent extra money because they enjoy coffee culture and talking to people would find your post, if not tone-deaf and insulting?

Re: Productivity

#257

Post by bobwaycott »

bachmeier wrote: post #122
bobwaycott wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense when one realizes increasing productivity is the single key to extracting maximum surplus value from labor under capitalism. Measuring (and increasing) productivity wasn’t invented for workers.

We're learning that in the debates over public education funding. For some reason, at least in the US, public education is justified if and only if it creates a more productive workforce. Why the government should subsidize the cost of training employees is rarely stated (probably for a good reason).

Well, of course. People aren’t educated for happiness, or even to be better humans. They are educated to standards that meet the expectations of the work place, since nearly all members of society will live to sell themselves for wages (unless they join the ranks of capitalists).

Capital requires an always-ready labor pool whose numbers exceed available employment. It helps keep constant downward pressure on wages. It also ensures people who aren’t hired—or are fired—are available the next time capital needs to put them to work to create more capital.

Mass education can’t be effectively sold to the People as the thing that enables them to become a wage slave. However, capital has long convinced the state to take an interest in economic growth at nearly all costs, so the state doesn’t even question the ways in which it is employed by capital to secure new markets, more labor, and more capital.

That said, it obviously isn’t education that creates a more productive workforce alone—but it makes for an effective bludgeon with which certain interests can beat back efforts to teach things that aren’t considered to be job-relevant. Education merely produces the raw human material capital can put to work to create more capital, without having to shoulder the cost/time burden itself. The extent to which capital successfully externalizes costs onto society at large is quite impressive.

Re: Productivity

#258

Post by Schwolop »

philwelch wrote: post #92
skrebbel wrote: post #44

What I like about this list is not so much the content, but the underlying message that Altman got to this point by experimentation and iteration. There's sometimes this hidden cultural idea that wildly successful people became so successful simply (by luck and) by being super good at what they do. I think Altman classifies as successful by most common measures so I find it refreshing that he apparently wasn't born a…

There's really only two things you need to do in order to be really good at basically anything: 1. Care a lot. 2. Work on continuously improving your skills. That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement. And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, cari…

Much as I dislike Scott Adams' views on many things, he has some smart advice in a lot of areas too. His take on success is to find a few areas where you can be in the top 25% and combine them. It's too hard to be in the top 1% of a specialty without natural talent, but if your specialty is the combination of four areas and you're in the top 25% of each of those areas, you're very likely to be amongst the top of the combined field - or be there by default because there's so few others doing it.

Re: Productivity

#259

Post by true_religion »

jjallen wrote: post #194
mgkimsal wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9% of the students showed a significant change of 15 points or more in IQ scores I had the opposite experience. I've had various IQ tests at age 5, then 9, then 16, then again in my mid-late 30s. 7 tests in all. They have various scores and scales, but in every case, I was within spitting distance of the same spot on the various scales of each test. In some cases, I didn't know I was going to be tested - no prep. I…

Wow, what would cause you to be IQ tested without knowing that in advance?

My university randomly gave us all IQ and personality tests as part of an introductory class.

Re: Productivity

#260

Post by vilmosi »

toasterlovin wrote: post #234
gideon_b wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ can be raised by a full standard deviation with a few months of training [1]. IQ is only stable over time because most people don't work continuously to improve it. IQ can be learned, just like everything else. [1] Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160801...

Color me skeptical. Pretty much every intervention ever tried has failed to measurably increase IQ long-term. The only exceptions are fixing nutritional deficiencies. If you could reliably raise IQ by a standard deviation in reasonably nourished children, it would be one of the most profound socio-political developments of all time (on the scale of major economic transitions like agriculture -> manufacturing -> knowl…

Well average IQ of the human population around the world has been increasing in the past decades if not centuries. And it's not because we're evolving within a few generations.
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