Military intelligence, in my working experience, was full of whip-smart individuals with no discernment. General Officers (IME, 3+ star Generals) and some charismatic leaders (again, anecdotal) have both. Lawyers have neither. But the hyper conversations I would always overhear the enlisted MIntel folks spouting, dripping with ADHD and stimulants was always, always lacking in prudence. This is intelligence versus wisdom. This is ‘tomato is a fruit’ versus ‘putting tomato in a fruit salad.’ My takeaway from this article is that YCombinator commenters suffer from the same military-intelligence-syndrome. The same compensatory eagerness, the same ‘I skimmed the title of the article and came to a conclusion,’ the “concerned with whether they could but not with whether they should” confusion of ideas. Compute is amazing, whip-smart and wicked fast, and the bitter lesson is learned in an environment with perfect information, but that is not the case. Should is a very heavy word, it comes laden with baggage. Baggage of norms and expectations and unspoken utility. In this case, compute excels at answering with the parameters firmly set, and Guy is exactly right that the methods used to maximize utility in an environment with unknowns is not the same as compute determining a better, faster method in environments with hard parameters. Parameters will always have to be set by humans. The Should will always have to be determined by people because unknown variables are unknown and if they are unknown by people then they will never be known by the machines. And because people, if they are communicating what they want, their utility, fail to always do a perfect job of it. As we observe we learn, as we learn our experiences adjust our utility. If we are going to outsource the compute part of the brain to the machine, we better get pretty good at observing and experiencing–wisely.
Also, liked the mic drop at the end. “Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose. I mention this not as confession but as demonstration: the human brought the utility function, the machine brought the compute. If that division of labour bothers you, I’d suggest the discomfort says more about the Bitter Lesson than about my writing process.”
I kinda liked DA: Inquisition. Haven’t played DA2 yet.