Top all-time · #2091
Otium
Personal blog · srconstantin.wordpress.comeconomicsphilosophy
Otium is a personal blog at srconstantin.wordpress.com about economics and philosophy. Since 2014, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Speculations and Hand-Wavy Ideas
Most-linked posts?
- Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-02-26
- Ra – The drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity (2016)4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-11-15
- Performance Trends in AI3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-28
- Strong AI Isn't Here Yet3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-21
- Do Rational People Exist?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-06-22
- Direct Primary Care2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-29
- In Defense of Individualist Culture2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-10
- The Costs of Reliability (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-15
- Do Rational People Exist?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-03
What Hacker News says?
Dude, if you'd just asked me a more specific question, you could surely have baited me into commenting on this or that culture war issue. Since you asked a general question, though, I'll simply answer with the generality that I wish we could all make more of an effort to show empathy for each other's problems, and (as I said on the podcast) carefully articulate where we agree and disagree with each other rather than…
Comment linking /2016/11/27/hiding-in-plain-sight/
on “I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA”Submitted Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences as a story · 461 points
HN discussionBagel Health (YC W19) First employee (Full-stack engineer) Decent cash salary plus first-employee equity (standard vesting) REMOTE Work at a YC startup trying to fix healthcare! Or at least improve a small part of it. Bagel is a new electronic health record for the growing number of doctors that don't accept insurance, particularly direct primary care (DPC) docs. DPC is trying to cut insurance out of primary care. I…
Comment linking /2018/09/25/direct-primary-care/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)”Submitted Sane Thinking About Mental Health Problems as a story · 140 points
HN discussionMy experience is people generally do different things when it's out of interest. More going deep on whatever their passion is, less of everything else. So you get ugly sites with interesting essays, or beautiful data visualization but no text for search engines to use to know to send people to the page. I really liked https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/the-costs-of-r... on this. I also think (though don't…
Comment linking /2019/07/20/the-costs-of-reliability/
on “YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos”Submitted Direct Primary Care as a story · 62 points
HN discussionRelevant post about GPT2: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are...
Comment linking /2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/
on “GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners”Submitted Do Rational People Exist? as a story · 60 points
HN discussionReminds me of a relatively old article I read, "Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences": https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are...
Comment linking /2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/
on “GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners”Submitted Personalized Medicine for Real as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThe questions are already being asked. > Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are...
Comment linking /2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/
on “ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations”Submitted Dwelling in Possibility as a story · 36 points
HN discussionWouldn't it be better for both the environment and local automation industries [0] if we produced goods within the countries that consume them? Whether or not local manufacturing jobs never come back, I just don't see why you would want to continue with something which seemingly has so many negative externalities (ethical, environmental, as well as a loss of means to innovate). [0] https://srconstantin.wordpress.com…
Comment linking /2016/11/19/industry-matters/
on “Google Recalls Staff to U.S. After Trump Immigration Order”Submitted Ra – The drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity (2016) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI'll let Sarah Constantin make this argument for me: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/in-defense-of-... :)
Comment linking /2017/06/27/in-defense-of-individualist-culture/
on “Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)”Submitted In Defense of Individualist Culture as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAck, forgot to add the link- [1] was meant to link to https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/09/sepsis-cure-ne... . I couldn’t find a comprehensive treatment of the broader issue on a quick check- I suspect that the nature of an issue revolving around “what we know vs what we formally know” resists discussion in places like scientific journals. But there’s some overlap with more well-known issues, such as antibi…
Comment linking /2017/04/09/sepsis-cure-needs-an-rct/
on “Dustin Moskovitz pours funds into high-risk research”Submitted Introducing the Longevity Research Institute as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes -- I'm not sure people quite appreciate just how serious a matter killing a negotiator is: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the...
Comment linking /2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the-messenger/
on “The Opium Wars Still Shape China’s View of the West”Submitted Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee also: Do Rational People Exist? http://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists...
Comment linking /2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/
on “When rational thinking is correlated with intelligence the correlation is modest”Submitted Performance Trends in AI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI want to emphasize that I said "making it so that nobody can take Algebra 'early'", i.e. California education bureaucrats are in the process, moving in that direction. They have not succeeded or completed the process. (In retrospect, I wish I had said "far fewer" rather than "nobody", as I cannot read their minds to determine if they are against anyone in California taking Algebra before 9th grade. However, the pos…
Comment linking /2016/10/20/ra/
on “My values, howled into the wind”Submitted Performance Trends in AI (how does Deep Learning improve it) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSarah Constantin's essay on plow cultures and hoe cultures seems apposite here: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a... (Note the very first photo in the wikipedia article)
Comment linking /2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/
on “Mosuo Women”Submitted On Trying Not to Be Wrong as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCollege admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence. Engineering is also mostl…
Comment linking /2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/
on “College Dropouts Thrive in Tech”Submitted The Costs of Reliability (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251755 Also a copy-paste of https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are...
Comment linking /2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/
on “Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences”Submitted Book Review: Why Are the Prices So Damn High? (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
