Raalei

Former CFO of Big Blue Test Icicles, Blood for Bob Alliance. DINO in the SUAD machine. If I'm not whelping, you're doing it wrong. Retired-ish.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

We're told raising the minimum wage kills jobs. A lie.

We're told a billionaires wealth tax kills jobs. A lie.

But when Musk says: “AI and robots will replace all jobs" & Ford's CEO says: AI will eliminate “half of all white-collar jobs” we're told "that's progress." Bullshit.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

If you poured a gallon of poison in a CEO's pool, you'd be arrested, for attempted murder.

They pour 10,000 gallons into your drinking water, that's just business.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

We deserve better.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

We are at this stage of capitalism.

[Frankie Muniz @frankiemuniz]

Glad NASCAR changed the no practice rule for failing tech first time by. Granted, @joshreaume and I were the only ones this season that had to sit out an entire practice session when I had one of the sport's biggest sponsors on my truck who also purchased an in-car camera where they expected to get some TV time during that practice session. Shame it didn't happen to one of the many companies owned by the driver's dads but to a real sponsor spending real money. NASCAR should make it right with said sponsor.

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[Alabama Revolutionary🌹✊🏾 @TerrellSocialst]

EVERY POLL SHOWED BERNIE SANDERS BEATING TRUMP BY MAJOR MARGINS!!!! HILLARY WAS EITHER LOSING BY 1% OR WINNING BY 1%. BERNIE WAS BEATING TRUMP BY 5% OR MORE EVERY TIME!!!

BERNIE WON WEST VIRGINIA BUT ONE SUPER DELEGATE DECIDED TO VOTE HILLARY AND DISREGARD 10,000+ VOTERS.

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@aladetai @HalfwayPost Every journalist should say that.

[K. @IbaraEleven]

Centrists will do stuff like this and then say with a straight face that it’s the left who helps republicans

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@EthicalBudget @HalfwayPost According to Christian dogma the pope is the voice of God on earth and anyone that contradicts him contradicts God. So i guess you'll be seen in hell with the rest of the "gay libtards"

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@MissileFur @AzPetrich Just like your guy Ronnie Ray gun made the 1st batch of "illegals" legal, you may wanna check yourself cause you just wrecked yourself on your own hypocrisy.

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@diceytroop @emmma_camp_ They always move the goal posts in favor of the rich. Liberals have enabled this shit for longer than I've been alive. Capitulating as far back as the Powell memo.

[K. @IbaraEleven]

DNC won’t release their 2024 autopsy report because it reveals they lost for things they intend to keep doing.

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@Fr3shP3pp3rJack @NotAvgLiberal 34 felony convictions. Fuck you hypocrite.

[Raalei @Raalei2]

@YourAnonNews Greed.