Stuff I'm thinking about

Here's a thing that has been bothering me lately. Frontier AI models are now performing at the 90th percentile or higher on a bunch of tasks that form the backbone of what white-collar workers do: reading comprehension, coding, legal research, medical diagnosis, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing. And they do it dirt cheap compared to hiring a human. Here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody likes to say out loud: most people, by definition, have average cognitive abilities. And a huge portion of professional ("white collar", "elite", etc.) employment has never actually required exceptional intelligence. Dilbert, Q.E.D. It required a combination of average-to-moderately-above-average ability, reliability, and the ability to be productive when working with others and to not make others less productive. The college degree was mainly a signal that you cleared that bar. This created a pretty stable economic arrangement that worked for decades: creden...

I am a smart person.  I'm writing this to tell you tricks that I've figured out how to be a smart person. Note that smart and successful are orthogonal concepts.  Being smart makes it much easier for you to be successful, but there is a lot more to success than smartness- there's work ethic, willingness to take (smart) risks, interpersonal skills, and a lot of luck (opportunity, circumstances, and so forth).  Being smart makes it easier to reduce the luck factor. What is smart? Smart partly is intelligence, whatever that is.  And I have a lot of that, but that is a gift from God, or genetics and environment if you don't believe, so I didn't earn that, and I can't improve that.  Yes, I know that you can practice and actually improve your performance on IQ tests, but I don't think that really makes you smarter in any way that really counts. Smart is also an approach to life.  That's mainly what I'm going to talk about. --- I started thinking of this p...