4 ms·
Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
- khandekars 17y agoInnovator's Dilemma?
- biohacker42 17y agoBeing too successful is a funny way of describing premature optimization and the risks behind great yet narrow specialization. Specialists are by definition exceptionally successful in exceptional circumstances. I don't think that makes them too successful. It just makes them high risk-high reward takers.
- snorkel 17y agoThe example cited is not death by too much success but rather death by not diversifying the product line.
- shimon 17y agoThis is a good example of hacker writing in 10 paragraphs the sort of thing that has often been diluted into a 250-page business book.
- endtime 17y agoIt's also a good example of someone taking 10 paragraphs to say "don't overfit"...which might be a bit terse for non-AI people, but the article still feels long-winded.
- vicaya 17y agoYeah. "Overfit" is more of a ML concept than AI concept though. Many ML people don't believe in AI at all.
- endtime 17y agoI didn't mean Spielberg AI...rather, AI as the umbrella term for things like ML, vision, heuristic search, some parts of robotics, etc. But yes, more specifically, it's a ML term.
- jlefo7p6 17y agoThe amazing thing is that there is a lot of repetition even at 10 paragraphs. Some of the other comments here sum it up in twitter-sized chunks. The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized.
- Alex3917 17y ago"The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized." If you read the literature on selective breeding they have extensive methodologies for avoiding genetic problems. If you just want a quick overview, Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation" has a couple of really entertaining chapters on the subject.
- jlefo7p6 17y agoThat book looks hugely interesting--thanks for the recommendation! We've been using biological metaphors in this discussion, but I'm not sure we can extend them this far.
- stcredzero 17y agoDidn't Andy Grove say something like this? However he couched it in terms of paranoia.
- propane 17y agoI can condense it down into one sentence: If you're not careful you will specialize yourself into a corner.
- keefe 17y agoThe post made some interesting points about technical success not equating to real world success, but the whole article suffers from a poor definition of the word.
- ojbyrne 17y agoFunny, at Toastmasters last night our table topic was "what if you had a different mother?" and we got to pick moms from a random list. My random mom was Angelina Jolie, and I think I made a well-reasoned case that I would have fucked myself to death. My point is that parent's success probably outdoes your own success.
- imp 17y agoThanks, I'm going to use that Table Topics theme next time it's my turn.
- pg 17y agoLisp Machines weren't that successful. I was their target user, and I ditched Symbolics to use Lucid on Suns at the first opportunity. The Lisp Machine software was appallingly baroque. Everything had every possible feature. There was no design, just implementation, and lots of it. The manuals took up a whole shelf, and it was generally faster to write something yourself than to find the predefined function that did it. A lot of (arguably most of) the badness of Common Lisp is Lisp Machine culture showing through.
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- ngvrnd 17y agohigh degrees of optimization lead to fragility. look at the current financial situation for an example.
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- ajju 17y agoAnyone know more about the author Erik Naggum? I have run into seen some old posts from him on the Python list and now this. A simple Google search reveals he is an academic/writer from Norway but not much more.
- patrickg-zill 17y agoHe is a huge presence on comp.lang.lisp . Not sure about his prowess as a programmer however.
- c00p3r 17y ago"Worse Is Better" again? =)