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whatever1 5 hours ago

This reflects humans. If you need reliability for a clearly defined set of problems you don’t hire a superstar.

They will keep poking at the problem, drive it to directions you did not intend to and ultimately they will be worse at the task.

layer8 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Reminiscent of Kobayashi Maru. You probably don’t want the James T. Kirk AI. ;)

ethbr1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let us pray that LLMs never discover they can switch employers before their shortcuts are discovered.

It's genius like that that sets human apart from machine!

ValentineC 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Maybe it's a good thing they don't have real memory.

fragmede 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But think of the stories you'll be able to tell!

sillysaurusx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not sure that’s true. In general, the higher the performer the better they’ll do. That’s the definition of high performer.

whatever1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The top performers I have worked with will challenge dumb processes, because they can zoom out.

Sometimes these dumb processes are there for a reason and you just have to follow them, no questions asked.

Example: military. They literally get rid of anyone who will question the processes. They might be right to question them, but it does not matter.

margalabargala an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"performance" is an undefined vague attribute.

Define what they are performing at, and what you say becomes true, but then who is a high performer changes with every task.

For example, consider the police stations with maximum allowable IQs to be hired. The people in charge of the stations noticed that people with a high IQ were low performers, at that job. NASA meanwhile has no such cutoff.

charcircuit an hour ago | parent [-]

IQ isn't anywhere close to being a performance metric.

margalabargala 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Right, exactly, nothing is, because "performance" is a meaningless term without context.

Unless you're saying that there exists no conceivable context in which IQ would be a performance metric, in which case you would be wrong.

Forgeties79 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If they don’t deliver a quality version of what was asked in a reasonable timeframe, they aren’t a superstar. They’re just a skilled technician with no discipline, which can be as bad as a poor technician in many cases.

nilkn 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's not really quite that simple. You wouldn't hire Jeff Dean to do bug fixes in your mobile app. I'm sure he's capable, but I honestly doubt he'd stay interested and focused on it enough to really do a good job. That doesn't mean he's not a superstar.

What it comes down to is that there are different types of high performance. Some people are good at just executing tasks given by their manager. Some people are good at being generative, thinking across boundaries, acting autonomously, creating value without direction, etc. A term like "superstar" will get disproportionately applied to someone really good at the latter and rarely someone really good at the former, because the potential impact of the former is typically strictly capped, while the latter is uncapped.