No Humility Here

This also seems to be babbling, mostly, as far as I can tell.

Among many other mistakes, she is somehow analogizing the scarcity of attention and the need to parcel it out judiciously with the problem of students writing papers. Do professors not realize that in most cases that students must regurgitate in the simplest forms possible what professors “teach” them to have any hope of a good grade? You know, I’ve done the opposite and my grades were not good. In school, you are penalized for thinking for yourself or attempting novel ideas or interpretations. So exactly what did she think those papers would contain, exactly?

I’ve interviewed job applicants, and perceived them all as “bright and impressive”, but found that the vast majority of them could not solve a simple math problem. The ones who could solve the problem didn’t appear any “brighter” in conversation than the ones who couldn’t.

I guarantee that I could not solve that math problem, but I’d also be better at the job assuming I had any training for it than any of the other applicants, and if not I’d be better at it in a few months. Like Ice Cube, in most areas I can mess around and get a triple-double. All except math.

If one prizes writing over math, I bet I could summarize this person’s own work better — more cogently and with more clarity — than they themselves could. And faster, too.

But sure, math is all that matters. Unless the job directly involves teaching math or a lot of high-level math, why does she thinks this matters at all? Academia’s math obsession is completely bizarre. I guess it is because quantification is easy; you can solve the math problem or not. It might not tell you a goddamn thing, but, recursively enough, you can quantify if someone can quantify something.

The main problem with this whole post is that she conflates the ability to detect BS in GPT-2 results with performance on garbage, worthless essays and math problems that the person might not — probably does not — have any training to solve.

It doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s yet more babbling. Where’s the evidence that these ideas have any relation at all?

This is the kind of shit I mean when I say that smart people are just not very smart, in general. Sure, I am certain she is good at her job and all that. But like most people she has the systems thinking capability of a desiccated tadpole — and from reading the rest of her blog, she’s trying! But she’s just not very good at it (as most STEM types are not). She has good intentions, but the end result is no insight. Just babbling.