The Bitter Lesson

Applied to Your Human Cognition

Rich Sutton explains in his 2019 essay “The Bitter Lesson”:

Clever tricks and handcrafted shortcuts in an attempt to make AI models better are not effective.

What is effective:

Scaling the compute devoted to search and learning.

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This lesson applies directly to your own human cognition

Clever tricks and shortcuts to success in life are not effective.

What is effective:

Scaling the cognitive energy you devote to attention and effort.

This is what every great human has done throughout history.

There are no shortcuts to success. You have to do the work. The work is applying your attention and effort to the task at hand.