Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.
I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.
But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.
I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
FWIW, I've been using AI, but instead of "max # of lines/commits", I'm optimising for "min # of pr comments/iterations/bugs". My goal is to end up with less/simpler code and more/bigger impact. The real goal is business value, and ultimately human value. Optimise for that, using AI where it fits.
Along those lines, some techniques I've been dabbling in:
1. Getting multiple agents to implement a requirement from scratch, them combining the best ideas from all of them with my own informed approach.
2. Gathering documentation (requirements, background info, glossaries, etc), targeting an Agent at it, and asking carefully selected questions for which the answers are likely useful.
3. Getting agents to review my code, abstracting review comments I agree with to a re-usable checklist of general guidelines, then using those guidelines to inform the agents in subsequent code reviews. Over time I hope this will make the code reviews increasingly well fitted to the code base and nature of the problems I work on.
Can you provide a link to this app?
Or alternately, share a few of the prompts by which you built it?
I only ask because, if it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!
TL;DR: To lose unwanted fat in a healthy, sustainable, frugal and environmentally-friendly way, follow a whole-food plant-based diet and maintain a calorie deficit over a long period of time by exercising vigorously on a daily basis and sticking to a healthy and enjoyable eating routine.
I think this skill could save time in a very rushed business environment.
A while back I wrote a prompt to build a script that runs git-reflog to get a the list of distinct authors. After a few small tweaks I got it roughly working. This took about 1 hour. Writing it myself would have definitely taken multiple hours, especially having to learn the details of git-reflog.
But that said I think it's mainly resume-building. ChatGPT isn't going to overall transform our productivity.
If you're looking to maximise employability / pay scale, maybe you can do some small side projects, just enough to showcase curiosity/open-mindedness.
Examples:
- Build a useful bash script using ChatGPT prompts and blog about it
- Build a text summariser component for your personal blog using Xenova / Transformers.js
- Build an email reply bot generator that uses ChatGPT prompt with sentiment analysis (doesn't have to actually send email, it could just do an API call to ChatGPT and print the message to the screen).
Just a few small examples and maybe a course or two (e.g. Prompt Engineering for Developers) should look great.
However I question how many companies really care about it right now. Most interviews I've done lately didn't bring it up even once.
But that said, maybe in a few months or year or so it will become more essential for most engineers.
> For most people—who won't solve complex math problems daily at work—the takeaway from learning math is not their mechanical ability at solving math problems. The takeaway is their understanding of math concepts and ideas, which will shape their thinking skills in general.
Agree, but for some others, there are real world consequences, e.g. whether they get accepted into a university or whether they can read and properly understand an academic paper.
I know what you mean, in fact I remember earlier on when I started the course, I had wanted to use these kinds of substitution techniques, etc. and thought I could finish the course in a few days. Boy was I wrong!
These techniques definitely won't work in a tough online multiple-choice test (of the kind I'm getting) where they deliberately sprinkle in subtle quirks to deceive you, which would require very disciplined algebra, fractions, powers, etc. to identify.
> this is one big hurdle in learning math backwards. You discover new missing pieces at every corner. Each missing piece leading to another missing piece.
Yes this is exactly what happening to me.
E.g. I got up to Week 2 of the course and suddenly made the big (to me) discovery that sqrt(a/b) = sqrt(a)/sqrt(b).
It seems trivial I know when you see it written like that, but the problem is to recognise and apply that principle in the context of a broader problem such as factoring.
> Just keep at it.
Thanks, this gives me confidence that I'm not wasting my time haha
I am beginning to get better at it, to the point that I can often work out why I got a question wrong on my own without referring to the answer.
> My guess is that most people hit a wall of abstraction at certain point.
I don't think it's a limit to their abstraction, I think it's that they didn't work properly on the fundamentals, so they had a superficial understanding of the abstractions.
To give a fitness analogy it's like trying to do heavy barbell presses before you can even do 10 pushups in a row.
My experience with programming is that once you get really really good with fundamentals you suddenly leap ahead and pick up new languages, paradigms, etc. incredibly fast.
Maybe this partly explains the 10x phenomenon - it's because they worked very hard on the fundamentals.
> Yep, this is the number one reason people think they aren’t suited for math. Everything is built on everything else, and if you missed anything you’re screwed. It takes a while to realise you are screwed, you can get by on rote for a surprising distance.
That's exactly what happened to me!
This is why I'm learning about differentiation yet struggling to factor simple fractions with a surd.