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Mitchell Hashimoto Says Top Performers Often Hide Their Intelligence
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Mitchell Hashimoto argues that many highly successful people across industries are very smart, even when they present themselves as unserious, and reacts to a clip of Ben Affleck discussing his machine learning knowledge.
Original post · 1 min read
An uncomfortable truth for a lot of people is that a lot of the most successful people in any industry are wicked smart. We apply stereotypes based on the loudest people, but its not representative of norms. Most are crazy smart and got to where they are because of it.
I grew up in LA, one of my parents was a TV producer, my wife was an actor, many friends "in the industry." I've been constantly surrounded by it, and some of the stupidest seeming people (cause its their bit) are actually insanely smart and strategic in private. It sometimes is just beneficial for various reasons to... not show that side of you.
My favorite anecdote was when a friend (a model) was dating a phD in physics and a very rude person made some off the cuff degrading comment to model friend about it without realizing model friend has their own phD in math lol. You wouldn't know from their instagram though!
For the quoted video, I don't know Ben Affleck. I don't know how deep his knowledge goes. He's almost certainly not going to be more knowledgable than someone who professionally does this area of work full time, but he also to me on the surface sounds like someone who knows a LOT more than the average person and possibly even the average software engineer (on this topic).
Anyways, this applies to tech too. I see it constantly.
I grew up in LA, one of my parents was a TV producer, my wife was an actor, many friends "in the industry." I've been constantly surrounded by it, and some of the stupidest seeming people (cause its their bit) are actually insanely smart and strategic in private. It sometimes is just beneficial for various reasons to... not show that side of you.
My favorite anecdote was when a friend (a model) was dating a phD in physics and a very rude person made some off the cuff degrading comment to model friend about it without realizing model friend has their own phD in math lol. You wouldn't know from their instagram though!
For the quoted video, I don't know Ben Affleck. I don't know how deep his knowledge goes. He's almost certainly not going to be more knowledgable than someone who professionally does this area of work full time, but he also to me on the surface sounds like someone who knows a LOT more than the average person and possibly even the average software engineer (on this topic).
Anyways, this applies to tech too. I see it constantly.
Fireside Alpha @firesidealphaBen Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do…
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