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by khazhoux 1468 days ago
> I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution.

I love this description and it matches my experience. Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped, and then with a sometimes endless series of commits at the end to patch up problems. The top engineers I've worked with (1-2 a decade) somehow just manage to avoid all that lost time.
2 comments
sinenomine 1468 days ago
> Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped

To a discerning eye this pattern looks like stronger minds implementing higher quality tree search[1], either through implementing higher quality neural search heuristics for tree pruning or via greater search depth.

Given relative NP-hardness of the problems[2] we are usually dealing with at our line of work and what we know about planning in machines and animals[3], it doesn't look immediately implausible.

With planning capability strong enough, one doesn't need trial and error in the real world for moderately complex problems: the plan devised through internal search is good enough to work on the first try. Weaker planners have to compensate by executing more rollouts and using the real world as a ground truth model.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265

2. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.13851

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deltaonefour 1468 days ago
And also it implies lack of creativity.. Novel solutions lie in places that aren't part of the efficient search and can be filtered out by heuristics. Some solutions can only be found by random walk similar to biology and natural selection.

Your train of thought fits with my statement on how there are two pillars of intelligence. Creativity and "lack of brain fog"

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deltaonefour 1468 days ago
Wait till you meet someone who is creative. These people are even rarer, and their solutions to problems tend to be like holy shit how can someone even think in that direction??

The one I knew actually had hugely novel solutions but was forgetful and absent minded.

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