"Bitter Lesson" goes mainstream: a reading list on why SF AI circles believe what they believe
Afinetheorem · x · 2026-09-23
Economist Matthew Yglesias urged people to get "Bitter Lesson"-pilled — referencing Richard Sutton's famous thesis that general methods leveraging compute ultimately beat hand-crafted approaches. Afinetheorem quoted the tweet, noting the idea has crossed into the mainstream (with a wink at Sutton's controversial AI ethics views), and shared the short reading list given to students explaining "why SF believes what it believes."
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