Bitter Pill

The bitter pill to swallow is this: we must abandon our preconceived notions.

In Zen, there is the concept of Mu (無) — often translated as “nothing” or “negation.” When a student asked Master Zhaozhou whether a dog has Buddha-nature, he replied simply: “Mu.”

This was not a yes. It was not a no. It was an invitation to let go of the question itself.

Rich Sutton’s “bitter lesson” in AI research echoes this ancient wisdom. Time and again, general methods that leverage computation have proven more effective than human-engineered solutions. The methods that scale — that learn from data rather than from our assumptions — are the ones that succeed.

The bitter pill is that our intuitions, our carefully crafted heuristics, our domain expertise… these often hold us back.

To make progress, we must practice Mu.

Let go of what you think you know.