Hill climbing

1.Optimizing whatever is in front of you instead of asking whether it's the right thing: the algorithm that summits the nearest bump and declares victory. Applies to careers, startups, benchmark-chasing models, and, in this city specifically, walking.

Four promotions in five years. Wrong hill. The valley crossing is scheduled for his 35th birthday.

01Origin

The term is old computer science: greedy local search takes whichever step goes up, which reliably finds the top of the nearest hill and just as reliably misses the mountain. The local maximum is the entire joke, and SF, a city professionally obsessed with optimization, adopted the vocabulary of its failure mode.

Chris Dixon's 2009 essay "Climbing the wrong hill" made it a career doctrine: the ambitious operator who takes every locally optimal step (the promotion, the raise, the safer offer) ends up atop a respectable hill, staring across the valley at the one they meant to climb, no longer willing to descend. The essay recirculates every hiring cycle, forwarded by people actively accepting the promotion.

The AI era gave it a second job: labs hill-climb benchmarks the way careers hill-climb comp (see IQmog for what the summit flex looks like), and every eval chart is a hill someone chose because it was near. The escape move has a name too: a pivot is the claim that you are not descending, you are relocating to a better hill. And yes, in San Francisco the term is also literal: the city is made of hills, everyone climbs them daily, and the metaphor is enforced by terrain.

02Notable sightings

Ryo Lu · @ryolu_ · view on X
the 9-9-6 local maxima trap you can optimize for looking busy, hitting metrics, being “productive” – but you might be climbing the wrong hill entirely. real breakthroughs happen in the spaces between. when you’re walking and your mind wanders. when you sit with a problem long enough that the obvious solutions dissolve and something deeper emerges. when you have the luxury of thinking “what if we’re approaching this completely wrong?” my process is simple: i’ll open a Notion doc on my phone and just walk. sometimes for hours. the walking rhythm unlocks something – maybe it’s the bilateral movement, maybe it’s getting away from screens, but ideas start connecting in ways they never do at a desk. i’ll quickly jot stuff down as interesting thoughts pass. then i come back and just sit with the problem. draw some pictures, build it out a bit. no rushing to conclusions. no pressure to ship something by end of day. just... what is this, really? what can it connect to or evolve into? what would this look like if it were in its most beautiful configuration? once i see it clearly, execution becomes effortless. the focused bursts where you’re completely in flow – that’s when the real work happens. but you can’t force your way there. you have to earn it with the slow, patient thinking first. the irony is that this “inefficient” approach ships better stuff faster than grinding 12-hour days. but it requires believing that thinking time isn’t wasted time. that walking isn’t procrastination. that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to not do. many teams don’t get this. they need to see keyboards clicking and meetings happening. but the best work – the stuff that actually moves the needle – happens in the flow moments when no one’s watching.

Shirley Wu · @ShirleyYXWu · view on X
We have been hill climbing single-turn benchmarks for way too long Now the hill is flat It’s time to climb a bigger and steeper mountain

TimDarcet · @TimDarcet · view on X
In case there is any ambiguity: DINOv2 is 100% a product of dumb hill-climbing on ImageNet-1k knn accuracy (and linear too) Overfitting an eval can be bad. But sometimes the reward signal is reliable, and leads to truly good models. It's about finding a balance

More sightings on X →

03Spread the ism

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Hill climbing

01Origin

02Notable sightings

03Spread the ism

04See also