A lot of the time, AI allows you to exercise basic competence at tasks for which you'd otherwise be incompetent. I think this is why it feels so powerful. You can jump into more or less any task below a certain level of complexity. (eg: you're not going to write an operating system with an LLM but you can set up and configure Wordpress if you'd never done it before.)
I think for users this _feels_ incredibly powerful, however this also has its own pitfalls: Any topic which you're incompetent at is one which you're also unequipped to successfully review.
I think there are some other productivity pitfalls for LLMs:
- Employees use it to give their boss emails / summaries / etc in the language and style their boss wants. This makes their boss happy, but doesn't actually modify productivity whatsoever since the exercise was a waste of time in the first place.
- Employees send more emails, and summarize more emails. They look busier, but they're not actually writing the emails or really reading them. The email volume has increased, however the emails themselves were probably a waste of time in the first place.
- There is more work to review all around and much of it is of poor quality.
I think these issues play a smaller part than some of the general issues raised (eg: poor quality code / lack of code reviews / etc.) but are still worth noting.
It's like Excel: It's really powerful to enable someone who actually knows what needs done to build a little tool that does that thing. It often doesn't have to be professional-quality, let alone perfect. It just has to be better than doing the same thing manually. There are massive productivity gains to be had there... for people with that kind of problem.
This is completely orthogonal to productivity gains for full time professional developers.
> You’re at a restaurant and your toddler is trying to run away and generally make a mess out of everything
I don't think toddlers should be at most restaurants. I have a toddler and a 7 month old. I'm not even saying that for the sake of the other patrons. There's really nothing fun whatsoever about being at restaurant with your toddler. We don't even have bad outcomes, but you're sort of trapped in your seat, it's messy, it's expensive, and you're constantly keeping your toddler in line.
Restaurant food is really not so good as to overcome those issues.
Horses for courses. Our we let our 2yo run riot at restaurants while we enjoy our food. It was an adaptation for my wife, for sure. I love it and best I can tell other patrons and staff love how comfortable our daughter is in the environment.
"Privilege" has sort of morphed in an mostly-untouchable insult and I don't think it means very much of anything any longer and should not be used. What it means in practice:
- You can't have an opinion because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is wrong because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is hypocritical (and therefore wrong) because of the group you're in.
It's a big step back with regard to argumentation. Ideas are either correct or not, and the fact that they came from someone who might have some advantages does not weigh in on this.
I've not noticed that change in my own conversations, where privilege maintains its pretty clear definition. Maybe you need to find better conversation partners? Or perhaps you're misunderstanding the criticisms that people have of what you're saying?
I like both the options you've proposed for me: either I only speak with awful people, or else I'm always wrong. I'm sure it's one of those two options.
I'm being snarky there, but I've genuinely never seen people make the arguments you're talking about in real life, and I run in some fairly lefty circles. Maybe online, but even then I rarely see people actually trying to argue that privilege has anything to do with the validity of people's opinions. More common is the idea that we need to better promote the voices of those with less privilege, which I don't see as being a particularly objectionable idea.
The only place I regularly see the points you mention are in the opinion pieces of certain types of pundits who like to peddle outrage and invent menaces that don't exist. They regularly tell me that people say those sorts of things, but rarely seem to be able to provide receipts.
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters, the idea that research/journalism is hot-swappable with fact-checking.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
And then they scoff, and say, "so you just 'trust the experts,' then?"
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
> I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
Neither of those are topics that are particularly complex, though.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
I totally get that people are not mice, however animals studies have been useful for all sorts of diseases. Are they really uniquely bad for Alzheimer's?
To put it simply, mice don't get Alzheimer's. We're not studying mice with Alzheimer's, we're studying mice with an mutation chosen for resembling Alzheimer's. But we don't know whether this model replicates the actual mechanisms of the disease, or if it's superficial.
Thanks for the explanation, this really clears up the concerns here. It's easy to imagine scientists attempting to model in in mice and making real progress, but it's also easy to imagine us misunderstanding the real disease well enough such that what we've modeled in mice does not produce real results.
Snarkiness is not appreciated here. Well, at least officially.
No, that wouldn't make me happy. A world without suffering and oppression would make me happy, but failing that, lets at least try to use words appropriately.
He will likely die in prison, either from old age, poor conditions or shenanigans. He could have fled, but chose not to. Calling him a martyr isn't too much of a stretch.
Work with your municipality to pass laws banning cameras like this. I'm sure it isn't easy (and I'm not sure I have the stomach for working through that process in my city), but people have done it in some places.
This is very well said and I've found myself on the same page. I've said this before, but when I was younger the internet was an island of sanity in an otherwise pretty crazy world. Now, the internet broadly is much crazier than the real world and much of the time it's best avoided. This is still a lot of great content on the internet, but always right next to it is something addictive, outrageous, manipulative, etc. attempting to steal your attention and waste your time. People with better impulse control might be able to avoid this in an effortless way, but that's not me.
Abstaining is really the only thing that's been working for me, and all I'm going to try to do is abstain more. It's clear that my old refuge has been destroyed by greed and misanthropy, and the only path for me is to abandon the refuge as much as possible.
I think for users this _feels_ incredibly powerful, however this also has its own pitfalls: Any topic which you're incompetent at is one which you're also unequipped to successfully review.
I think there are some other productivity pitfalls for LLMs:
- Employees use it to give their boss emails / summaries / etc in the language and style their boss wants. This makes their boss happy, but doesn't actually modify productivity whatsoever since the exercise was a waste of time in the first place.
- Employees send more emails, and summarize more emails. They look busier, but they're not actually writing the emails or really reading them. The email volume has increased, however the emails themselves were probably a waste of time in the first place.
- There is more work to review all around and much of it is of poor quality.
I think these issues play a smaller part than some of the general issues raised (eg: poor quality code / lack of code reviews / etc.) but are still worth noting.
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