Taylorism is a management philosophy based on using scientific optimization to maximize labor productivity and economic efficiency.
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@ForeverExpat @fuzzychef @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
Yeah, all that is the non-ridiculous sales pitch for LLMs. And maybe…occasionally? But there’s real substance in these supposedly menial tasks.Summarization, for example, is deep: it requires deciding what the central idea is. People who’ve systematically studied LLMs summarization concluded that they’re •terrible• at that. Unless you’re a very slow writer, •that• is the time — not sentence-forming.
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@ForeverExpat @fuzzychef @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
Now think of the •cost• of mis-summarizing. A manager gets an LLM summary that misses the main idea, fails to take some crucial action, and… It’s everything that’s already broken in orgs, but faster and even •more• broken.What people are re-learning with LLMs is that cleaning up bad work is •costly•. A day’s work only hours!…plus, later on, weeks or months of mop-up.
Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])
In most cases, LLMs will not replace humans or reduce labor costs as companies hope. They will •increase• labor costs, in the form of tedious clean-up and rebuilding customer trust. After a brief sugar high in which LLMs rapidly and easily create messes that look like successes, a whole lot of orgs are going to find themselves climbing out of deep holes of their own digging. Example from @[email protected]: https://aus.social/@Joshsharp/112646263257692603
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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@inthehands @ForeverExpat @fuzzychef @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus I was just reading an article that pointed to this paper as something to be aware of in the term of LLMs and long term decay in their efficacy in a continuous learning setting.
IMO unless companies want to continuously reinvest to keep these expensive models up to date and ready for their context aware domain ... there is a really high barrier to entry for costs, arguable return for value, and a host of other reasons to be concerned be it legal, moral, ethical, etc.
LLMs aren't "fire and forget" just like any other technology investment made in the past (tongue-in-cheek since nothing is...). Really hope industry leaders and practitioners give that some serious noodling before signing their pocket books away to a long term contract ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07711-7
"Loss of plasticity in deep continual learning" -
@gregdosh “Really hope industry leaders and practitioners give that some serious noodling before signing their pocket books away to a long term contract”
PAUL: [snorts in veteran developer]
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@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus /Proofs and Refutations/ is a wonderful book.
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@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Pickering’s /The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science/¹ is along similar lines, using the example of the bubble chamber (invented because Glaser wanted to do lab-top science, but ended up inventing a symbol of Big Science) and Hamilton’s quaternions (he was trying to solve a completely different problem).
¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/556449.The_Mangle_of_Practice
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@inthehands @fuzzychef @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
1st, the cost of revising a text by an expert is less work than the cost of writing from scratch. Of course you should never just pass off LLM output without applying some expertise. Still revising the output saves you anywhere from 20-80% of the time.
2nd, you overestimate the importance of precision for most info worker tasks. Summarizations by definition leave out details - which ones are important is ALWAYS going to be debatable. -
@ForeverExpat
“the cost of revising a text by an expert is less work than the cost of writing from scratch”Heh, wow, that’s…preposterous. I think this discussion ends with us just parting ways here.
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@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus FYI: here’s my summary of what Pickering says about quaternions: http://www.exampler.com/old-blog/2004/02/13/index.html
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@marick
That sounds quite interesting. Thanks for the recommendation! -
@marick @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
Nice writeup, lovely example! Brings this passage to mind:“Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.”
“On the other hand, once you have made your choices…then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back!”
https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf
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@inthehands @dalias @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Well, given corporate performance recently across the industry, you CAN make a strong case for LLMs replacing CEOs.
(Mostly because the average CEO is a platinum-spoon baby who is utterly unqualified for the job.)
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@fuzzychef
It’s probably not a coincidence (but probably sample bias) that all the really excellent CEOs I’ve interacted with have run fairly small companies. -
Carl T. Bergstromreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
"The fundamental task of software development is not writing out the syntax that will execute a program. The task is to build a mental model of that complex system, make sense of it, and manage it over time."
YES!
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands @ct_bergstrom the worst part is how often those people are supposedly experienced practitioners of the job they do poorly understand
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@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Since you said that nice thing, may I present my sole academic sociology publication: “Agile Software Development: A Manglish Way of Working”¹, in a followup book collection: /The Mangle IN Practice/² (2009).
¹https://user.fm/files/v2-21dcabb6abbfd8ebc5fabfe1e6f8fa65/marick-truly-final-dammit.pdf
²https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-mangle-in-practice -
@marick @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
“The Mangle of Practice” and its subsequent line of thought (including your essay) are all new to me. Thanks for the introduction! -
Adrian Segarreplied to Carl T. Bergstrom last edited by
@ct_bergstrom @inthehands @jenniferplusplus When I taught computer science from 1983-93 we called this approach "systems analysis", and taught students (as best we could) how to do it.
What happens these days?
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@ASegar @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
Well, if you’re a student in my department, it’s woven into the fabric from the start — and a little more so every year, any time I get a chance to lay hands on part of the curriculum.But the truth is that you never really truly absorb it until you’ve lived with it for a while out in the wild. I see our job as educators as being not to bypass the maturation that comes from experience, but to expedite it.