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The rise of judgement over technical skill

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Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#41

Post by kragen »

dwoldrich wrote: post #39

AI enables me to gold plate _everything_ I do, which feels exhilarating, if a bit exhausting. Having decent taste and being able to continuously test and verify my work allows me to smooth over the occasional hallucinations and elicit towering, mind-bending solutions. AI's no replacement for experience; garbage in-garbage out. When AI gets too good, I figure people will cloister to stop feeding the beast. It can only…

Can you elaborate? What kinds of things are you doing, maybe something related to programming? What part of the job do you delegate?

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#42

Post by kragen »

Wololooo wrote: post #36
physicsguy wrote: post #28

A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and cou…

Reminds me of that concept that I saw pop up in HEP in recent years between "users" and "experts". This distinction in that case is so dumb I cannot wrap my head around it: You first encounter the code, are unfamiliar with it but very quickly you become expert in order to solve your problem and advance the thing forward. It does not matter which codebase you start on, what matters is that you understand what the actu…

High-energy physics?

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#43

Post by layer8 »

dwoldrich wrote: post #39

AI enables me to gold plate _everything_ I do, which feels exhilarating, if a bit exhausting. Having decent taste and being able to continuously test and verify my work allows me to smooth over the occasional hallucinations and elicit towering, mind-bending solutions. AI's no replacement for experience; garbage in-garbage out. When AI gets too good, I figure people will cloister to stop feeding the beast. It can only…

What do you mean by gold-plating? What does not gold-plating look like?

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#45

Post by k__ »

I think, the argument would make more sense if software like Cubase came with unlicenced samples from all songs out of the box. Artists sued and won when someone used their samples without permission.

If you use AI to create art, it's like that.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#46

Post by CuriouslyC »

k__ wrote: post #45

I think, the argument would make more sense if software like Cubase came with unlicenced samples from all songs out of the box. Artists sued and won when someone used their samples without permission. If you use AI to create art, it's like that.

There's a difference between a sample and something inspired by something but also significantly different. The copyright laws around music are kind of draconian so it's not a good analogy for code anyhow, imagine a world where a fundamental do while loop had 90 year copyright protection, and that's the sort of world we'd be living in if code copyright was like music copyright.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#47

Post by apwell23 »

drewcoo wrote: post #33
mehulashah wrote: post #4

I would argue that this is already true in roles where one supervises the work of another person with skill. Great leaders, for example, were once practitioners. Over time their skills may fade, but their judgment makes them effective and able to the scale their impact.

In software, we promote good engineers to management, effectively accelerating the Peter Principle. It doesn't have to be that way. Management skills are not an outgrowth of the skills of the managed, but orthogonal to them. This is similar to the lesson many PhD candidates I've known learn: expertise in their field is not pedagogical expertise. Companies who promoted from within used to provide training for new mana…

> In software, we promote good engineers to management

i've not seen this. Infact its the opposite.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#48

Post by Wololooo »

kragen wrote: post #42
Wololooo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of that concept that I saw pop up in HEP in recent years between "users" and "experts". This distinction in that case is so dumb I cannot wrap my head around it: You first encounter the code, are unfamiliar with it but very quickly you become expert in order to solve your problem and advance the thing forward. It does not matter which codebase you start on, what matters is that you understand what the actu…

High-energy physics?

Yes, sorry I should not have abbreviated that... Professional deformation...

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#49

Post by mihaaly »

physicsguy wrote: post #28

A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and cou…

Education itself is supposed to teach us learning, not the mere facts/methods, not just the hard knowledge. Hard knowledge comes with it anyway as some sort of 'side product'. You cant learn on nothing, something will be used for it, that something forms the hard knowledge eventually. Typically broad set but shallow hard knowledge.

Ironicly, this is what I feel chipping away in modern collaborative developments. The appreciation of learning capability. In the self interest of the organization (short term self interest, long term is too unpredictable, so does not exists in the practice) specific technical knowledge parcticed individuals are sought out for the purpose of easy replacement: not to be dependent on personnel, have it like a plug and play component. The ability to learn is not valuable while inside the organization. Should be practiced enough for years beforehand and applied intensely after joined. For the sake of claiming evolving organization the teaching may be outsourced in a very limited time to some sort of external enterprise making money on disseminating hard knowledge with made up examples or generic (artificial) applicability, instead of doing it in the actual context of the organization. Be part of the organization. Daily. Application of the new hard knowledge in the specific context of the organization will be casual by the random enthusiast. If they can break through of the company policy and established ways of management. Eventually the policies and practicies must be rigid as well, shouldn't they, so the personnel working in the management could be as easily replacable as the foot soldiers of code. For the sake of the organization. Call this approach the Organization Oriented Development.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#50

Post by lordnacho »

Judgement and technical skill go hand in hand. Technology merely moves the boundary of what is considered judgement, and what is considered technical skill.

I know someone who wrote programs in the punch-card era. Back then, technical skill meant being diligent and thoughtful enough that you avoided most bugs when writing the program. If you screwed this up, you had to wait for another time slot. What does this mean for the complexity of programs you could write? Well, it means you are quite limited. You can't build judgement about things above what is now considered a very basic program.

I learned to program before the AI era that seems to be nascent. Technical skill means things like being able to write programs in python and c++, getting many computers to work together, being able to find hints when something goes wrong, and so on. Judgement now covers things like how a large swarm of programs interact, which was not really in scope for punch-card guy.

Now AI arrives, and it appears that we are free from technical skill problems. Indeed, it does fix a lot of my little syntax issues, but actually it just moves the goalposts. There's soon going to be no excuse for spending time working out the syntax for a lambda function, you'll be expected to generate a much more complicated product, for which you will need an even higher overview to say you are providing judgement.

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