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Anger, Anxiety and Agency

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Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#21

Post by haxiomic »

junon wrote: post #17
linuxhansl wrote: post #12

I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration. Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us. Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire? Frustration: This could be a time of fun and explorat…

More on the frustration: this person with no real world experience is hired and all of a sudden sending me six page articles they themselves couldn't fathom writing and they're lauded by founders and celebrated as pioneers of the company. Nobody in that chain could pick out a race condition from a lineup of cat feces. And I'm the "bad guy" for poking holes in all of the Groundbreaking Computer Science being done. Tha…

Exactly this, so often the content is wrong or simply misunderstood and the AI sycophancy is trusted over devs who do know their craft

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#22

Post by dgellow »

jszymborski wrote: post #3

> Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And well at least someone at Meta wants that. > [...] > My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, ins…

> I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.

That’s really the thing. If you understand how badly a few people are accumulating resources and power through the build up of AI, with the very explicit goal to make most people’s life worse, you have to be angry. Its a rational reaction. It doesn’t have to be tamed through an analytical process

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#23

Post by garlic_enjoyer »

Noaidi wrote: post #13

Anger and anxiety are normal responses to abnormal and dangerous situations. They should not be changed or ignored, they should be used. This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.

>But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing something to you.

>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?

The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.

You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#24

Post by 12ags7 »

garlic_enjoyer wrote: post #23
Noaidi wrote: post #13

Anger and anxiety are normal responses to abnormal and dangerous situations. They should not be changed or ignored, they should be used. This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.

>But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing something to you. >Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your…

Get out the E-Meter! This feels like a Scientology audit.

Tell us what we can do against the mindless slop! DDoS Anthropic?

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#27

Post by jondlm »

Good article! I agree that curiosity is a wonderful place to land.

However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.

In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#29

Post by jjulius »

tptacek wrote: post #18

The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry. People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature. (There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from unders…

Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be. The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#30

Post by qudat »

As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.

I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.

The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.

So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.

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