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Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

tucker.wales

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Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#71

Post by scared_together »

tuckerwales wrote: post #69
scared_together wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops. > Asking it requires skill. Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this. > and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece. Prompt your LLM of choic…

Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword. I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback.

I believe there is a societal problem here, not specific to your particular actions. The expectation that communications should be “cleaned up” and “professional” in the first place comes from a bygone era. In the 2010s and earlier removing all typos, fixing wording, formatting the text and adding images were all signals that someone put extra care into sending their message. But in the present that just indicates use of AI.

You mentioned in another comment that your hand-drawn images would be “far worse”. Leaving aside whether any images were needed at all, a hand-drawn scribble in the 2010s might be unprofessional but in the present day there’s an AI generated image on every visible surface. A hand-drawn image, even a bad one, would actually make you stand out.

Even if you want to present the cleaned up version, you could also provide the original audio.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#72

Post by jaggederest »

torginus wrote: post #70
jaggederest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly,…

Any workable management approach relies on not managing down further than your direct reports, and believing what they say. Otherwise you've eliminated that layer of middle management, and have to do their work. It might happen that this is the correct approach, and how to slice things up is often an eternal argument both on an organizational level and technical level. Unfortunately that gives a lot of power to the m…

That's why sometimes new management comes in and cleans house at the direct report level so they have people they know they can trust.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#73

Post by tuckerwales »

scared_together wrote: post #71
tuckerwales wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword. I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback. I believe there is a societal problem here, not specific to your particular actions. The expectation that communications should be “cleaned up” and “professional” in the first place comes from a bygone era. In the 2010s and earlier removing all typos, fixing wording, formatting the text and adding images were all signals that someone put extra care into sending…

Appreciate the feedback and I don't necessarily disagree with your points - the societal argument is an interesting one.

I do think it's interesting that some people are immediately turned off of something because of the whiff of AI even if they like the actual idea or content.

Will likely experiment with different ways of writing in the future!

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#74

Post by chrisweekly »

jedberg wrote: post #54

My last few jobs I started with a listening tour. I talked to everyone who was relevant to the job and asked them: - what is going well, - what is not going well -what do hope that I will fix -what should I do -what should I not do I put those question in the agenda for the meeting invite so they could come prepared. Then we took the conversation from there. I put it all into a google doc, then synthesized it into su…

Great approach - I'd add a key one: "Who else should I talk to / who is (regardless of title) effectively responsible for X?"

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#75

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

jaggederest wrote: post #40
tracerbulletx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great philosophy for anyone who is pretending to know what they're doing that will still result in the plane crashing because you need to know how to fly a plane to fly a plane, and you need to know how to run a business to run a business.

On the other hand, because you've run business A, doesn't mean you have a clue how business B is actually working. I've seen that one more than a few times too. Sometimes the plane is going to crash and the best you can do is a soft landing.

Ok but also one surefire way to crash a plane is to enter the cockpit and start perturbing things.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#76

Post by eudamoniac »

massysett wrote: post #57
arnorhs wrote: post #23

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-…

Why would I not just type in "how do I correctly balance towards action in a new role" into chatgpt and read that instead? I have no signal that the author did anything beyond that himself.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#77

Post by tuckerwales »

eudamoniac wrote: post #76
massysett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-…

Why would I not just type in "how do I correctly balance towards action in a new role" into chatgpt and read that instead? I have no signal that the author did anything beyond that himself.

Apart from years of experience and thinking about this problem, dictating my thoughts into my phone and transcribing and posting...

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#78

Post by eudamoniac »

tuckerwales wrote: post #77
eudamoniac wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I not just type in "how do I correctly balance towards action in a new role" into chatgpt and read that instead? I have no signal that the author did anything beyond that himself.

Apart from years of experience and thinking about this problem, dictating my thoughts into my phone and transcribing and posting...

How would I discern that from the AI slop images and AI formatting? What you just said is not signal, it's things you privately know. There are a lot of blogs out there. You need to appear superficially worth reading before I know your biography and work processes.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#79

Post by tuckerwales »

eudamoniac wrote: post #78
tuckerwales wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from years of experience and thinking about this problem, dictating my thoughts into my phone and transcribing and posting...

How would I discern that from the AI slop images and AI formatting? What you just said is not signal, it's things you privately know. There are a lot of blogs out there. You need to appear superficially worth reading before I know your biography and work processes.

Respectfully, I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read. Have a great day!

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#80

Post by eudamoniac »

tuckerwales wrote: post #79
eudamoniac wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would I discern that from the AI slop images and AI formatting? What you just said is not signal, it's things you privately know. There are a lot of blogs out there. You need to appear superficially worth reading before I know your biography and work processes.

Respectfully, I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read. Have a great day!

"You need to..." implies "for me to read it", me possibly being a proxy for others, and nothing more. So responding to "You need to do X for me to read it" with " I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read." is just restating my comment tautologically. I think you are taking my criticism personally, but it's not personal or even related to the content because I don't know you and I didn't read it. I am just giving you the feedback that AI writing is a negative signal that is going to make a lot of people not read the thing, not because it's annoying to read, but just because there's no inherent indication that anyone thought through this text like there usually is when something is published.

Also, you engaged with my comment, not I with yours, and I attempted to converse with you, but you then exited superciliously (below) without engaging with or even acknowledging my point. You don't need to say goodbye online if you don't want to discuss what I'm saying.

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