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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

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Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#151

Post by joshstrange »

I have no doubt AI is acceleration or continuing out march into isolation. I also have no idea how to combat the root issue (since stopping the progress of science has never really worked or been possible).

This has been going on for quite some time, you can find lots of people talking about things like disappearing "third place/space"'s [0]. The trend seems to be fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, something I've been guilty of as well. We have unlimited opportunities for both entertainment and pursuing our interests. COVID also was like pouring gas on this with people isolating and some people never "reintegrated" afterwards. A general lack of community is the root issue from my perspective but how to best encourage/build that is something I struggle with.

I've seen some theorize the need for everything to be in service of growing the economy, everything needing to be turned into a side-hustle or monetized in some way is to blame. I can believe that, so often things feel like a zero-sum game and the fatigue from that is real. I can't tell you how many times I've started writing software (before or after LLMs) and found myself lost (in the very early stages) thinking about monetization or thinking about "how will this scale?", "How could I make this configurable for people who want to use this differently than I do?", etc, all _before_ there is a viable piece of software to use. Once I realize what I'm doing it's maddening. It's the "planning for how to handle 1M simultaneous users when you don't have 1".

LLMs have let me break from that thinking, design software just for my needs, which is freeing in many ways and I love what I've been able to do but also isolating. More and more I find myself wanting to fork "ideas" not code. Why would I want to try to participate in someone else's vibe/llm-assisted project instead of just making my own? I feel that pull and I also feel like it's wrong or misguided.

I have no answers here, just noting I'm seeing and experiencing this and I don't know how to stop it.

I'll end with a quote that Aaron Sorkin has written into multiple of his TV shows:

    It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.

    — Aaron Sorkin
[0] For those not familiar, my quick summary of the idea is that we normally have home and work but also a third place we go. For some that's a church or similar, for some it's community center, for other's it's some kind of community they are apart of.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#152

Post by neutronicus »

tchalla wrote: post #126
neutronicus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this. The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's goi…

It’s not about being in your lane. It’s about approaching things with an open mind plus the desire to solve the problem instead or proving yourself right.

Yeah, I guess my point is that IMO a lot of people have so little interest in solving the problem that they aren't even approaching it at all, open mind or no.

It's not my experience that I'm constantly arguing with people, for what it's worth. I get positive feedback for being willing to work on areas of the codebase I'm not already familiar with, and develop an understanding of areas of the codebase no one is familiar with.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#153

Post by PunchTornado »

wrsh07 wrote: post #106
nicce wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these "is this AI" checkers should be banned, as they never can reach 100% accuracy.

This is a truely bizarre claim. Imagine if one said: "Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"

Imagine writing an article in 5 days. Working hard. Posting it online and then everyone says it is ai and laughs and dismisses it because a tool says it is AI.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#154

Post by surajrmal »

Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

I saw this happen a bit earlier this year, but most everyone I work with has learned that it was foolish. The feedback that they are doing something wrong needs to be explicit and strong. We're all going through a learning curve and establishing cultural norms is important at this time.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#155

Post by soulbadguy »

bunderbunder wrote: post #101
fidotron wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.

I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain common, basic misconceptions about my area of expertise to me. (And it got so much worse once they started using LLMs to aid them in their efforts. Glazing as a service is a hell of a d…

> Glazing as a service is a hell of a drug.

You my friend made my day.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#156

Post by surajrmal »

deadbabe wrote: post #107
Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

At some point, LLMs will be a far better source of truth, and then this distaste of people “outside their domains” is really just going to be a sort of snobbery from people who have had experience in a domain for a long time, (but they still have the same level of knowledge and insight as a person who just used an LLM to research). These people are basically nascent “human supremacists”, who believe that only raw hum…

If I talk to a professor about their field of expertise, does that empower me to talk with other professors in that field on an equal level?

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#157

Post by teiferer »

mccoyb wrote: post #55

AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc. Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it. Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially…

> But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain.

I think the article's point is more nuanced. Short term, the human brain as the "conductor" can keep up and an expert can see whether the machine did a good job and course correct if necessary. Over time though that degrades more and more.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#158

Post by zzzeek »

kaffekaka wrote: post #137
zzzeek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i had that experience with them a few years ago but not these days. The models are being improved constantly, so here my "non expert hunch" is that...well, two things. either the models are getting better at sycophancy, OR, I myself am getting better at prompting - because I don't "argue" with a model. I'd still love to chew on some specific examples though.

A typical example is when discussing some issue where there is no clear right or wrong. Architectural decisions for example. Then it is easy to use an LLM to produce arguments for your opinion. It is also easy to do this without realizing it because you do not understand the issue enough yourself so you do not know what questions to ask or how the actual circumstances affect the choices.

well sure. I'm pretty sure if someone came to me with an architectural opinion in my field that an unknowledgable person got by coaxing an LLM into sycophancy, I'd be able to counter them effectively. if they are just refusing to listen then they're just a toxic person which is nothing new.

So I guess this all goes into the familiar "LLMs allow people who are shitty at to produce 10x the shitty output". this is a failure mode we're going to have to learn to mitigate

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#159

Post by claiir »

teiferer wrote: post #147
foolinaround wrote: post #138

Beautifully written essay. The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so). The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output? Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know…

> Beautifully written essay. Agreed! Great flow, structure, no BS, really good! I would wager this didn't use LLM help to be written. Though if I'm wrong I'd really like to know and would be very impressed. (And if I'm right then the article is an illustration of its own message. You don't learn how to write such essays without having practised it for many years without opting for the easy way of letting the LLM do t…

From the post, “and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus.” That’s a Claude sentence.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#160

Post by gowld »

varjag wrote: post #41
Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.

Currently, the leader of USA national AI policy (Trump admin and OpenAI) is a history Bachelors with no technical training or advanced training of any kind, Dean Ball.
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