The Great AI Weirding
deliprao.substack.com
The Great AI Weirding
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Re: The Great AI Weirding
#2I thought this was going to be a biography of Weird Al
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#3The key, from my perspective, is to focus on real work which produces real value for other human beings. In an academic context I admit that it can be difficult to attach this value to your work.
As well, in this article, a person bemoans the opportunities their parents gave them; piano lessons, math competitions, etc. Even though they have clearly benefited from these advantages, it's unclear to me if the person acknowledges the position of privilege that such an upbringing grants.
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#4We, collectively as a community, are forced to play these stupid RL career games because if you refuse, you become illegible and, consequently, invisible to sources of physical, emotional, and intellectual sustenance. It’s like we are all trapped in vicious cycles of RL career games while hoovering up others in these cycles.
Once a critical threshold of people start playing these RL career games, these terrible metrics get elevated to some weird group fairness metrics for hiring/admissions/compensation decisions, no matter how inequitable these games are and how disparate the outcomes are. The metric has moved beyond convenience to something hard to root out. The terrible metric becomes tyrannical, and complaining about it makes you sound like someone who “blames the game for being a bad player”. Even if it was a game you never wanted to play, to begin with.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Hire illegible people. Someone is going to tell you can’t and cite vague legal reasons. Unless that person is an actual lawyer giving formal legal advice (or your boss) just ignore him.
As a general matter you should always ignore non-lawyers citing vague legal reasons for why you can’t do something.
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#5What is RL?
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#6H index? I see people caring far more about the quality of the conference for your paper. Paper at NeurIPS or ACL or EMNLP will be worth more than papers at 2nd rate venues. Usually researchers doing real SOTA work haven’t even had time for their other work to be cited heavily yet
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#7The open secret is that top-quartile R1 CS faculty positions aren't coveted anymore and don't attract the best like they used to.
The choice is now between increasingly tenuous/meaningless tenure after 5-10 years and a $500K/year lower bound for 10-12 years. That choice is... not a hard choice for anyone who values intellectual freedom. And the right answer sure as shit isn't the faculty position.
A good 50% of those faculty chasing chasing NeurIPS papers are doing so because at least once before going up for tenure they will apply for positions at big tech. They end up coming on not just non-executive, but often outside of management and at the bottom of the (Top IC)-[1-2] total comp band. If they net an offer they'll usually leave. The major barrier to an offer is usually ego and "is this personal actually humble enough to be useful to other people".
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#8What is RL?
Reinforcement learning
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#9tldr you cannot gradient descend to find the optimal human being.
this reminds me a lot of the recent book The Fund about Bridgewater Capital, where they tried to come up with hundreds of metrics to rate each employee on, and then they made employees constantly rate each other on an iPad with this custom software they spent massive sums of money building. If you didnt rate other people you got fired. After years and years of this it was just all abandoned, complete and total waste.
Re: The Great AI Weirding
#10tldr you cannot gradient descend to find the optimal human being. this reminds me a lot of the recent book The Fund about Bridgewater Capital, where they tried to come up with hundreds of metrics to rate each employee on, and then they made employees constantly rate each other on an iPad with this custom software they spent massive sums of money building. If you didnt rate other people you got fired. After years and…
I read the book about this in Principles. They rate all their decisions. It is hard to imagine how it works