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'Hey Number 17 '

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Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#111

Post by sangnoir »

phillipcarter wrote: post #18

Consider nearly any professional sports team and the relative effort that athletes put in. There's very little disagreeing on objectives our outcomes (score/prevent points, win games) and incentives are directly tied to this (win more games, get more money). And yet when you listen to what some of the highest-performing athletes say, they'll readily admit they don't go 100% effort 100% of the time. In fact, that's of…

> In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do because you can burn out quickly

Bingo! Sport's teams avoid burning out the talent, because they are hard to replace. Corporates are ambivalent at best, with most accepting some churn for higher profitability. They may even pay for mental health benefits to ameliorate the effects, but remain happy with a "high performance" burnout culture where people cycle out after 18-24 months.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#112

Post by zafka »

Damn!! For the longest time, when asked to leave a number by a voice mail I have used 17. Now while perusing the comments here, I find out it is the most commonly picked number. There goes my perceived sense of originality. Sigh......

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#113

Post by rudasn »

makeitdouble wrote: post #106
causal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like this exist because of people who don't take Goodhart's law seriously. Turn efficiency into a convenient metric, target that metric, and next thing you know problems keep cropping up despite your efficiency numbers being so high!

I think it's more a leftover of Taylorism, where you cut tasks into bits small enough to not need craft and have an army of untrained and exchangeable workers do it. Workers don't have enough agency to significantly pervert the metrics. They can cut corners and/or work slower, but that's not inherently related to the metrics, and there is no long term view for the workers in the first place.

Scientific Management. It's one of those areas of study where one can easily miss the forest for the trees. It sounds so good, it must be right!

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#114

Post by tqi »

madeofpalk wrote: post #83
tqi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I think people are getting confused because this is framed as a technology story, not a story about the inhumane conditions in sweatshops. I feel like this framing is common in a lot of news stories (big tech being the villain du jour), and is unhelpful because it causes folks who otherwise agree with each other to fixate on the "is technology bad or is it neutral" angle, which gets in the way of any actual agr…

No, this framing is exactly right. It highlights how Y Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane conditions of sweatshops. You don't get to create this product and then absolve yourself of its negative impact of it.

But that's my point - Y Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane conditions of sweatshops, the how is irrelevant to why it is bad. But framing it as a story about "AI" and "machine vision" just causes people to argue about the technology.

[1] Y Combinator supports an AI startup that's pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#115

Post by 404mm »

krunck wrote: post #61

"Optifye.ai, launched by Duke University computer science students Baid and Mohta, is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company’s site. On their Y Combinator company profile, they write that both of their families run manufacturing plants, where they’ve been exposed to factory working conditions since they were children. “I've been around assembly lines for as long as I can remember,” Baid wrote. Mohta wrote,…

F! those two in particular.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#116

Post by johnnyanmac »

tqi wrote: post #114
madeofpalk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this framing is exactly right. It highlights how Y Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane conditions of sweatshops. You don't get to create this product and then absolve yourself of its negative impact of it.

But that's my point - Y Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane conditions of sweatshops, the how is irrelevant to why it is bad. But framing it as a story about "AI" and "machine vision" just causes people to argue about the technology. [1] Y Combinator supports an AI startup that's pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.

> But framing it as a story about "AI" and "machine vision" just causes people to argue about the technology.

It's relevant because this furthers this idea that current early AI technology is not about making the world a better plance and is instead used to accelerate the worst aspects of humanity.

Sadly, the abuse of workers is not a novel idea. So the conversation should be more towards how we establish an ethical attitude towards how we make use of LLM's

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#117

Post by johnnyanmac »

theamk wrote: post #44
Etheryte wrote: post #15

This is exactly why we need regulations that prohibit this. The upcoming EU regulations [0] seem to at least partially cover this, as employment is one of the high risk categories for AI systems. What that means in detail is still to be seen, but at least the groundwork is already there. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152937

Will those regulations help with non-AI version of the same? If you want plot a worker's performance graphs (and fire them for underperformance), you don't need any AI or vision or even a computer, just a supervisor who manually counts the workers' outputs. "Hey number 17, how come you made only has 10 boxes this morning, while number 16's has made 25 boxes already. Work harder!" Unlike AI stuff, it will only be dail…

>Will those regulations help with non-AI version of the same?

No, but it adds friction and slows down the corruption. Sometimes that can be just as important as making long term preventative measurements.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#118

Post by johnnyanmac »

ryandrake wrote: post #96
darkwater wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of bubble are the founders living in? The article points this out: both come from families owning sweatshop^W factories, so that's the bubble. They probably were applauded by their fathers for the good idea and execution.

But they at least went through a slightly-diverse undergrad university (Duke) and hopefully didn't spend it insulated from different kinds of people. Out of the thousands of students there, all of their friends happened to also be sweatshop heirs? I guess I just don't understand how someone, who's not royalty, can become a grown ass adult, never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy…

>and hopefully didn't spend it insulated from different kinds of people.

Who knows? Maybe they could insulate themselves. Maybe they got a bunch of views but the ones that fit their current purview prevailed.

>never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy towards people unlike themselves.

people throw around the term too loosely nowadays, but psychopathy/sociopathy can be a legitmate explantion. Supposedly, CEO's have a disproportionately high amount of sociopathy. I wonder if its something you can develop from environmental factors?

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#119

Post by johnnyanmac »

ryandrake wrote: post #32
speak_plainly wrote: post #7

Imagine if they had read something like Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. Instead of creating a digital whip for shallow (or even outright harmful) managers, they could have developed a QA tool grounded in real, deep thinking—one that respects proven principles of manufacturing. There’s still time to course-correct, and embracing some of the foundational literature on the topic could make the difference.

When anyone argues that Engineering majors shouldn't have to take all those pesky electives and get at least a basic grounding in Ethics and the Humanities, we can point to this startup as a potential consequence.

A real shame we don't do both. In addition to a general Teamwork class in the psych department (which did involve some ethics), I took a dedicated class for software ethics. It may have been straightforward for many, but as someone who was only exposed to tech (as a career) in high school it made me realize that code isn't just thos pile of legos to break and rearrange.Even non-critical business can cost lives if they are irresponsible with what they build.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#120

Post by ashoeafoot »

ryandrake wrote: post #37

What I'd love to know is: Assuming the founders pitched this idea for feedback to many people before getting this far, including to friends and family, didn't a single one of those people pull them aside and say: "Wait a minute, maybe stop and think about what you're actually creating here..." Could they find nobody in their circle of advisors who are able to empathize with low paid factory workers or at the very lea…

And now you see them. Real, old world societies , with castes and strata ,where the royalty looks down on the peasants while paying lipservice to western idea. China, india, the middle east, russia. Welcome to the desert of the real.
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