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Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

kaggle.com

251–260 of 338 posts

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#251

AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.

I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.

> That Be (capital) want their results last week.

"Now" is too late, competition has already figured their next move out. We need to move fasterer. Broken eggs doesn't matter, the supply is constant anyway.

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#252
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why blame capital? Why not the customers, or management (which is just another representative from labour)?

Customers are customers because of capital. Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.

> Customers are customers because of capital.

Do you mean that in general, or only in this specific situation?

In general it's obviously not true.

> Management represents the owners (capital.)

Only insofar as any employee represents the owners.

> Any other framing is delusional.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#254

"I think you just need to accept the results of the competition. The winning submissions clearly provide value and had a lot of effort invested in them. I'm not really worried about a few inconsistencies or mistakes if the value is still there. Did you think another submission deserved to win over these?" That comment is gold. Yeah, I'm not worried about hallucinated slop, just accept it was the winner folks.

That right there is the mentality that is going to drive me into a hole. Engineers are already grumpy enough dealing with asinine human bullshit that doesn't translate into reality. Seeing blatant slop judged by blatant slop (and it is, in this case, extremely blatant on both ends) and then saying "geez if you're criticising this you must be butt-hurt, move on" is so mind-blowingly frustrating. Like you can't even start to reason with someone like that. Yes, the author of the comments clearly believes other submissions made sense and engaged in good faith with the competition parameters, and that those deserve to win. Are we stupid?

We tried! In good faith! We put a lot of time into articulating ourselves clearly! We even pretended to be nice, reminding ourselves to be charitable and that we might be missing something! And like... it's normal every once in awhile for someone to opine dumbly, but when it's all the time and the perpetrators are people who just do not care that they are spewing glorified Bayes-slop into the universe and then being rewarded for it by people who both can't tell the difference and don't understand why that's a problem... we all get really tired, really quickly, and we want to disengage.

Personally I have zero tolerance for this kind of lazy-ass approach to reality. I'm seeing it increasingly at work. I'm seeing it increasingly in corpo sludge. I'm seeing it increasingly in social interactions. I'm seeing it explode on social media. I want to engage in life-affirming activities with people who have actual minds that they cultivate and use. I will not waste precious time and attention on communities that tolerate slop. If you want me to care, communicate with me in good faith. I don't think we should be kind or forgiving about it. Kaggle got exactly one strike on this, now they're dead to me forever. Same with open source contributors. Same with content creators. Out of basic ethics I need to give multiple strikes to employees who report to me (and hold myself accountable for their actions first), but exactly one strike for leadership above. Trust is precious. We need to hold one another accountable. If that burns some bridges so be it. Enough is enough and we do in fact know better.

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your position is that people actually want to do more work, but their managers are forcing them to work less? I don't buy it.

No, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them th…

People are prone to outsource their thinking because it's the path of least resistance.

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue we’re dealing with is that the tool is as likely to write confident sounding, well-written but completely wrong everything and if you don’t know the difference you might accidentally give it a gold medal. Like a chainsaw: yes the tools are useful and will be used in the future, but we may not want to use chainsaws to carve up the turkey.

If the judge doesn't know the difference, why are they judging a competition, and also, why is the competition esteemed?

These are great questions

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decision trees are one of the oldest forms of AI! There are even algorithms to automatically form decision trees, though you don't need ML to have AI.

Those algorithms were only called machine learning and it's the opposite. Before the marketers got ahold of it we reserved AI for the actually intelligent, sentient, full strength vision of intelligent systems. We now talk about general AIs and A[Super]Is.

The term AGI was coined almost 30 years ago; is that when the marketers got ahold of it?

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.

First, I don’t pretend that’s the only driver. Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation. Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation. Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capit…

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#259
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why blame capital? Why not the customers, or management (which is just another representative from labour)?

Customers are customers because of capital. Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.

The only thing that capitalism brings to hierarchy is an abstraction layer.

You get the same dysfunctions in any organisation where the management levels are staffed by narcissists and sociopaths who need hierarchy to feel a sense of self, and need to enforce it to self-soothe.

There are political structures even more hierarchical than US corporations, and some of them punish status infractions + perceived failures with violence or death.

The problem is the dysfunctional psychology of hierarchy. The more upper levels tend to performative hierarchy and status plays, the worse everything gets.

Re: Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners

#260
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all. My guess is the causality is usually * the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "socia…

One piece of managment advice I've gotten is to be very careful about what ideas you're throwing out there, because people can very easily get the wrong idea about the priority, and this can get worse as multiple layers get involved.

Well people assume that as you move up the chain of command, the ratio of noise to signal drops precipitously. If your CEO is focusing on idle musings then I would fear that you’re directionless. But in reality no one person can be laser focused for 24 hours a day, including the 5 minutes you happen to spend with someone talking about something you just read while in the elevator.
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