31–40 of 51 posts
Calling this "weirding" is wrong and misleading (particularly going to the trouble to insert the definition). The post is describing the opposite, a great normalisation. AI research (and everything else) becoming legible, quantifiable, gamified, and Goodhart's law-ed.
> AI will make the world even more quantifiable and, in many cases, falsely quantifiable. > The false quantification and rank ordering of things using AI will bring real-world weirdness in how people function, which has nothing to do with the functions they carry out. I call this the “Great AI Weirding”. If anything AI is the sort of power tool that should let everyone make up their own rankings more easily, and be l…
We, 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 metri…
I did that with a few interns/junior people and they turned out to be disappointing rather than predictably satisfying. I still agree with you, because I want to believe it pays off in the long run. But it definitely comes at a real short term cost.
Calling this "weirding" is wrong and misleading (particularly going to the trouble to insert the definition). The post is describing the opposite, a great normalisation. AI research (and everything else) becoming legible, quantifiable, gamified, and Goodhart's law-ed.
Also, weirding was originally a term used in the novel Dune. https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Weirding_Way
This is hidden metrics when you're getting a home loan, your insurance premiums, your success in dating sites, college admissions, whether somebody would hire you to do a dj gig at a nightclub, everything.
It's all recursive bullshit games, and you won't know which ones so you're just gonna run on as many treadmills as you can, all at once, while fully knowing some of them aren't even worth anything - just not which ones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did that with a few interns/junior people and they turned out to be disappointing rather than predictably satisfying. I still agree with you, because I want to believe it pays off in the long run. But it definitely comes at a real short term cost.
Therein lies the problem. Most people are apathetic and incompetent. Winning rat race points requires some amount of competence and "oomph", so rat race points will always correlate positively with applicant quality. Most rat-race-losers, unfortunately, aren't Socrates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). There are of course some, and even plenty of examples, but it does seem industry partners is almost necessary these days. I'm not convinced that level of interaction is healthy, for either parties.
> Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). Read more pure math papers, then you will see the difference. :-)
It's not a problem unique to AI researchers, it's about everything , if not now then ten years from now. This is hidden metrics when you're getting a home loan, your insurance premiums, your success in dating sites, college admissions, whether somebody would hire you to do a dj gig at a nightclub, everything. It's all recursive bullshit games, and you won't know which ones so you're just gonna run on as many treadmil…
Maybe one of the treadmills is how pleasant and agreeable your opinions are. How they make people feel. Maybe you should shut the hell up before you get yourself into trouble and drive up your premiums.
The 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…
Much of this could be true, but I’ve seen R1-tenure-caliber PhDs come on staff at top industry labs for a lot more than the pay you’re suggesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article is not necessarily about academia, I think it’s actually more geared towards “industry” AI researchers.
Honestly, is there a big difference anymore? The vast majority of papers I read are either by industry directly or have industry as a partner (as an author, not just acknowledgements). There are of course some, and even plenty of examples, but it does seem industry partners is almost necessary these days. I'm not convinced that level of interaction is healthy, for either parties.
Only a very small subset of industry cares about academic publishing, and even within that subset it's only a fraction of groups at a fraction of corps that consider publishing a primary or even secondary objective.
The groups that do care about those things can be good gigs, but are generally not the place in the company you want to be anyways, unless you can get in and out (for good) in <10 years. If you can do something that actually impacts the business -- that is actually useful to other humans -- no one gives a shit about h-indices or kaggle scores. And you'll be better compensated anyways.