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Care Doesn't Scale
351–360 of 382 posts
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. The friction between moving between, and knitting different systems and languages together that I don't use frequently enough to be fluent, has been lowered by an order of magnitude or two. Due to small knowledge gaps getting filled the instant I need them to be. The same with getting a basic understanding (o…
> If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. I mean, A) hallucinations still happen, and B) Google sucks anyway. I don't know of anyone at the company still using Google because we're largely an engineering outfit and all were aware as Google's search features slid into uselessness.
I find that the code I get from Copilot Chat frequently fails to do exactly what I asked, but it almost always at least hits on the portions of a library that I need to use to solve the problem, and gets me to that result much more quickly than most other ways of searching do these days.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. The friction between moving between, and knitting different systems and languages together that I don't use frequently enough to be fluent, has been lowered by an order of magnitude or two. Due to small knowledge gaps getting filled the instant I need them to be. The same with getting a basic understanding (o…
> If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. I mean, A) hallucinations still happen, and B) Google sucks anyway. I don't know of anyone at the company still using Google because we're largely an engineering outfit and all were aware as Google's search features slid into uselessness.
Hallucinations (or more correctly labelled, confabulation) is a property of human beings as well. We fill in memories because they are not precise, sometimes inaccurately.
More to the point, once you know that, having a search engine for ideas that can flexibly discuss them is a tremendous and unprecedented boon.
A new tool, many (many) times better than Google ever was for many ordinary, sometimes extraordinary tasks. I don't understand the new gigantic carafe of water is half full viewpoint. Yes, it isn't perfect!? It is still incredibly useful.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#354In the Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a says "Anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world." and anyone who destroys a life is considered to have destroyed an entire world.
In this sense care does scale in long timelines. When pregnant women go hungry, predispositions towards obesity remain in the epigenome even after several generations[0]. As a trivial example, in Les Miserables, the criminal Valjean can only become a hero because he is forgiven completely and totally by one man. It may sound ridiculous but surely life is also ridiculous.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-gene...
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#355I have what I think it's a very good article on the economy of care - making exactly this point and others, but it's in the dungeon of peer review for more than one year. And the reviewers do not even answer my emails.
I would be keen to read it if you're happy to share?
sure, especially if you are an academic. how can i get in contact?
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#356I'm surprised the article and non of the comments I've seen in this thread mention effective altruism, which in the framing of the article is an attempt to scale caring in some sense. The article helped me realize why so many people in the startup/tech/software engineering scene are drawn to effective altruism, it's a way to scale helping humanity in the best way possible. The effective altruism argument is that it's…
Well, this may not be the best example. Mosquito nets are oft being used as fishing nets. Since 1) the loopholes of malaria nets are much smaller than manually knotted ones (thus also killing baby fish) and 2) the impregnation chemicals kill riverbottom insects (thereby disrupting the foodchain), this has lead to a massive killing of fish. Instead of fixing malaria, this has instead led to aggrevated hunger crises in…
Lol this is a perfect encapsulation of the white savior problem. Thank you.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#357I'm surprised the article and non of the comments I've seen in this thread mention effective altruism, which in the framing of the article is an attempt to scale caring in some sense. The article helped me realize why so many people in the startup/tech/software engineering scene are drawn to effective altruism, it's a way to scale helping humanity in the best way possible. The effective altruism argument is that it's…
I think most people's problem with "effective altruism" is rather that some of its more prominent adherents end up defining "helping humanity" in very weird and rather counter-intuitive ways. Like that whole argument that we basically should care more about future humans than present ones because there's a lot more future ones.
I agree that's most people's problem, but it's now mine. I've tried to think about effective altruism from first principals. For me, I can rationally understand effective altruism and why it's attractive. I even believe people that follow it (and actually do good) may in some sense be "better" people than me. But it none the less rubs me the wrong way and I can't follow it, so I've tried to understand why.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. I mean, A) hallucinations still happen, and B) Google sucks anyway. I don't know of anyone at the company still using Google because we're largely an engineering outfit and all were aware as Google's search features slid into uselessness.
Hallucinations (or more correctly labelled, confabulation) is a property of human beings as well. We fill in memories because they are not precise, sometimes inaccurately. More to the point, once you know that, having a search engine for ideas that can flexibly discuss them is a tremendous and unprecedented boon. A new tool, many (many) times better than Google ever was for many ordinary, sometimes extraordinary task…
> Hallucinations (or more correctly labelled, confabulation) is a property of human beings as well.
Yeah and if, when I asked a coworker about a thing, he replied with flagrantly wrong bullshit and then doubled-down when criticized, I wouldn't ask him anything after that either.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale? That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever. Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale an…
> Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale? Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails yo…
> by definition
This an empirical argument about nails. Are you just saying that to emphasize your confidence?
> cut nails
I just googled and there are literally dozens of brands of this product.
Even so this preference appears to be a niche opinion of artisan woodworkers, not a failure mode of furniture and construction.
> The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand
Yes it is. They wanted to pay less for nails and the cheaper manufacturing served that need. If it mattered they would pay more.
> but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture.
In other words, people like to reminisce about hand made goods. But when it comes to paying for them, they usually prefer the ones that work well at a fraction of the cost.
You can’t claim that intricate items with fine details are not manufacturable at scale (see the iPhone?). So your cause and effect are backwards. Manufacturing did not dictate old methods became less prevelant. Consumers did.
And once again, your claim that higher quality ones don’t exist is wrong too. I guarantee we can find a supplier of many varieties of decorative nails. They are just more expensive.
Re: Care Doesn't Scale
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also where I really dislike a lot of this more recent push toward automating communication. One person deciding what needs to be said, to whom, and when, can have a LOT of leverage in the productivity department, by reducing the time that tens or even hundreds or thousands of other people lose to coping with the fire hose. Microsoft Copilot has been yet another downgrade in this department. Since it got adopt…
Pretty funny to see the solution to the paperwork morass is twofold: an AI to generate paperwork and an AI to understand it. Can we just... not do that at all?
Ha, no instead we're going to eventually have to have AI workers getting AI salaries and to spend on AI products. Then the AI governments and eventually AI wars...