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The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

arxiv.org

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Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#41

Post by visarga »

jplusequalt wrote: post #15
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" skill decline is real" Is this -> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level? or Is this -> Existing experts, are actually loosing there skills? Using AI is reducing someone already known skills.

Both? AI is good enough to generate a first pass for an increasingly large number of projects. An engineer using AI can create an even larger amount. But muscle memory and expertise are not fixed. They fade over time without use. If you're no longer writing code yourself, you'll get rusty on syntax in the short term. In the long term, you'll get rusty on code structure and layout. But many engineers are no longer rev…

It is probably skill loss on one side and gain on another. In a few years it is going to matter even less if you can code manually. The hard part now is understanding what agents do. How can you gain a bit of confidence in their work? I think it relates to testing, you can trust the parts you test.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#42

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mjburgess wrote: post #37
zaphar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resource…

which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misunderstood by (romantic, naive, libertarian) fools to have said that absent a powerful soverign, life is "nasty brutish and short". What he more accurately said is that, "an unmanaged commons is nas…

> In either case, the tragedy of the commons issue is well known in other guises throughout the history of philosophy

It really isn't. There are lots of anecdotes that appear to illustrate the tragedy, throughout history. But what they lack is what Ostrom added: the historical account of how a previously managed commons had its management structures dismantled by greed and power and only then was in a position to become a "tragedy". The result is that a very significant number of people believe that resources held in common always lead to "tragedy", when in fact the lesson is "the structures used to manage resources held in common are critically important, and severe action should and must be taken against those who try to dismantle them". We can hold resources in common, but must be ever vigilant and actionful against the selfish bastards who seek to manipulate them for their own advantage.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#43

Post by taurath »

burningChrome wrote: post #20
noir_lord wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynically they may be banking (however misguided it turns out to be) on model skill in aggregate growing faster than the skills of their staff decline at which point, bin the staff, use the model. The hype from non-technical people about AI would make you think they already discovered AGI.

>> model skill in aggregate growing faster than the skills of their staff decline at which point, bin the staff, use the model. How people in tech are aware they're training their replacements? Or are we quickly approaching an apex where the people running these companies realize AI cannot completely replace human developers?

> Or are we quickly approaching an apex where the people running these companies realize AI cannot completely replace human developers?

The boosters are loud and the failures are made silent, until the failures become impossible to ignore. Tens to hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AI in enterprise software companies need to show RoI at some point, and the promises of executives leaning on AI's productivity improvements to make their accelerated release schedules need to actually make the releases. Its currently a very dangerous career move to publically apply critical thinking to LLM capabilities. I think the math sort of does itself.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#44

Post by EGreg »

io84 wrote: post #7

A new and growing fear I have is that AI cuts off some of the most well-trodden pathways to intellectual growth. Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer. This is faster for the person seeking the micro-assistance, but there is a flipside: fewer human-to-human…

This already happened in many other areas. You don't ask locals for directions anymore. You just have Google Maps.

There used to be jokes about how men don't want to ask for directions...

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#45

Post by jgord »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #28

The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people arou…

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and c…

.. presumably hyper-inequality also erodes the use of common resources, or resources available to commoners ?

eg. large companies ( 'hyperscalars' ) pre-ordering RAM and GPUs driving up the prices to the point where PC gamers and AI enthusiasts cant upgrade.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#46

Post by jplusequalt »

visarga wrote: post #41
jplusequalt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both? AI is good enough to generate a first pass for an increasingly large number of projects. An engineer using AI can create an even larger amount. But muscle memory and expertise are not fixed. They fade over time without use. If you're no longer writing code yourself, you'll get rusty on syntax in the short term. In the long term, you'll get rusty on code structure and layout. But many engineers are no longer rev…

It is probably skill loss on one side and gain on another. In a few years it is going to matter even less if you can code manually. The hard part now is understanding what agents do. How can you gain a bit of confidence in their work? I think it relates to testing, you can trust the parts you test.

>The hard part now is understanding what agents do. How can you gain a bit of confidence in their work?

How can you understand them when everything changes again 6 months from now?

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#48

Post by chasd00 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #8
xendo wrote: post #2

For anyone that does LLM supported work it's crystal clear that skill decline is real. Surprisingly, the leadership at my work doesn't give rats ass about it. They published AI engineering manifesto, pushing for loops, workflows, advocating for producing many times more code. All of this ignoring the elephant in the room.

" skill decline is real" Is this -> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level? or Is this -> Existing experts, are actually loosing there skills? Using AI is reducing someone already known skills.

i don't really buy the "loosing skills" line. I'm not old enough to remember but it seems like this would be similar to an expert slide rule operator lamenting the skill loss because of using a calculator. A new tool has come out that antiquates some skills but requires a new set of other skills to master.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#49

Post by mjburgess »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42
mjburgess wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misunderstood by (romantic, naive, libertarian) fools to have said that absent a powerful soverign, life is "nasty brutish and short". What he more accurately said is that, "an unmanaged commons is nas…

> In either case, the tragedy of the commons issue is well known in other guises throughout the history of philosophy It really isn't. There are lots of anecdotes that appear to illustrate the tragedy, throughout history. But what they lack is what Ostrom added: the historical account of how a previously managed commons had its management structures dismantled by greed and power and only then was in a position to bec…

Right, and that's pretty much exactly Hobbes analysis of the state of nature which is a hypothetical stripping away of such systems of political management.

The application of this principle to physical resources is novel, sure -- but the observation that "enforced coordination solves the rational self-interest problem" isnt novel.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#50

Post by chasd00 »

Planktonne wrote: post #26
mikepurvis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as an existing expert in my field (robot devops) what I feel most strongly is not that I'm losing my skills but rather than I'm losing my nerve . Like, problems that I would previously dig into on my own, poking at this and that log file to try to understand what happened to get a system into a particular state, now claude is mediating most of those kinds of interactions and it is the one doing the first pass…

I think this is a really important idea. Good problem solvers, in general, are people who are prepared to go in and poke around, to see what happens when you disable this or add that . The only way I've found to make juniors develop that instinct is to make them do it until it comes naturally--to continually demand they verify their assumptions, test out theories while debugging. If you don't practice being comfortab…

> Good problem solvers, in general, are people who are prepared to go in and poke around, to see what happens when you disable this or add that.

you have to do all this when dealing with AI too. The syntax is a conversation vs a strict grammar but you still have to do all the exploration, verification, and evaluation you always had to do as a developer. You have to know how to explain what you want and know when you have it, that's not always an easy skill to learn though.

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