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The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

arxiv.org

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Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#51

Post by pjmorris »

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.

Why not both?

I've got a friend whose firm has started using 'cognitive surrender' to describe the habit of delegating thinking to the LLM in the way that we used to skim code reviews and say 'LGTM' while missing something important.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#52

Post by chasd00 »

jselysianeagle wrote: post #9
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.

> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level? What skills are being developed by non-devs prompting AI to churn out code they don't understand? Note that I'm not debating if the code is good or works or whatever, I'm asking if any real skills are being developed merely by prompting AI towards some goal.

my sister and two of her friends put together a small company. She asked me to work on a mobile app for them, like a small niche LMS. I was making progress but fell behind, i have a demanding job/family and she doesnt. She asked if she could try to take it over, i told her about claudecode and then gave her some magic words to get started with. Basically, some framework names and some other technologies involved and some prompt guidance. She completely took off with it and came up with a flow where she chats with ChatGPT and it tells her what to tell ClaudeCode, she copy/pastes into claudecode does it's thing.

How could it possibly work? Except she got through setting up her own Apple dev account, all the certificates, subscription entitlement, revenuecat integration, TestFlight, all the paperwork that goes along with a listing and all of that in about 3 weeks. She submitted her app to the AppStore for review last friday.

She didn't learn any coding but she sure as hell produced a pretty good mobile app with a subscription payment system all on her own with the help of ChatGPT and ClaudeCode. She's also producing different tools that run on her website which is hosted on squarespace. I have no idea how she's doing it but she has all these little questionairre and decision tree pages backed by google sheets. She's the second non-coder i've seen really blossom with AI and just run with it building stuff she's always wanted but never knew how.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#53

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mjburgess wrote: post #49
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed that it's not novel.

But Ostrom's novel observation wasn't that. It was "all those stories of how shared ownership of resources leads to tragedies? they're wrong, and part of a mostly uncoordinated attempt to get you to abandon the idea of shared ownership of resources. It is, as ever, greed and power that lead to those tragedies".

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#54

Post by doug_durham »

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.

I don't see it being "crystal clear" that skill decline is real. People are doing work they wouldn't have been able to do before. They are getting a more broad exposure to technologies than they have before.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#55

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

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…

If the LLMs work as advertised, we won't need experts.

Even today, with the current state of the art, we need far fewer experts. LLMs are already much better at debugging than humans are, for example. Math proofs are falling at a unprecedented rate. And so on.

In the future, we may not find mere human levels of intelligence so useful. Let consumers consume.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30
burningChrome wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

I don't know, I find AI still misses the mark so much for stuff that's not happening inside a well constrained framework with very specific guardrails and boundary conditions. Every time I have agents build something half complex that I would be easily able to pull off myself (albeit not at their pace) I always ask if everything is correct and working and I get a resounding "yes!", then I test it and it's essentially…

[deleted]

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#57

Post by foxglacier »

i_s wrote: post #47

Maybe we have to subsidize zoomers until we can figure this out.

And if the solution turns out to be "we don't need those skills anymore", what will happen to those subsidized people? Better just let them find work wherever they see a demand. Software has gutted many other industries of competent people. Maybe now they can return and lift up the rest of the economy.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#58

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

chasd00 wrote: post #50
Planktonne wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nah, you really just need to tell it "the program broke: ". It'll go and poke around for you just fine.

Try it sometime.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#59

Post by zaphar »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #39
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…

My understanding of Ostrom's work was to show that basically almost all commons were managed, and that when they were not, that was the result of selfish actors deliberately seeking to dismantle the management structures to further their own individual interests.

That was not my understanding at all. She seemed to be making a much more nuanced point than the simplistic: "selfish actors deliberately dismantle..". I was more responding to the idea that she refuted hardin though which is very much not the case. She built on and expanded his thesis.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#60

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

chasd00 wrote: post #48
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.

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.

But it genuinely doesn't require much skill. That's the main selling point, in fact.

Look at the prompts used to make progress on the Riemann conjecture: https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta

> Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”). This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

Jarred is not a mathematician, and not an expert on the Riemann conjecture. What new skill is needed to tell the LLM to believe in itself? What part of that work couldn't have been done by a ten year old?

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