Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#71

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Must be a glitch in the matrix or I got kicked into an alternate timeline, because until yesterday I never saw anyone here question the general meaning of "tragedy of the commons" and its stated implications, and suddenly it's the second time I see some 1968 book reference brought up and implications that "tragedy of the commons" is debunked, and that it's saying basically the opposite of what I know it to be saying.…

I question it every time I see it on HN. Every time. Same on mastodon. Same on Lawyers, Gun, Money. One of my own personal quests. So many people know about "the tragedy of the commons", an idea that really does only go back to Hardin's book, but hardly anyone knows about Ostrom's work which IMO is vastly more important (and also more correct).

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#72

Post by abathologist »

falcor84 wrote: post #19
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…

>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. I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.

Reading a book is a form of communication between the writers the readers, and literary culture enriches this with the ongoing interactions around texts. The argument voiced by Socrates in the Phaedrus is not primarily that it removes or stifles interaction but that it undermines memory (and thinking) and that it will "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves". AFAIK, there is well established research that shows that the move from oral to literate cultures does indeed bear this out. More recent studies about how wayfinding deteriorates when we rely on GPS seems a like a similar dynamic.

There is another charge against writing in the Phaedrus, which is that texts cannot answer for themselves (contrary to spoken interlocutors) or adjust their communication to the needs and character of the reader:

> when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves

An interesting thing about computation is that it is a writing and re-writing that can indeed be responsive and, in a non-trivial sense, "answer for itself". LLMs do this in a form that is obviously very successful for engagement (and for hype) and for producing a lot of compelling output.

I think the Phaedrus also has something to say here:

> Soc. Then [they who who knows the just and good and honourable] will not seriously incline to "write" his thoughts "in water" with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?

>

> Phaedr. No, that is not likely.

>

> Soc. No, that is not likely--in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#73

Post by mikepurvis »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #58
chasd00 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The truly wild situation for me is when I have something self contained enough that I can let the bot manage the entire loop unsupervised. Like, here's the patches from the old version, here's the new version, here's the test suite that's got to pass. I'm going to bed now, see you in the morning.

And in the morning, I have patches for the new version that pass the test suite.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#74

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

Even for my tiny toy projects, I notice a bug and I tell the LLM and it corrects it, most of the time, but I shudder at the amount of code it generates or changes.

If it has some subtle data corruption bug then you're hosed.

It's just crazy to me to think about running AI changes in production on a real product.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#75

Post by treetalker »

sfny wrote: post #40

This paper misrepresent fundamental concepts from Ostrom’s work, which won a Nobel, and fails to contextualize Hardin’s theories. As a 'human resource development' paper it somehow pretends that capitalism doesn't exist? Hardin coined "The Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968, elaborated on his theory in his 1974 paper "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor". He was a eugenicist and specifically targeted refu…

Law practice in the United States is self-policing.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#76

Post by brokenmachine »

chasd00 wrote: post #52
jselysianeagle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I hope she has insurance when that db gets hacked or some other code disaster happens.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#77

Post by DiscourseFan »

schneems wrote: post #63
falcor84 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.

The difference is that the act of writing a book is a type of knowledge generation/curation/distillation that Socrates didn't know about. I don't think the act of writing prompts for an LLM advances thinking/cognition in the same way.

I am fairly certain Socrates knew about books, he just wasn't literate himself. But literacy was quite common amongst Athenian citizens, it was sort of an outlier for the time. Of course most of the day-labor was done by slaves, but it afforded them the time for cultural pursuits and healthy debate, and Socrates was very much a product of that.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#78

Post by falcor84 »

abathologist wrote: post #72
falcor84 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.

Reading a book is a form of communication between the writers the readers, and literary culture enriches this with the ongoing interactions around texts. The argument voiced by Socrates in the Phaedrus is not primarily that it removes or stifles interaction but that it undermines memory (and thinking) and that it will "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will tr…

Interesting, so based on this, do you think that Socrates would have been more ok with learning from an AI that can speak back to defend its claims (assuming we address the sycophantic tendencies) than with learning from "frozen" books?
Post reply on HN