A thinkpiece about AI, feel free to sit out if you are tired of them.
I thought the argument here was laid out nicely and in a way that resonates with a lot of thoughts I’ve had.
Edit: I forgot to add that I chucked at the part that’s like “most digital gardens are just about digital gardening.” I’m in this photo and I don’t like it
Yeah, this is a great counter to the “productivity cult” that surrounds a lot of financial/business discourse, and seems to run concurrent to the AI techbro hype that’s everywhere right now.
Also, I felt kind of attacked by this bit here:
Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something.
What an article! Very brave author: that piece must be sending some people into conniptions lol
I don’t feel attacked by this, myself, but I don’t think this author is considering the possibility that most people aren’t autodidacts because the desire isn’t there. It isn’t rational. It has nothing to do with a priori reasoning. Reasoning is what you do to rationalize your desire, and your desire is emotional, not rational.
If I wanted to know everything there is to know about late Soviet military hardware, I’d find a way to justify it. Maybe even find a semi-agreeable way to make a living at it in the process; surely the developers of games like War Thunder need researchers. Likewise, there is no a priori reason for me to use Debian at home instead of a Mac, since I can afford the latter. But Debian feels right to me, at least now that systemd is only occasionally janky. Likewise, there was no a priori reason for me to be a metalhead; the music resonates on a more fundamental level than mere reason.
TL;DR: this guy should try reading David Hume. At least the part where he explains why reason is nothing but a slave to the passions. The man was talking about motivated reasoning during the frigging Enlightenment.
Yeah, I think he is coming from the ratsphere/economist thinking that says that humans are by definition rational as long as you correctly identify what that person is optimizing for. And then when you work backwards from the factual observation that most people aren’t autodidacts, you are forced to conclude that there isn’t “utility” in teaching yourself hard stuff deep into adulthood, and I think this is true: Even in a fairly specialized career, if you go out and learn Feynman integration or whatever, your boss will most likely just say “cute, did you finish the slides yet?”
But that’s just it—the Soviet military hardware example was chosen, I think, on the assumption that (approximately) nobody derives joy from just learning about that; it’s knowledge that you would only want to acquire as an instrument to something else (hardware repair technician career?). Of course there are those War Thunder types who do just love memorizing hardware esoterica… But that’s a flaw with the chosen example, not the argument.
I think what I love about it is that it is challenging and provocative but not in a cheap way–it is not going after a political/identity group or a commonly belittled hobby or something; it’s basically open season on everyone
Except that they aren’t, in my experience. I could claim to be “optimizing for autonomy”, but then the choices I’ve actually made in my life wouldn’t make sense. I got married, for example. I work a corporate W2 job. I own a house. None of these are necessarily what somebody optimizing for autonomy would choose, unless I wanted more than mere autonomy.
I’ve long suspected that homo economicus is a grossly oversimplified model of human behavior uninformed by psychology, sociology, or empirical observation obtained from actually talking to people. Articles like this do little to allay that suspicion. Nor do I trust “rationalists”.
Yeah, I don’t agree with their worldview either, but the rat response would be: “Then you aren’t optimizing for autonomy, you are optimizing for something else.”
“Something else” could be a weighted sum of autonomy and other factors.
The point is to understand what is is you really are optimizing for and, if you aren’t happy with that, to change objectives and actions to align with each other.
I understand the point, I just don’t care for it. I’m not a machine or a piece of software; there has to be more to life than optimization. Or maybe I’m just indulging in Romanticism again?
Just because machines optimize and you optimize, doesn’t mean you are a machine.
Rationalists’ eternal obsession with optimization is unhealthy, but it may be equally unhealthy to try too hard to refute the label, too. Otherwise you lend support to the tribalist mentality that separates the world into “rationalists and not,” “romantics and not,” and so on.
What I see in this think piece is similar to what I see in people defending AI use, let me explain.
He’s arguing that AI is not the tool CEOs want it to be, which I think is right. But he comes from the question “Would an “AI executive assistant” actually boost your productivity?”. I don’t think that’s the right question to make when talking about AI, because I don’t think that’s the right question to make about life.
Thinking in terms “Would x boost my productivity?” is only going to lead you to depression and anxiety honestly. This question treats any knowledge as disposable. If it’s got a value (aka adds value directly to my job or will make me make more money) it’s worth knowing, if it doesn’t, throw it and forget about it. This is anti-intellectualism. I’ll take this paragraph as an example:
The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible ball of twine.
First of all, researches do take notes. How do I know? I am one and I am surrounded by them, it’s actually an important part of the job. We just don’t post about it. Then there’s the part " It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no deliverables.", all I have to say is: yes, and? Just because I won’t make money off of it it has no value? What a sad life, honestly.
Kids don’t learn about dinosaurs because that will boost their productivity in the future. I don’t want to get another degree having a stable job because it will help me with my job. I’d say most people here don’t build their websites to make money or make them more productive, but it does hold a lot of value to them.
Knowledge for the shake of knowledge, creating things for the shake of creating. Sometimes, later, you may find it can make you money or it can help society as a whole, but you didn’t do it for that reason, you did it because you wanted to create, or to know. And that’s how we got where we all are now.
Edit: we all do or study things for a job or something like that. It’s just not all that we do should be for that.
I agree that this question presupposes the value of “productivity,” and that if you don’t share that value, then the rest of the argument is immaterial.
I don’t feel that I have the luxury of dismissing productivity. It’s not that I value productivity above all else. But I have specific goals I am trying to achieve in life, and being productive in the conventional sense moves me toward those goals.
I believe it is possible to pursue conventional things without compromising my values or succumbing to depression and anxiety. The secret is moderation.
Thus, in the compartment of my life that is playing the productivity game, I am very much interested in the “AI boosts productivity?” question, just as I am interested in the related questions of “At what cost?” and “Are there alternatives to AI that also boost productivity?”
As a researcher, you might like the Experimental History blog. I like how this author teases apart some of the motivations that lead people into and out of research careers and the competing notions of “productivity” you find in academia. This post is not about research per se but it is one of the more popular posts and hooked me in.
