The last time that was tried, patriarchy devoured it like a delicious chocolate.
Before you can achieve your vision you will have to learn how to appease angry, lustful, ambitious men. The only way patriarchy retires for good is if it is granted a kushy pension.
A sweet disorder in the dressing
Kindles in food a wantonnessing;
A bun about the burgers thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lettuce, which here and there
Enthrals the growling stomacher;
A sauce neglectful, and thereby
ketchup to flow confusedly;
A spilling salt, deserving note,
Into the rumpled sandwich tote;
A careless side dish, in whose fries
I see a wild ed'bility:
Do more bewitch me, than when meals
Are too precise in their appeals.
This workflow is another example of a developer with contempt for testing. Yes there is iteration and review and output checking. In relatively low risk projects that is enough— but so is basic vibe coding.
At some point in a serious project a responsible adult must ask the question: “How do I know this works well?” The developer himself is an unreliable judge of this. LLMs can’t judge, either. But anyone who seeks to judge, in a high stakes situation, must take time and thought to test deeply.
In one case "we" is an imaginary humanity as a whole acting to fulfill a grand species defining mission, in the other case "we" is the real, decadent, ignorant and divided population of some countries.
You silly men. You think green fields and blue sky thinking will make space colonization less expensive and more obtainable than a new airline terminal.
Of course the proof is in the utter lack of progress toward obtaining the stars, despite the stars in your credulous eyes.
There is antidote to what ails you: try thinking about this for five minutes straight.
How can you possibly not understand? You really are flummoxed about people who devote themselves to supporting their families economically and thus invest great energy into that pursuit?
That’s like going to the Olympic Village, among all the athletes, and being unable to understand why athletes ask each other “What’s your sport?” They are in the Olympics, man! They put everything into getting there. Ask them about their obsession, for crying out loud.
And ask me about how I am trying to make it in the world. I am happy to talk about it! Why aren’t you?
How are those the same? You're comparing exclusively star athletes and the general public - many of whom might have jobs in fields not of their choosing, be underpaid, doing grunt work, etc. It's rare to have a high paying, interesting job with good working environment. As another commenter mentioned, it can devolve into status games as well, which is off-putting.
It's what everyone other than pedantic jerks think AGI means. Read a book. Watch a movie. Every depiction of AGI is essentially a depiction of a human. Sometimes a human without substantial emotions. That's sentience.
The focus of AGI is on achieving human equivalence in cognitive tasks, or to surpass it ("intelligence"). That's where the money and the research is. Making a stupid machine that happens to be aware ("sentient") isnt the goal.
This article commits exactly the sin that it claims to warn against. It has obligatory positive statements about the value of critical thinking, surrounded by highly disparaging comments about how people practicing critical thinking in good faith are not adding value. The net effect will be to discourage the healthy development of critical thinking practice.
Taking generic potshots at critical thinking is not a skill.
The article has good advice. The idea of postponing critique for a little bit to give an idea a chance to breathe, for instance. But then it also comes in with insulting BS like “Shooting down ideas is not a skill.” The whole article is obviously about improving one’s skill at the positive practice of culling bad ideas. Why throw such shade with the title?
The ignorant practice of refusing to consider an idea is not the same as critical thinking. Critical thinkers already feel bad about bringing rain to the parade. Do you have to make them feel even worse about it?
That's fair. The title is provocative and probably overstates my actual position, which as you note is closer to "the way people practice critique in meetings is low value and here's how to do it better". The point about making critical thinkers feel worse is taken too. The people I'm describing in the post aren't the careful, thoughtful critics, but instead the reflexive ones. I could have drawn that line more clearly.
I read it as "shooting down" implying low-effort "I'm going to kill this because it makes me uncomfortable" type responses, not legitimate critique. Well-calculated rejection is indeed a valuable skill, but also hopefully won't come across as "shooting down".
It's tough to write any article about any part of this topic, because there's so much nuance and the nuance matters. Yet none of us would read a post that captured the nuance, it'd be way too long and probably cover too much that is obvious. (But maybe now I'm shooting down someone who might attempt to write such a thing... please do, it's worth a try!)
I wrote a couple of books about testing. Yes, writing nuance is really hard. One of my readers noticed I contradicted myself across two different sections, due to a single missing word.
‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.”
This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.
Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.
Before you can achieve your vision you will have to learn how to appease angry, lustful, ambitious men. The only way patriarchy retires for good is if it is granted a kushy pension.
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