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#LLMs feel *exactly* like crypto did in 2017, with nearly daily articles about how it can't possibly work, and a die hard community earnestly pleading "but you just don't UNDERSTAND!"
The main difference is that there *are* reasonable use cases. They're just far smaller than people want to admit.
The biggest problem with this rush to replace jobs with LLMs is that they all have a very naive view of what "the job" is. Reducing a very human process with an LLM, which even if it works (which is usually doesn't) still misses out on the very human cost of using such a dehumanizing process.
This was well documented in the 80s with "The Social Life of Information" by JS Brown. We've seen this naivete so many times, it's expected at this point.
@scottjenson Almost everyone thinks that almost everything - except that which they have deep personal experience in - is "simple".
It never is. Because what they think of as an external "that thing is simple" is actually an internal "my understanding of that is simplistic".
And lo; humanity repeats systemic mistakes endlessly. Human nature is to assume we know things better than we do, as long as our surface understanding is all _we_ need.
@mattwilcox Yeah, whether it's Dunning-Krugger, Narrative Fallacy, 1st vs 2nd order thinking, or Chesterton's fence, I feel humans have a LITANY of thinking challenges that make us usually get it wrong the first time.
@scottjenson I'm pretty convinced it's just a manifestation of evolutionary pressure and not unique to humans - other than we're the peak "smart" we know of atm.
Evolution does tons of different things - but it always favours the lowest energy state required to do any specific job as long as it's "good enough". That applies to thinking as well.
We need a higher level of cognition for the exact niche we each are in... but outside of that "it'll do" rules. No need to spend the energy for more.
@mattwilcox That's a really interesting point! I agree
@scottjenson Does make it a really hard problem to do anything about on a "whole system" and "for any real length of time" level though. We're battling how the universe works.
I think the first step is to make sure that everyone is aware of it. In a "I make mental shortcuts _all the time_ about _almost everything_ I think I understand."
Then "and I should know the limits of that, and why I should then trust many topics to other people who know more".
Then "how do I choose who/what to tust?"
@scottjenson ... all of which takes more energy than "eh, it'll do as it is, I'm OK".
Which is the issue.
@mattwilcox yeah I think lots of people understand this at some level. It's why we do prototypes after all. It's never a perfect process of course, but people ARE trying