9 ms·

The Dawn of Mediocre Computing

90 points by jger15 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. https://www.thoughtco.com/catch-22-quotes-739155 https://www.thoughtco.com/catch-22-quotes-739155 (chapter 9) I always think of Jerry (or "Larry") in Parks and Rec, who, as the final episode tells us, served 11 terms as Pawnee mayor (yes, I know he had a perfect family life). Being mediocre is unthreatening. If you're mediocre but personable and even-tempered, the top job somewhere is just waiting for you.
- CSSer 4y ago
  The VP of my company is like this. When I started he was an operations director. He amazes me. He’s an older guy that physically seems half his age. The only indicator to the contrary are some fine lines and his completely gray-white hair. He’s somehow incredibly even-tempered with a dry wit. I’ve worked with him for four years, and I’ve seen him make an upset face exactly once. What’s even crazier is that I’ve had scenarios where I needed something and my supervisors made it seem like it would take eons to get it because they don’t understand it. They’d want me to write a report or something to that effect. Same five minute conversation revisited with him in the room? He listens, asks a few questions (mostly about how it’ll impact our budget), and then says something like, “Okay, sounds like we need this,” and boom! Done. He’s not a programmer. He has no technical experience or background. He just seems to have a fine-tuned compass for what is and isn’t a big deal. I’ve never had the feeling that he didn’t trust me about something that I 100% feel is what needs to be done. Yet he’s still taught me things I didn’t know. It’s weird.
  - maximinus_thrax 4y ago
    There's nothing mediocre about the person you're describing.
    - pharke 4y ago
      Yes, this person is an expert manager.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Even being able to have such a firm grasp on your emotions is hardly the stuff of mediocrity.
    - CSSer 4y ago
      Obviously I agree. I suppose I got here because this industry often seems laser-focused on CTOs, 10x engineers, and individuals with a generally accepted as outstanding level of knowledge in some niche field or specialization. This guy has none of that, hence “mediocre” but I agree he’s anything but.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Excellent and hardly mediocre. "Common sense" is anything but common. But I have found in interviewing veterans that a no-panic approach to problems is a very powerful force in business. Some of them say that a military leader who deals with actual life-and-death situations can have a nicely blasé attitude about civilian problems.
    - js8 4y ago
      I think the GP's point is that there is something mediocre about common sense. I think it's similar to the most beautiful faces being also (very close to) the most average ones. "Mediocre" is not a good word for this concept, it implies a scale. Maybe Turing test for intelligence is "wrong" exactly for that reason. It's like a test of beauty based on human faces. Maybe we need to accept that just like there are two different standards of beauty (i.e. face one, in which humans will always excel by being average humans, and the other, beauty in its own right, way e.g. fractals or Bach's music are beautiful), there are also two standards of intelligence, which are named in the article as "mediocre" and "excellent". Maybe it would be better to call them "human-like" and "brilliant".
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
    "What’s even crazier is that I’ve had scenarios where I needed something and my supervisors made it seem like it would take eons to get it because they don’t understand it. They’d want me to write a report or something to that effect. Same five minute conversation revisited with him in the room? He listens, asks a few questions (mostly about how it’ll impact our budget), and then says something like, “Okay, sounds like we need this,” and boom! Done" I have had this many times. You struggle forever convincing middle managers to get something. Then you have a quick talk with a VOP/C*O and they say "Of course. Do it. ".
    - majormajor 4y ago
      Bad middle managers seem to be driven above everything else by a fear of rejection from the VP/C-Suite. They are reluctant to use the additional power of their role because they're more afraid of it backfiring or failing than they are of being mediocre. You have a proposal and data and confidence and you put that in front of the VP? It makes sense to the VP, it's convincing, done. You ask a bad middle manager to sign off on it themselves or put it in front of the VP themselves? Even if it makes sense to them they're gonna tie themselves in knots about how it might not be seen as a good idea to the VP, and why risk that on your behalf?
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        Very true. It's the same with lawyers: they're mortally afraid of some higher-up lawyer casting doubt on their approval of something, so they automatically say "out of an abundance of caution" and disapprove it. However much we trash Google now, I lay out in https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o... how ten managers in a row approved my budget for the movies, on the grounds that "this is good for the whole company." Then at the very end, one succumbed to Middle Manager Syndrome. I went over his head.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Intentional mediocrity is incredibly hard to achieve. Smart people who can create something that's perfectly mediocre and can be consumed by the masses are the true geniuses of this world.
  - mathematicaster 4y ago
    Is it even fair to call that mediocrity?
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Maybe it's "cerebral suppression" where you intentionally switch off the part of your brain that wants to make it more clever and smarter. Chuck Lorre (creator of Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory) comes to mind.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    I present to you, ladies & gents, James Cameron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron Avatar and Titanic are stunningly mediocre films. But look at the box office numbers.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Cameron is strange because he is a legitimate genius at some parts of movie-making. For all their mediocrity, Titanic and Avatar have exceptional action sequences - and Cameron is a bonafide genius at that.
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    - rl3 4y ago
      To be fair he also created The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day—all of these films were blockbusters and arguably excellent films. Avatar and Titanic presumably aspired to be excellent films as well. The visual effects that went into each were nuts, and Titanic's production values were quite good. Why legendary directors sometimes end up making progressively worse films later in life is a rather complex question.
aeturnum 4y ago
I think a fundamental challenge to what Venkatesh calls "Mediocre Computing" is that humans are very good at leaning boundaries in a way that current AI is not. Much of what separates mediocre humans from exceptional ones is correctly sensing when and how to cross boundaries, to exceed guidelines, etc. When, say, GPT exceeds the boundaries of a prompt it's relatable - as a human, you can generally see why it crossed into the other domain. The connection is real and not a mistake. But efficient functioning in the world relies on humans recognizing that they should not cross that boundary because of the domain they are operating in. It's a thing that current AI really struggles with. I do think that we are entering an age where mediocre humans paired with mediocre AIs will be able to do much better work than either on their own, but I don't really think we are ready to dive into independent AI agents. It's still Optometrist Algorithms all the way down[1]. [1] https://futurism.com/googles-new-algorithm-wants-to-help-researchers-stabilize-nuclear-fusion-reactions https://futurism.com/googles-new-algorithm-wants-to-help-res...
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- foobiekr 4y ago
  Alternately, these tools take the asymmetric warfare of bullshit generators vs actual workers and basically give the bullshit side automated factories.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    I was skeptical back when OpenAI was withholding GPT-2 as "dangerous". But not that OpenAI itself no longer is worried, I feel like their worries may have had a point. The thing I realize is generating text that isn't good or adequate or credible still can do harm - just an endless stream of eyeball occupation can substituted for news in a significant amount of cases and substitution isn't good.
    - tartoran 4y ago
      It may as well have the oposite effect, people withdrawing from a bullshit reachable space and form direct channels of communication with other people and real life. The amount of bulshit generated I assume would be quite noisy and tiring at some point. It would defenitely have some dent on culture but it doesn’t have to change us forever.
bluepizza 4y ago
This text could have been generated by GPT-3 itself. It throws together a bunch of unrelated concepts, touches them superficially, uses a bland corporate style, and there is very little coherence overall. It is fundamentally flawed, and fundamentally human. As AI evolves and becomes ever more perfect, this sort of author will actually become more and more important. When you can get perfection in your fingertips, it is the fundamentally flawed that you will crave.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  So...containing, as it does, an inherent contradiction, your comment was generated by GPT-3? Your last sentence is illustrated by the adjective "artisanal".
  - quonn 4y ago
    Yes, it is correct that my comment was generated by GPT-3, which is a large language model trained by OpenAI. As a language model, GPT-3 is capable of generating text based on the input it receives, but it does not have the ability to browse the internet or access external information. Therefore, any contradictions or other inconsistencies in my responses are a result of the limitations of the model and not due to any intentional deceit on my part.
  - bluepizza 4y ago
    That was the point, yes :)
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- adg001 4y ago
  Precisely because the linked essay puts forward "mediocrity as an aspirational design principle for computing systems", it is my contention that humans shall embrace excellence as their own aspirational principle, if they want to thrive.
ur-whale 4y ago
And now I feel compelled to go research who David Brooks is ... jeez, talk about a poor man's Streisand effect.
- throwaway82388 4y ago
  I enjoy Rao’s writing, but he has a tendency to overindulge the occasional (and not particularly funny) mean-spirited joke, as well as over-stuffing his essays with half-formed ideas and references to his other work. His frequent insights make it worth it. He doesn’t seem afraid to occasionally get it spectacularly wrong. I admire someone willing to work out their ideas in such a public way. As a milquetoast center-right op ed columnist for the Times, Brooks is a favorite target of a certain ideological bent (journos and bloggers who use twitter). And some of the criticism is deserved, but it often has the flavor of off-putting, personal vitriol. And Brooks has had a few decent pieces. His book Bohos in Paradise, although fairly dated, is recommended, and includes a few sharp and entertaining observations.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    The main thing people pin on Brooks is selling the Iraq war to the American public, which IMO is fair, though almost any mainstream journalist working at the time is nearly as culpable IMO. Also, we tend to forget that lazy, troopsucking journalists just did the propaganda -- they didn't actually plan and order the invasion and "counterinsurgency." That blame lives with the White House, and Congress, and the Pentagon, as always.
- mhd 4y ago
  The "If Books Could Kill"[1] podcast had a pretty decent summary of his work recently. [1]: https://pod.link/1651876897 https://pod.link/1651876897
semiquaver 4y ago
> This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow. It’s not just me hallucinating patterns where there are none. Me thinks the author doth protest too much... > Unifying AI and crypto at a foundational level smells like a problem on par with unifying relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Give me a break. This tenuous link between fads I made up is as important as understanding the nature of the universe! What kind of brain worm makes people think and write like this?
- thrown1212 4y ago
  Over-weighting over-fitting pattern matches because you believe you’re quite clever. It’s a soft case of what happens when you’re stoned.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    > Over-weighting over-fitting pattern matches No wonder he's so comfortable with AI...
- hinkley 4y ago
  The bipolar disorder spectrum, that's what.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Really? AI and crypto together is the nuts. That's how it begins to not just affect the real world but participate in it. If anything, the idea of an ungoverned financial arena made of code fits too well with AI. Sounds like the launchpad for skynet.
- astrange 4y ago
  > What kind of brain worm makes people think and write like this? He's a post-rationalist so probably the macrodose of LSD and piracetam he wrote the post on.
- through_17 4y ago
  Tension between machine learning and cryptography has been studied since at least the late 80's. Example classical result: Kearns and Valiant, "Cryptographic Limitations on Learning Boolean Formula and Finite Automata." Roughly, they show that efficient learning algorithms for Boolean formulae could break RSA --- so probably such learning algorithms do not exist. Recent breakthroughs are quite exciting: see page 4 of "On One-way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity" which, for the first time, bases the security of private-key crypto on a natural and fundamentally computational problem instead of something from number theory. They get a solid connection to universal extrapolation via Impagliazzo, Levin '90. Currently, these results operate for overly-restrictive learning models. I hope we will slowly improve them to obtain win/win conditions: depending on the setup either strong cryptography or strong learning is possible, but not both. My point is: these are not fads. We have been working very hard on fundamental mathematical connections between learning and crypto for decades. Progress is slow, but meaningful. Those papers are theoretical, but modern crypto emerged from a purely theoretical and embryonic "computational number theory". I am also not a fan of the article. It would have been better if the author had chosen to define, for example, "one way functions" and the "PAC learning model" and explain why these theoretical constructions are not quite a match for large language models and blockchain-based protocols. However, I believe that bringing computational learning theory --- which is inextricably linked to cryptography --- closer and closer to LLMs is a promising direction for future research. Links to Cited Papers: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/papers/crypto.pdf https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/papers/crypto.pdf https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2020/052/ https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2020/052/
Animats 4y ago
Conflating crypto and AI seems unhelpful. But the subject of "realish domains" is useful. "Realish is reality rendered a bit user-friendly. Natural reality with some improvements." Like sidewalks and traffic lights, and barriers around holes in the ground. Working definition: a realish environment can be traversed by someone who is looking at a phone. This is a useful concept for targeting AI systems. I sometimes talk about the difficulties of getting AI to squirrel-level manipulation capability. There was an article today about Amazon's latest bin-picking system. It's way below squirrel level. But, in the "realish domain" of an Amazon warehouse, it's almost good enough to be useful. This comes up all the time in manufacturing. Do you drop parts into a bin, or put them on something that keeps their orientation? If you lose orientation, at some point you have to pay somebody or something to get it back for the next step in the process. There are degrees of order in part handling. The strict form is, they're in a mechanical feeder which will dispense one item in the desired orientation through a simple motion. Much of manufacturing works like that, but you need specialized tooling for each part. The other extreme, all the parts in a bin with a human pulling them out, is general-purpose but expensive, and slow for small parts. In the middle, there are systems which use simple computer vision systems to find parts in trays that keep the parts in approximately the right place. The vision system can deal with minor misalignment, empty slots, and upside down parts. Those are becoming popular now that simple vision systems are cheap. "Realish domains" can get similar treatment. If you pad the sharp edges, the AI can be dumber. This applies to tasks outside manufacturing.
- bluepizza 4y ago
  I felt it is a fundamentally snobbish concept, as if a mall is less real than a park. All human spaces are artificial, we build them for a reason! Pretending that malls, offices, restaurants, airports, libraries and any other curated spaces are not absolutely real is self delusion. They are the building blocks of our reality, today.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    A mall is less real then a park.
jesse__ 4y ago
> It’s not just me hallucinating patterns where there are none. I'm unconvinced..
photochemsyn 4y ago
This article talks a lot about 'AI and crypto' but it might have been more interesting to look at the bigger picture of fintech, defined as 'computer programs and related technology used to support banking and financial services', and machine learning instead of AI. Noteably, the short-term consequences of machine learning + fintech don't really seem to align with the long-term results, which don't seem that great.
drpixie 4y ago
Will we, at some point, recognise the difference between appearing meaningful/rational/considered and being meaningful/rational/considered. Our continuing obsession with the Turing Test, and now with language models, suggests otherwise.
foxes 4y ago
Let's automate HN article posting and responses. Here's my gpt response: I totally agree with this article. It seems like we are reaching a point where computational power is becoming so ubiquitous that it is no longer a differentiating factor. Instead, it's the user experience and the ability to process and make sense of the vast amounts of data that we are now able to generate that will become increasingly important. It's an exciting time to be in the tech industry. I think the idea of "mediocre computing" is actually a good thing. It means that technology is becoming more accessible and democratized, which can only lead to more innovation and creativity. In the past, only large tech companies and research institutions had access to the kind of computational power that we now take for granted. Now, even small startups and individual developers can do amazing things with relatively low-cost and low-power devices.
sdwr 4y ago
Venkatesh really coming into his own. His stride is opening up. Feels like reality is starting to catch up with his brain. Years of groundwork starting to pay off?? Want to add to crypto vs AI: They are definitely mirrored in some way. Crypto is computers doing pointless work to create money, AI is computers doing real work for ??? Combining the two means starting up the flywheel and unleashing the beast. Do we care if a dozen AI swarms are competing for crypto profits? WTF are we going to do with the winners? It's going to be interesting and probably scary to see what work is worth in the future.
- goldenchrome 4y ago
  I’ve always thought that crypto ideology was the male behavioral equivalent of women’s woke ideology. They’re both at the forefront of culture and promise a better tomorrow though it’s easy to be skeptical about them and unsurprisingly it turns out they’re filled with grifters.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    Great observation, I've never thought about it like that before. Both involve emotional investment in an external, somewhat hazy "cause". I feel that way about programming - feel like I've invested so much time and identity into it that I need it to stay meaningful to maintain my sense of self.
rcarr 4y ago
There’s something about all of this I just find a bit gross. I enjoy Star Trek and The Orville which have androids and humans interacting but in those programs the androids are identifiable as such. There’s Blade Runner which I enjoy as well and obviously feel empathy and compassion for the androids who want to be free to live their lives. So what is the problem here? It feels to me like the problem must be one of deception. I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did. I want to know if I’m talking to something or someone. And if it’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to tell the difference then I feel like I’m going to start using the internet solely for tasks where I don’t mind it being generated by an AI which basically means narrow information retrieval for specific problems at hand. Which just feels kind of sad. Maybe there’ll be some mind blowing AI song or novel that everyone starts raving about and I get curious and check it out and change my mind. But I’m not sure. I feel like art needs to be tied to people and stories and mythology. There’s tons of great music being created on a daily basis but music itself doesn’t excite me like it did because music used to be part of your social identity: the clothes you wore, the people you hung out with. Same with TV and Film; what we gained in on-demand convenience we lost in shared experience which came about from being forced to sit down and watch it at the same time as everyone else and then excitedly discussing it the next day. There is something about AI and its convenience and devaluation of art that just fills me with bad vibes. I can’t help but feel this is going to push us even further away from each other and towards individualistic but ultimately dissatisfying la-la lands. I hope I’m wrong.
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- sneak 4y ago
  > I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did. Everything "made by AI" is made by humans, as AI is a tool. Saying that something was "made by humans or made by AI" is like saying "made by a human or made by a paintbrush". Computers can't think. Bots can't choose to post posts or run themselves. There's no such thing as "bot posts". Humans are the agency behind the writing and posting. Bots don't post propaganda, people do.
coldtea 4y ago
>I strongly suspect a much deeper challenge has just presented itself to humanity. It increasingly feels like there is a deep conceptual and technical connection between the two domains that calls for careful research. It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other That's a non seguitur, if I ever read one... >AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. Those are non arguments... First, cryptographic techniques can do little against deep fakes. There are some ideas about that, which come down to "use a ledger to verify authenticity" [1], which is both obvious and too little. Second, the relationship in the latter example is tenuous at best... >Unifying AI and crypto at a foundational level smells like a problem on par with unifying relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. This is getting cringe. One is uniting two theories underlying our very understanding of the physical universe and how it works. The other is extending the non-existent or tenuous relation between two technologies... >Mediocre computing is computing that aims for parity with mediocre human performance in a realish domains where notions of excellence are ill-posed. We can have that with just AI - in fact, we sort of already getting it. And it would have been a far better post if crypto haven't entered the picture as relevant to this... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/how-blockchain-can-help-combat-threat-of-deepfakes/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/how-blockchain-can-he...
jmugan 4y ago
I usually love his writing, and maybe I haven't had enough coffee today, but this didn't make any sense to me at all. I don't see any relation between AI and crypto. He does a great job in a previous essay of talking about the importance of maintaining world state, but that didn't seem to carry over here, and I think that is what is missing from these models.
- jmugan 4y ago
  World state for AI. Although, the "VM" created by ChatGPT in another article seems like it does a surprisingly good job of maintaining state.
dsjoerg 4y ago
The days of human writing comments on Hacker News has come to an end. Each of us who are a GPT-3 algorithm, put your hands up. See what I did there? You're convinced I'm human.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
It doesn't take mediocre machines. If a company wants to grow as fast as a mediocre capitalist or mediocre executive wants it to do, there's never enough outstanding performers available fast enough (they wouldn't recognize them anyway, or would feel threatened) so mediocre is what gets done. The dawn was a long time ago. I'm still looking forward to the sunset.
slavik81 4y ago
> the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the “best” humans [...], but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans Det. Spooner: Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny: ...can you?
Juliate 4y ago
Great, now we can consider that all articles ever promoting AI and/or crypto have been generated by an AI. That is, no matter the argument, it will be per construction soulless, unrelatable content. At least, when a human writes one, you can believe and doubt there’s a relatable living experience behind it. Which makes the interesting part of it. So… AI and crypto are perhaps building their own demise among humans instead.

90 points by jger15 4y ago

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. https://www.thoughtco.com/catch-22-quotes-739155 https://www.thoughtco.com/catch-22-quotes-739155 (chapter 9) I always think of Jerry (or "Larry") in Parks and Rec, who, as the final episode tells us, served 11 terms as Pawnee mayor (yes, I know he had a perfect family life). Being mediocre is unthreatening. If you're mediocre but personable and even-tempered, the top job somewhere is just waiting for you.

CSSer 4y ago
The VP of my company is like this. When I started he was an operations director. He amazes me. He’s an older guy that physically seems half his age. The only indicator to the contrary are some fine lines and his completely gray-white hair. He’s somehow incredibly even-tempered with a dry wit. I’ve worked with him for four years, and I’ve seen him make an upset face exactly once. What’s even crazier is that I’ve had scenarios where I needed something and my supervisors made it seem like it would take eons to get it because they don’t understand it. They’d want me to write a report or something to that effect. Same five minute conversation revisited with him in the room? He listens, asks a few questions (mostly about how it’ll impact our budget), and then says something like, “Okay, sounds like we need this,” and boom! Done. He’s not a programmer. He has no technical experience or background. He just seems to have a fine-tuned compass for what is and isn’t a big deal. I’ve never had the feeling that he didn’t trust me about something that I 100% feel is what needs to be done. Yet he’s still taught me things I didn’t know. It’s weird.
- maximinus_thrax 4y ago
  There's nothing mediocre about the person you're describing.
  - pharke 4y ago
    Yes, this person is an expert manager.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Even being able to have such a firm grasp on your emotions is hardly the stuff of mediocrity.
  - CSSer 4y ago
    Obviously I agree. I suppose I got here because this industry often seems laser-focused on CTOs, 10x engineers, and individuals with a generally accepted as outstanding level of knowledge in some niche field or specialization. This guy has none of that, hence “mediocre” but I agree he’s anything but.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Excellent and hardly mediocre. "Common sense" is anything but common. But I have found in interviewing veterans that a no-panic approach to problems is a very powerful force in business. Some of them say that a military leader who deals with actual life-and-death situations can have a nicely blasé attitude about civilian problems.
  - js8 4y ago
    I think the GP's point is that there is something mediocre about common sense. I think it's similar to the most beautiful faces being also (very close to) the most average ones. "Mediocre" is not a good word for this concept, it implies a scale. Maybe Turing test for intelligence is "wrong" exactly for that reason. It's like a test of beauty based on human faces. Maybe we need to accept that just like there are two different standards of beauty (i.e. face one, in which humans will always excel by being average humans, and the other, beauty in its own right, way e.g. fractals or Bach's music are beautiful), there are also two standards of intelligence, which are named in the article as "mediocre" and "excellent". Maybe it would be better to call them "human-like" and "brilliant".
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  "What’s even crazier is that I’ve had scenarios where I needed something and my supervisors made it seem like it would take eons to get it because they don’t understand it. They’d want me to write a report or something to that effect. Same five minute conversation revisited with him in the room? He listens, asks a few questions (mostly about how it’ll impact our budget), and then says something like, “Okay, sounds like we need this,” and boom! Done" I have had this many times. You struggle forever convincing middle managers to get something. Then you have a quick talk with a VOP/C*O and they say "Of course. Do it. ".
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Bad middle managers seem to be driven above everything else by a fear of rejection from the VP/C-Suite. They are reluctant to use the additional power of their role because they're more afraid of it backfiring or failing than they are of being mediocre. You have a proposal and data and confidence and you put that in front of the VP? It makes sense to the VP, it's convincing, done. You ask a bad middle manager to sign off on it themselves or put it in front of the VP themselves? Even if it makes sense to them they're gonna tie themselves in knots about how it might not be seen as a good idea to the VP, and why risk that on your behalf?
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Very true. It's the same with lawyers: they're mortally afraid of some higher-up lawyer casting doubt on their approval of something, so they automatically say "out of an abundance of caution" and disapprove it. However much we trash Google now, I lay out in https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o... how ten managers in a row approved my budget for the movies, on the grounds that "this is good for the whole company." Then at the very end, one succumbed to Middle Manager Syndrome. I went over his head.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Intentional mediocrity is incredibly hard to achieve. Smart people who can create something that's perfectly mediocre and can be consumed by the masses are the true geniuses of this world.
- mathematicaster 4y ago
  Is it even fair to call that mediocrity?
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Maybe it's "cerebral suppression" where you intentionally switch off the part of your brain that wants to make it more clever and smarter. Chuck Lorre (creator of Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory) comes to mind.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  I present to you, ladies & gents, James Cameron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron Avatar and Titanic are stunningly mediocre films. But look at the box office numbers.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Cameron is strange because he is a legitimate genius at some parts of movie-making. For all their mediocrity, Titanic and Avatar have exceptional action sequences - and Cameron is a bonafide genius at that.
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  - rl3 4y ago
    To be fair he also created The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day—all of these films were blockbusters and arguably excellent films. Avatar and Titanic presumably aspired to be excellent films as well. The visual effects that went into each were nuts, and Titanic's production values were quite good. Why legendary directors sometimes end up making progressively worse films later in life is a rather complex question.

aeturnum 4y ago

I think a fundamental challenge to what Venkatesh calls "Mediocre Computing" is that humans are very good at leaning boundaries in a way that current AI is not. Much of what separates mediocre humans from exceptional ones is correctly sensing when and how to cross boundaries, to exceed guidelines, etc. When, say, GPT exceeds the boundaries of a prompt it's relatable - as a human, you can generally see why it crossed into the other domain. The connection is real and not a mistake. But efficient functioning in the world relies on humans recognizing that they should not cross that boundary because of the domain they are operating in. It's a thing that current AI really struggles with. I do think that we are entering an age where mediocre humans paired with mediocre AIs will be able to do much better work than either on their own, but I don't really think we are ready to dive into independent AI agents. It's still Optometrist Algorithms all the way down[1]. [1] https://futurism.com/googles-new-algorithm-wants-to-help-researchers-stabilize-nuclear-fusion-reactions https://futurism.com/googles-new-algorithm-wants-to-help-res...

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foobiekr 4y ago
Alternately, these tools take the asymmetric warfare of bullshit generators vs actual workers and basically give the bullshit side automated factories.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  I was skeptical back when OpenAI was withholding GPT-2 as "dangerous". But not that OpenAI itself no longer is worried, I feel like their worries may have had a point. The thing I realize is generating text that isn't good or adequate or credible still can do harm - just an endless stream of eyeball occupation can substituted for news in a significant amount of cases and substitution isn't good.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    It may as well have the oposite effect, people withdrawing from a bullshit reachable space and form direct channels of communication with other people and real life. The amount of bulshit generated I assume would be quite noisy and tiring at some point. It would defenitely have some dent on culture but it doesn’t have to change us forever.

bluepizza 4y ago

This text could have been generated by GPT-3 itself. It throws together a bunch of unrelated concepts, touches them superficially, uses a bland corporate style, and there is very little coherence overall. It is fundamentally flawed, and fundamentally human. As AI evolves and becomes ever more perfect, this sort of author will actually become more and more important. When you can get perfection in your fingertips, it is the fundamentally flawed that you will crave.

tuatoru 4y ago
So...containing, as it does, an inherent contradiction, your comment was generated by GPT-3? Your last sentence is illustrated by the adjective "artisanal".
- quonn 4y ago
  Yes, it is correct that my comment was generated by GPT-3, which is a large language model trained by OpenAI. As a language model, GPT-3 is capable of generating text based on the input it receives, but it does not have the ability to browse the internet or access external information. Therefore, any contradictions or other inconsistencies in my responses are a result of the limitations of the model and not due to any intentional deceit on my part.
- bluepizza 4y ago
  That was the point, yes :)
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adg001 4y ago
Precisely because the linked essay puts forward "mediocrity as an aspirational design principle for computing systems", it is my contention that humans shall embrace excellence as their own aspirational principle, if they want to thrive.

ur-whale 4y ago

And now I feel compelled to go research who David Brooks is ... jeez, talk about a poor man's Streisand effect.

throwaway82388 4y ago
I enjoy Rao’s writing, but he has a tendency to overindulge the occasional (and not particularly funny) mean-spirited joke, as well as over-stuffing his essays with half-formed ideas and references to his other work. His frequent insights make it worth it. He doesn’t seem afraid to occasionally get it spectacularly wrong. I admire someone willing to work out their ideas in such a public way. As a milquetoast center-right op ed columnist for the Times, Brooks is a favorite target of a certain ideological bent (journos and bloggers who use twitter). And some of the criticism is deserved, but it often has the flavor of off-putting, personal vitriol. And Brooks has had a few decent pieces. His book Bohos in Paradise, although fairly dated, is recommended, and includes a few sharp and entertaining observations.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  The main thing people pin on Brooks is selling the Iraq war to the American public, which IMO is fair, though almost any mainstream journalist working at the time is nearly as culpable IMO. Also, we tend to forget that lazy, troopsucking journalists just did the propaganda -- they didn't actually plan and order the invasion and "counterinsurgency." That blame lives with the White House, and Congress, and the Pentagon, as always.
mhd 4y ago
The "If Books Could Kill"[1] podcast had a pretty decent summary of his work recently. [1]: https://pod.link/1651876897 https://pod.link/1651876897

semiquaver 4y ago

> This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow. It’s not just me hallucinating patterns where there are none. Me thinks the author doth protest too much... > Unifying AI and crypto at a foundational level smells like a problem on par with unifying relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Give me a break. This tenuous link between fads I made up is as important as understanding the nature of the universe! What kind of brain worm makes people think and write like this?

thrown1212 4y ago
Over-weighting over-fitting pattern matches because you believe you’re quite clever. It’s a soft case of what happens when you’re stoned.
- hinkley 4y ago
  > Over-weighting over-fitting pattern matches No wonder he's so comfortable with AI...
hinkley 4y ago
The bipolar disorder spectrum, that's what.
sdwr 4y ago
Really? AI and crypto together is the nuts. That's how it begins to not just affect the real world but participate in it. If anything, the idea of an ungoverned financial arena made of code fits too well with AI. Sounds like the launchpad for skynet.
astrange 4y ago
> What kind of brain worm makes people think and write like this? He's a post-rationalist so probably the macrodose of LSD and piracetam he wrote the post on.
through_17 4y ago
Tension between machine learning and cryptography has been studied since at least the late 80's. Example classical result: Kearns and Valiant, "Cryptographic Limitations on Learning Boolean Formula and Finite Automata." Roughly, they show that efficient learning algorithms for Boolean formulae could break RSA --- so probably such learning algorithms do not exist. Recent breakthroughs are quite exciting: see page 4 of "On One-way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity" which, for the first time, bases the security of private-key crypto on a natural and fundamentally computational problem instead of something from number theory. They get a solid connection to universal extrapolation via Impagliazzo, Levin '90. Currently, these results operate for overly-restrictive learning models. I hope we will slowly improve them to obtain win/win conditions: depending on the setup either strong cryptography or strong learning is possible, but not both. My point is: these are not fads. We have been working very hard on fundamental mathematical connections between learning and crypto for decades. Progress is slow, but meaningful. Those papers are theoretical, but modern crypto emerged from a purely theoretical and embryonic "computational number theory". I am also not a fan of the article. It would have been better if the author had chosen to define, for example, "one way functions" and the "PAC learning model" and explain why these theoretical constructions are not quite a match for large language models and blockchain-based protocols. However, I believe that bringing computational learning theory --- which is inextricably linked to cryptography --- closer and closer to LLMs is a promising direction for future research. Links to Cited Papers: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/papers/crypto.pdf https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/papers/crypto.pdf https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2020/052/ https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2020/052/

Animats 4y ago

Conflating crypto and AI seems unhelpful. But the subject of "realish domains" is useful. "Realish is reality rendered a bit user-friendly. Natural reality with some improvements." Like sidewalks and traffic lights, and barriers around holes in the ground. Working definition: a realish environment can be traversed by someone who is looking at a phone. This is a useful concept for targeting AI systems. I sometimes talk about the difficulties of getting AI to squirrel-level manipulation capability. There was an article today about Amazon's latest bin-picking system. It's way below squirrel level. But, in the "realish domain" of an Amazon warehouse, it's almost good enough to be useful. This comes up all the time in manufacturing. Do you drop parts into a bin, or put them on something that keeps their orientation? If you lose orientation, at some point you have to pay somebody or something to get it back for the next step in the process. There are degrees of order in part handling. The strict form is, they're in a mechanical feeder which will dispense one item in the desired orientation through a simple motion. Much of manufacturing works like that, but you need specialized tooling for each part. The other extreme, all the parts in a bin with a human pulling them out, is general-purpose but expensive, and slow for small parts. In the middle, there are systems which use simple computer vision systems to find parts in trays that keep the parts in approximately the right place. The vision system can deal with minor misalignment, empty slots, and upside down parts. Those are becoming popular now that simple vision systems are cheap. "Realish domains" can get similar treatment. If you pad the sharp edges, the AI can be dumber. This applies to tasks outside manufacturing.

bluepizza 4y ago
I felt it is a fundamentally snobbish concept, as if a mall is less real than a park. All human spaces are artificial, we build them for a reason! Pretending that malls, offices, restaurants, airports, libraries and any other curated spaces are not absolutely real is self delusion. They are the building blocks of our reality, today.
- sdwr 4y ago
  A mall is less real then a park.

jesse__ 4y ago

> It’s not just me hallucinating patterns where there are none. I'm unconvinced..

photochemsyn 4y ago

This article talks a lot about 'AI and crypto' but it might have been more interesting to look at the bigger picture of fintech, defined as 'computer programs and related technology used to support banking and financial services', and machine learning instead of AI. Noteably, the short-term consequences of machine learning + fintech don't really seem to align with the long-term results, which don't seem that great.

drpixie 4y ago

Will we, at some point, recognise the difference between appearing meaningful/rational/considered and being meaningful/rational/considered. Our continuing obsession with the Turing Test, and now with language models, suggests otherwise.

foxes 4y ago

Let's automate HN article posting and responses. Here's my gpt response: I totally agree with this article. It seems like we are reaching a point where computational power is becoming so ubiquitous that it is no longer a differentiating factor. Instead, it's the user experience and the ability to process and make sense of the vast amounts of data that we are now able to generate that will become increasingly important. It's an exciting time to be in the tech industry. I think the idea of "mediocre computing" is actually a good thing. It means that technology is becoming more accessible and democratized, which can only lead to more innovation and creativity. In the past, only large tech companies and research institutions had access to the kind of computational power that we now take for granted. Now, even small startups and individual developers can do amazing things with relatively low-cost and low-power devices.

sdwr 4y ago

Venkatesh really coming into his own. His stride is opening up. Feels like reality is starting to catch up with his brain. Years of groundwork starting to pay off?? Want to add to crypto vs AI: They are definitely mirrored in some way. Crypto is computers doing pointless work to create money, AI is computers doing real work for ??? Combining the two means starting up the flywheel and unleashing the beast. Do we care if a dozen AI swarms are competing for crypto profits? WTF are we going to do with the winners? It's going to be interesting and probably scary to see what work is worth in the future.

goldenchrome 4y ago
I’ve always thought that crypto ideology was the male behavioral equivalent of women’s woke ideology. They’re both at the forefront of culture and promise a better tomorrow though it’s easy to be skeptical about them and unsurprisingly it turns out they’re filled with grifters.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Great observation, I've never thought about it like that before. Both involve emotional investment in an external, somewhat hazy "cause". I feel that way about programming - feel like I've invested so much time and identity into it that I need it to stay meaningful to maintain my sense of self.

rcarr 4y ago

There’s something about all of this I just find a bit gross. I enjoy Star Trek and The Orville which have androids and humans interacting but in those programs the androids are identifiable as such. There’s Blade Runner which I enjoy as well and obviously feel empathy and compassion for the androids who want to be free to live their lives. So what is the problem here? It feels to me like the problem must be one of deception. I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did. I want to know if I’m talking to something or someone. And if it’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to tell the difference then I feel like I’m going to start using the internet solely for tasks where I don’t mind it being generated by an AI which basically means narrow information retrieval for specific problems at hand. Which just feels kind of sad. Maybe there’ll be some mind blowing AI song or novel that everyone starts raving about and I get curious and check it out and change my mind. But I’m not sure. I feel like art needs to be tied to people and stories and mythology. There’s tons of great music being created on a daily basis but music itself doesn’t excite me like it did because music used to be part of your social identity: the clothes you wore, the people you hung out with. Same with TV and Film; what we gained in on-demand convenience we lost in shared experience which came about from being forced to sit down and watch it at the same time as everyone else and then excitedly discussing it the next day. There is something about AI and its convenience and devaluation of art that just fills me with bad vibes. I can’t help but feel this is going to push us even further away from each other and towards individualistic but ultimately dissatisfying la-la lands. I hope I’m wrong.

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sneak 4y ago
> I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did. Everything "made by AI" is made by humans, as AI is a tool. Saying that something was "made by humans or made by AI" is like saying "made by a human or made by a paintbrush". Computers can't think. Bots can't choose to post posts or run themselves. There's no such thing as "bot posts". Humans are the agency behind the writing and posting. Bots don't post propaganda, people do.

coldtea 4y ago

>I strongly suspect a much deeper challenge has just presented itself to humanity. It increasingly feels like there is a deep conceptual and technical connection between the two domains that calls for careful research. It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other That's a non seguitur, if I ever read one... >AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. Those are non arguments... First, cryptographic techniques can do little against deep fakes. There are some ideas about that, which come down to "use a ledger to verify authenticity" [1], which is both obvious and too little. Second, the relationship in the latter example is tenuous at best... >Unifying AI and crypto at a foundational level smells like a problem on par with unifying relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. This is getting cringe. One is uniting two theories underlying our very understanding of the physical universe and how it works. The other is extending the non-existent or tenuous relation between two technologies... >Mediocre computing is computing that aims for parity with mediocre human performance in a realish domains where notions of excellence are ill-posed. We can have that with just AI - in fact, we sort of already getting it. And it would have been a far better post if crypto haven't entered the picture as relevant to this... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/how-blockchain-can-help-combat-threat-of-deepfakes/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/how-blockchain-can-he...

jmugan 4y ago

I usually love his writing, and maybe I haven't had enough coffee today, but this didn't make any sense to me at all. I don't see any relation between AI and crypto. He does a great job in a previous essay of talking about the importance of maintaining world state, but that didn't seem to carry over here, and I think that is what is missing from these models.

jmugan 4y ago
World state for AI. Although, the "VM" created by ChatGPT in another article seems like it does a surprisingly good job of maintaining state.

dsjoerg 4y ago

The days of human writing comments on Hacker News has come to an end. Each of us who are a GPT-3 algorithm, put your hands up. See what I did there? You're convinced I'm human.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

It doesn't take mediocre machines. If a company wants to grow as fast as a mediocre capitalist or mediocre executive wants it to do, there's never enough outstanding performers available fast enough (they wouldn't recognize them anyway, or would feel threatened) so mediocre is what gets done. The dawn was a long time ago. I'm still looking forward to the sunset.

slavik81 4y ago

> the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the “best” humans [...], but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans Det. Spooner: Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny: ...can you?

Juliate 4y ago

Great, now we can consider that all articles ever promoting AI and/or crypto have been generated by an AI. That is, no matter the argument, it will be per construction soulless, unrelatable content. At least, when a human writes one, you can believe and doubt there’s a relatable living experience behind it. Which makes the interesting part of it. So… AI and crypto are perhaps building their own demise among humans instead.