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> Literally half of humans -- in a professional IT setting -- can't understand simplified, clear english in emails. Similarly, in my experience about half can't

> Literally half of humans -- in a professional IT setting -- can't understand simplified, clear english in emails. Similarly, in my experience about half can't follow simple A -> B logic. There are alternate hypotheses. People have preferences. When it appears that someone does not understand something, they may be pretending they don't understand it, or they may simply be ignoring it. Maybe they are trying to avoid an unpleasant task, or maybe they find dealing with a specific person unpleasant and not worth the effort. In my experience, people are far more capable and competent when they feel comfortable and are interested in the task.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> In my experience, people are far more capable and competent when they feel comfortable and are interested in the task. That's definitely true, but in my experience people have limits: simple biological ones. Repetitive tasks make practically all humans bored, for example. The fact that AIs never get sleepy, distracted, or bored already makes them super-human in at least that one aspect. That they have essentially perfect English comprehension, and hence aren't phased by the use of jargon or technical language, puts them head-and-shoulders above most humans. The frustrations I'm venting aren't some rare thing. I'm working on a technical team where the project manager doesn't understand what the team members are saying. This is not just a matter of syntax, or jargon. They just don't understand the concepts. This is so common in the wider industry that I'm pleasantly surprised, shocked even, when I come across a PM that can ask useful questions instead of needing endless corrections along the lines of: "It's spelled SQL, not Sequel." I've never met a PM that could do simple arithmetic, like "10 TB at 100 MB/s will take over a day to copy, we should plan for that!". Never. I've tested Chat GPT 4 on both language and concepts that I've seen trip up PMs, and it understood "well enough" every time. For example, GPT 4: The sentence "We deployed sequel server successfully last night" seems incorrect due to the incorrect naming of a product. "Sequel server" should actually be "SQL Server", a popular relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. Therefore, the corrected sentence should be: "We deployed SQL Server successfully last night." PS: If you tell GPT 4 to pretend it is a technical project manager and instruct it to ask followup questions, it is noticeably better at this than any PM I have worked with in the last few years.
pixl97 3y ago
The particular problem with work is, people that are commonly promoted to tasks that are neither interested nor comfortable with the task they have been given. You've instead moved the task from general human capability to one of management alignment with worker capability and human statistical probability. This is something that human management has been failing at for about forever, especially as team size gets large. Maybe we'll see AI 'management' align humans to tasks better, or more likely as time and LLM capability progresses, we'll just see the average AI capability increase over the average worker capability and companies will just depend on unreliable meat less.

jiggawatts 3y ago

> In my experience, people are far more capable and competent when they feel comfortable and are interested in the task. That's definitely true, but in my experience people have limits: simple biological ones. Repetitive tasks make practically all humans bored, for example. The fact that AIs never get sleepy, distracted, or bored already makes them super-human in at least that one aspect. That they have essentially perfect English comprehension, and hence aren't phased by the use of jargon or technical language, puts them head-and-shoulders above most humans. The frustrations I'm venting aren't some rare thing. I'm working on a technical team where the project manager doesn't understand what the team members are saying. This is not just a matter of syntax, or jargon. They just don't understand the concepts. This is so common in the wider industry that I'm pleasantly surprised, shocked even, when I come across a PM that can ask useful questions instead of needing endless corrections along the lines of: "It's spelled SQL, not Sequel." I've never met a PM that could do simple arithmetic, like "10 TB at 100 MB/s will take over a day to copy, we should plan for that!". Never. I've tested Chat GPT 4 on both language and concepts that I've seen trip up PMs, and it understood "well enough" every time. For example, GPT 4: The sentence "We deployed sequel server successfully last night" seems incorrect due to the incorrect naming of a product. "Sequel server" should actually be "SQL Server", a popular relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. Therefore, the corrected sentence should be: "We deployed SQL Server successfully last night." PS: If you tell GPT 4 to pretend it is a technical project manager and instruct it to ask followup questions, it is noticeably better at this than any PM I have worked with in the last few years.

pixl97 3y ago

The particular problem with work is, people that are commonly promoted to tasks that are neither interested nor comfortable with the task they have been given. You've instead moved the task from general human capability to one of management alignment with worker capability and human statistical probability. This is something that human management has been failing at for about forever, especially as team size gets large. Maybe we'll see AI 'management' align humans to tasks better, or more likely as time and LLM capability progresses, we'll just see the average AI capability increase over the average worker capability and companies will just depend on unreliable meat less.