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Attacking the participants in a systemic shift is 100% useless as it doesn't target the culprit. In programming we have a similar phenomenon, that StackOverflo

Attacking the participants in a systemic shift is 100% useless as it doesn't target the culprit. In programming we have a similar phenomenon, that StackOverflow-driven (and I guess now GPT-driven) juniors have overtaken the industry and displaced serious talent. Because sufficient amounts of quantity always beats quality, even if the end result is inferior, this is caused by market dynamics, which operate on much cruder parameters than the sophisticated analysis of an individual noticing everything around them becoming "enshittified". SO-driven juniors are cheap, plentiful, and easily replaceable. And a business that values less expense and less risk therefore prefers them, because it has no way to measure the quality of the final product with simple metrics. The same mechanism is driving AI replacing our jobs currently, the avalanche of garbage papers by academics. This is entropy for you. We see it everywhere in modern society down to the food we eat. Quality goes away, replaced by cheap to produce and long shelf life. If we don't fundamentally alter what the system sees as ACCEPTABLE, and VALUABLE, this process will inevitably continue until our world is completely unrecognizable. And to fundamentally alter the system, we need an impulse that aligns us as a society, startles us into action, all together (or at least significant majority of us). But it seems we're currently in "slowly boiled frog mode".

ilc 3y ago
This whole thing reminds me a bit of playing Fallout 4. There will be good data, the pre-AI enshitification data. The stuff from before the war. And then... the data after. Tainted by the entropy, and lack of utility of AI. Alas, this means in some senses, human progress will slow and stop in the tech field if we aren't careful and preserve ways to create pre-AI data. But the cost of it is so high in comparison to post... I'm not sold it will be worth it.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  This paints a rosy picture of human-generated data now. It's not as if most human data is reliable. Even among peer reviewed scientific literature, most of it is crap and it takes effort to find the good stuff. Also, your analogy kind of misses the point of the Fallout games. The pre-war world was awful, filled with evil corporations like Vault-tech and Nuka Cola that murdered and poisoned their customers, and the point of the games is that people need to move on and not idealize the past.
  - ilc 3y ago
    There is a reason I didn't draw a hard parallel. I use AI day to day. I see what it can do and can't. But when you see pages, and pages, and pages of GPT spam all over the place. Finding the nuggets of wisdom will be much harder than before, the "bomb" was dropped. Thus actually leading to the whole FO4 main plot. Yes, life will always find a way. And yes humanity can not put the genie in a bottle, we are much more likely to put it on a Fat Man catapult. But it means, that in a sense... that we will all have to accept this background radiation of AI shit, as part of our new norm. And this isn't the first time I've thought in similar ways. I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer. Probably because of the increased effort to actually print something. Who knows... maybe I'm just an old coot seeing patterns where there are none.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      > "I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer." This is 100% the case in chess as well. The books before and after the computer era are orders of magnitude different in terms of readability. I think a major shift in society has been in motivation. In the past if you were studying advanced mathematics, let alone writing about it, it was solely and exclusively because you absolutely loved the field. And you were also probably several sigmas outside the mean intellectually. Now? It's most often because of some vague direction such as wanting a decent paying job, which may through the twists and turns of fate eventually see you writing books in a subject you don't particularly have much enthusiasm for. And the much more crowded 'intellectual market', alongside various image crafting or signaling motivations, also creates a really perverse incentive. Exceptional competence and understanding within a subject makes it easy to explain things, even the esoteric and fabulously complex. See: Richard Feynman. But in modern times there often seems to be a desire to go the other direction - and make things sound utterly complex, even when they aren't. I think Einstein's paper on special relativity vs many (most?) modern papers is a good example. Einstein's writing was such that anybody with a basic education could clearly understand the paper, even if they might not fully follow the math. By contrast, so many modern papers seem to be written as if the author had a well worn copy of the Thesaurus of Incomprehensibility at his bedside table.
ableal 3y ago
> Because sufficient amounts of quantity always beats quality Hegel (as echoed by Marx): "merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes" ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.240462397 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.240462397 ) I always found that an interesting observation, whatever you think of the rest of their works.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Hegel is a hack and doesn’t deserve to be cited here. Consider that he’s really only famous because his class motivated a bunch of other philosophers (the young Hegelian's, Marx, Stirner, Bruno Bauer et al) to meet in wine bars after class to complain about how terrible/impossible to understand his philosophy is. Anyone whose even tried to read stuff of his I.e the phenomenology of spirit will tell you that he’s a charlatan and hack, and the people who constantly cite him (I.e Zizek, Lacan, Foucault) are also hacks.
  - ableal 3y ago
    Hey, can't a blind pig find an acorn? Is it less of an acorn because it was found by a pig? Myself, I appreciate Schopenhauer a lot more, and we know what he thought of Hegel, but I'm not fanatical about it. If a hack hits on a good line, I'll nab it.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  It's an absolutely valid observation and I cite it often. We need to learn as a society how to separate things and think less wholesale. The best people have silly beliefs, the worst people have great insights, and the vast majority of us are in-between. If we discard everything "tainted" by imperfection, we'll be left with nothing good.

ilc 3y ago

This whole thing reminds me a bit of playing Fallout 4. There will be good data, the pre-AI enshitification data. The stuff from before the war. And then... the data after. Tainted by the entropy, and lack of utility of AI. Alas, this means in some senses, human progress will slow and stop in the tech field if we aren't careful and preserve ways to create pre-AI data. But the cost of it is so high in comparison to post... I'm not sold it will be worth it.

jhbadger 3y ago
This paints a rosy picture of human-generated data now. It's not as if most human data is reliable. Even among peer reviewed scientific literature, most of it is crap and it takes effort to find the good stuff. Also, your analogy kind of misses the point of the Fallout games. The pre-war world was awful, filled with evil corporations like Vault-tech and Nuka Cola that murdered and poisoned their customers, and the point of the games is that people need to move on and not idealize the past.
- ilc 3y ago
  There is a reason I didn't draw a hard parallel. I use AI day to day. I see what it can do and can't. But when you see pages, and pages, and pages of GPT spam all over the place. Finding the nuggets of wisdom will be much harder than before, the "bomb" was dropped. Thus actually leading to the whole FO4 main plot. Yes, life will always find a way. And yes humanity can not put the genie in a bottle, we are much more likely to put it on a Fat Man catapult. But it means, that in a sense... that we will all have to accept this background radiation of AI shit, as part of our new norm. And this isn't the first time I've thought in similar ways. I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer. Probably because of the increased effort to actually print something. Who knows... maybe I'm just an old coot seeing patterns where there are none.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    > "I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer." This is 100% the case in chess as well. The books before and after the computer era are orders of magnitude different in terms of readability. I think a major shift in society has been in motivation. In the past if you were studying advanced mathematics, let alone writing about it, it was solely and exclusively because you absolutely loved the field. And you were also probably several sigmas outside the mean intellectually. Now? It's most often because of some vague direction such as wanting a decent paying job, which may through the twists and turns of fate eventually see you writing books in a subject you don't particularly have much enthusiasm for. And the much more crowded 'intellectual market', alongside various image crafting or signaling motivations, also creates a really perverse incentive. Exceptional competence and understanding within a subject makes it easy to explain things, even the esoteric and fabulously complex. See: Richard Feynman. But in modern times there often seems to be a desire to go the other direction - and make things sound utterly complex, even when they aren't. I think Einstein's paper on special relativity vs many (most?) modern papers is a good example. Einstein's writing was such that anybody with a basic education could clearly understand the paper, even if they might not fully follow the math. By contrast, so many modern papers seem to be written as if the author had a well worn copy of the Thesaurus of Incomprehensibility at his bedside table.

ableal 3y ago

> Because sufficient amounts of quantity always beats quality Hegel (as echoed by Marx): "merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes" ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.240462397 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.240462397 ) I always found that an interesting observation, whatever you think of the rest of their works.

Der_Einzige 3y ago
Hegel is a hack and doesn’t deserve to be cited here. Consider that he’s really only famous because his class motivated a bunch of other philosophers (the young Hegelian's, Marx, Stirner, Bruno Bauer et al) to meet in wine bars after class to complain about how terrible/impossible to understand his philosophy is. Anyone whose even tried to read stuff of his I.e the phenomenology of spirit will tell you that he’s a charlatan and hack, and the people who constantly cite him (I.e Zizek, Lacan, Foucault) are also hacks.
- ableal 3y ago
  Hey, can't a blind pig find an acorn? Is it less of an acorn because it was found by a pig? Myself, I appreciate Schopenhauer a lot more, and we know what he thought of Hegel, but I'm not fanatical about it. If a hack hits on a good line, I'll nab it.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
It's an absolutely valid observation and I cite it often. We need to learn as a society how to separate things and think less wholesale. The best people have silly beliefs, the worst people have great insights, and the vast majority of us are in-between. If we discard everything "tainted" by imperfection, we'll be left with nothing good.