3 ms·

Machine-generated or people-generated hallucinations? You would be surprised at how bad most existing reports in business are - and people don't get fired for t

Machine-generated or people-generated hallucinations? You would be surprised at how bad most existing reports in business are - and people don't get fired for those.

thuuuomas 3y ago
This tedious, snarky response is neither clever nor insightful. Like, we get it - you resent your coworkers & consider them beneath you. Hopefully, your unique, elite output keeps you employable for a few quarters longer than them.
- ehutch79 3y ago
  No, it’s a legit gripe. I’m routinely asked to make reports, but things stall when I ask, “so what do you actually need to see on the report, and where should the data come from”. A lot of people out there are kind of cargo cutting their way through things.
  - oblio 3y ago
    > cargo cutting Cargo culting. Though cargo cutting would be interesting to watch :-)
    - ehutch79 3y ago
      ooops. Missed that typo.
- andybak 3y ago
  I didn't read the comment as especially snarky. Your response was both snarky and personal which I think comes across much worse.
- hdhuwgdue2 3y ago
  I don't think parent was trying to be clever. In my neck of the woods various reports have to be massaged hard to account for some of stupid data decisions in the old times. You would be amazed how many issued we identified so far and our mgmt uncharacteristically wants us to bring up issues. Some companies kill their messengers. So yeah.. I absolutely buy that a portion of business reports are of low quality.
nicklecompte 3y ago
I have not gotten fired for a bad report, but I certainly made mistakes in reports/Excel sheets that were intended as customer-facing deliverables. The good thing is that my coworkers checked my work and often noticed mistakes - not always, once an angry customer noticed my mistake, and my boss chewed out my coworkers for being lazy. Obviously humans are not foolproof. But if I was making mistakes, say, in 5% of my facts and figures...I probably would have been reassigned to other work. 5% is way too high for an Excel sheet: it makes the model completely useless. It often takes more effort to audit and fix 5% of busted Excel cells than it does to just rebuild the model from scratch. GPT-4/Copilot/Gemini/etc almost certainly make more than 5% errors for any real use case. I am sure there are many bad organizations with lower standards than the organizations I worked at. My concern is that good organizations will adopt technology like GPT, inadvertently lowering their standards because they trusted a machine they didn't understand. It's very worrying that good people are rationalizing this choice by saying "well humans are also unreliable" without putting specific numbers to it. 5% errors in document summarization is not good enough for human workers, and it certainly shouldn't be good enough for software.

Machine-generated or people-generated hallucinations? You would be surprised at how bad most existing reports in business are - and people don't get fired for those.

thuuuomas 3y ago

This tedious, snarky response is neither clever nor insightful. Like, we get it - you resent your coworkers & consider them beneath you. Hopefully, your unique, elite output keeps you employable for a few quarters longer than them.

ehutch79 3y ago
No, it’s a legit gripe. I’m routinely asked to make reports, but things stall when I ask, “so what do you actually need to see on the report, and where should the data come from”. A lot of people out there are kind of cargo cutting their way through things.
- oblio 3y ago
  > cargo cutting Cargo culting. Though cargo cutting would be interesting to watch :-)
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    ooops. Missed that typo.
andybak 3y ago
I didn't read the comment as especially snarky. Your response was both snarky and personal which I think comes across much worse.
hdhuwgdue2 3y ago
I don't think parent was trying to be clever. In my neck of the woods various reports have to be massaged hard to account for some of stupid data decisions in the old times. You would be amazed how many issued we identified so far and our mgmt uncharacteristically wants us to bring up issues. Some companies kill their messengers. So yeah.. I absolutely buy that a portion of business reports are of low quality.

nicklecompte 3y ago

I have not gotten fired for a bad report, but I certainly made mistakes in reports/Excel sheets that were intended as customer-facing deliverables. The good thing is that my coworkers checked my work and often noticed mistakes - not always, once an angry customer noticed my mistake, and my boss chewed out my coworkers for being lazy. Obviously humans are not foolproof. But if I was making mistakes, say, in 5% of my facts and figures...I probably would have been reassigned to other work. 5% is way too high for an Excel sheet: it makes the model completely useless. It often takes more effort to audit and fix 5% of busted Excel cells than it does to just rebuild the model from scratch. GPT-4/Copilot/Gemini/etc almost certainly make more than 5% errors for any real use case. I am sure there are many bad organizations with lower standards than the organizations I worked at. My concern is that good organizations will adopt technology like GPT, inadvertently lowering their standards because they trusted a machine they didn't understand. It's very worrying that good people are rationalizing this choice by saying "well humans are also unreliable" without putting specific numbers to it. 5% errors in document summarization is not good enough for human workers, and it certainly shouldn't be good enough for software.