Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:09:42 JST Paul Cantrell

   Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:16:06 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Specific line of thought to illustrate my general point:

     Consider an LLM that helps manage email correspondence. It writes emails! It summarizes emails! Less reading! Less typing! More messages faster! Productivity boost!! Except:

     - You have to babysit the LLM, guide it and check it to make sure it’s accurately preserving human intent (which is, after all, the whole point of communication…right??). That’s new work, and likely cancels out the slim time savings of reduced reading and typing.

     2/

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:19:47 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     - But it's an LLM, so it’s still often wildly, convincingly incorrect. Miscommunication increases. Miscommunication has costs. Miscommunication generates new work. Which now gets done faster! And generates yet more work!

     - IT staff has to administer the LLM, support the LLM, evaluate vendors, yada yada.

     - People have to maintain the LLM itself, and the infra that supports it. Those costs are •large•.

     3/

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:24:19 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     And if by some magic all of this actually spins up and gets working, then (1) the barrier to communication decreases (why not just send another email if it’s automated?), (2) individual communication load increases (because you can answer emails at a faster rate), and (3) the net efficiency of communication decreases (because of everything in the previous two posts).

     Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:26:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     I severely doubt many real orgs measures actual desired large-scale outcomes well enough to spot that net efficiency decrease. All this is going to look like increased productivity. Will •be• increased productivity in the ways that most folks actually measure it.

     But here, with the bird’s-eye view of a hypothetical, it’s clear: the total amount of work happening to achieve the same ends has •increased•.

     5/

   • Embed this notice
     Stu (tehstu@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:30:09 JST Stu

     in reply to

     @inthehands In the same way that orgs "save" money by firing people, but effectively lose money by distributing work and causing inefficiencies elsewhere (the hidden cost, as it were).

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:31:50 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     I said “reduce total workload.” What are some thing that accomplish •that•?

     “Do we really have the problem we think we have?”

     “There’s a simpler way.”

     “Work from home!”

     “Hmm, I’m going to think about my reader, and edit for clarity and emotional impact before sending this email.”

     “We’re willing to pay for experience / expertise.”

     “Things are going well. No need for you to stick around!”

     “Maybe we don’t need to do this thing anymore. We can just choose not to have this problem.”

     /end

   • Embed this notice
     Pyperkub (pyperkub@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:36:56 JST Pyperkub

     in reply to

     @inthehands Yeah, during a particularly bad CA budget year I was introduced to the tech concept of:

     Do less with less.

     Sometimes it's what layer 8 requires.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:52:27 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     A lot of things that get billed as a productivity boost sound suspiciously to me like recipes for reducing operational slack and thus “going solid:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cook_(safety_researcher)#%22Going_solid%22

     /7

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:56:33 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • dogzilla

     @dogzilla
     Existing systems •are• what I’m comparing against. I am assuming here, based on (1) emperical observation and (2) the underlying principles of these systems, that LLM email assistants will generally lower communication accuracy on both the transmitting and receiving side versus unmediated human-human interaction. “Worse communication but faster” is what this tech can offer.

   • Embed this notice
     dogzilla (dogzilla@masto.deluma.biz)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:56:34 JST dogzilla

     in reply to

     @inthehands Fair points, but you seem to be comparing an LLM-based system against one with perfect efficiency, instead of the existing human-based system (which I’m certain has its own set of failings).

     While it’s useful to know how an LLM system deviates from the ideal, I’d be far more interested in how it compares against the existing system. Personally, I don’t need a system to be perfect - I just need it to be better

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 04:58:44 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     As both a software developer and a teacher, I’m increasingly interested in figuring out which costly things are avoidable, or can be simplified, or •just don’t matter•…and then doing less of them.

     Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

     /end

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 05:04:22 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Sean Boots

     @sboots
     Thanks. Thoughts on this one still forming; I feel like there’s a kernel in here somewhere that I haven’t found yet.

   • Embed this notice
     Sean Boots (sboots@mastodon.sboots.ca)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 05:04:23 JST Sean Boots

     in reply to

     @inthehands This is such a good thread. 💯💯

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 05:35:44 JST Paul Cantrell

     • datarama

     @datarama
     Process tools and social tools •are• tools in my book. And yes, that’s where much of the action I’m talking about is at. You’re picking up what I’m putting down.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 12:14:05 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • brinnbelyea

     @brinnbelyea Sounds like we’re singing each other’s tune!

   • Embed this notice
     brinnbelyea (brinnbelyea@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 12:14:06 JST brinnbelyea

     in reply to

     @inthehands David Graeber's book BS Jobs explains why we will have more "productivity" that produces nothing. It's all about the churn that achieves nothing, justifying more churn.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 12:32:30 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • brinnbelyea

     @brinnbelyea Well, I’m not an academic, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

     His thesis that a lot of modern work is bullshit seems compelling. The details of his analysis don't; they seem facile, more geared to entertainment than explanatory analysis. The first flaw: his need to categorize whole jobs as bullshit (administrative assistants? useless? really?!) rather than identifying BS as being something marbeled through all jobs.

   • Embed this notice
     brinnbelyea (brinnbelyea@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 12:32:31 JST brinnbelyea

     in reply to

     @inthehands That's surprising. If Graeber's thesis holds water anywhere, it would be academia. It's a very hard case to make that businesses carry multitudes of unproductive employees because management conspires to build fiefdoms despite this lowering profits. In academia, though, the explosive growth of admin and the war on faculty would seem to the the one place where Graeber's thesis is indisputable.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 22:20:31 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • GinevraCat

     @GinevraCat
     My spouse works at an elementary school, and it’s a similar story. The way the district abuses her time is horrifying.

   • Embed this notice
     GinevraCat (ginevracat@toot.community)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 22:20:32 JST GinevraCat

     in reply to

     @inthehands So much this! At the high school I teach at, if you complain about workload / suffer stress / miss deadlines etc, the general administrative response is to allocate you to an online course on "efficient time management".
     Thus adding yet another burden on your time. It's the budgeting in poverty problem - my problem is not how I budget my time, it's the fact that I need more time!

     (Not in my department, though. My HOD understands this.)