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Comment by Falimonda | Hacker News Reader

You cannot fathom how a government official may have told them that they've managed to accelerate their EU accession through the help of LLMs by a specific number of months?

Here's a speculative scenario that doesn't seem so insane:

Albania has a roadmap for EU accession. The roadmap is broken up into discrete tasks. The tasks have estimates for time to completion. They've been able to quickly hack away at 5.5 years worth of tasks using LLMs.

Your problem with the statement is that they didn't provide a source. Maybe express interest in the facts that might support that instead of freaking out over perceived insanity.

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EU accession isn't some jira story where you close tickets.

For a country like Albania, it requires massive social, cultural, political and economical changes. There's no way anyone has a good estimate and there's no way an LLM has magically transformed the culture in a way that's a) meaningful and b) quantifiable.

Turkey has been a candidate for 25 years now, with no meaningful progress.

Why could it not be 15 years for the cultural stuff and 10 years worth of paperwork process, I can imagine an LLM cutting that process in half if it involved hiring and training staff, or waiting for staff to become free from other work to build said paperwork. Out of everything they said in that email, the 5.5 years isn't something I'd pick on given, as you noted, the crazy timelines we're talking about to even be able to put forward an EU application.

Because these are made up numbers. No one knows how long it takes to change culture. The paperwork stuff is not like filling in a tax return, it's actually creating laws that fit into the Albanian legal system but implement EU legislation, and then passing those laws. It's defining new economic measures, getting those numbers, and then formulating legislation to improve them, and then actually implementing that legislation, and the improvements actually happening.

There are no real estimates on any of these numbers. Some countries joined the EU in months, others in 1-2 years, others took 5-10, Turkey has been in the process for two decades or so.

Surely everyone sensible knows an estimate when they see one? All estimates are made up numbers friend, how much flour you use in bread is a made up number too, how long you cook an egg, how fast should a speed limit be set...sure, based on some form of realty, but all estimated are made up numbers. So lets go to that "some form of reality" we derived that made up number form: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/albania-to-sp... - Seems reasonable, no?

Picking on a number based on it's "made upness" is a fool's errand, pick on the assumptions of it's basis in reality.

"All models are wrong", but some models are more wrong than others. My estimate for how much flour I'm going to put in the bread is going to be way, way more accurate than your estimate of how many years ChatGPT shaved off Albanian EU process.

I just can't get over the absurdity of even attempting to estimate - in 0.1 decimal years - how many years tool X shaves off of a totally non quantifiable complex real world process.

And I can't get over the absurdity of seeing multiple people here defending this bullshit.

That's fair!! I accept it.

I'd hazard a guess that all the people here, people like me, "defending this bullshit" - are probably professionally estimators - I am anyway, so I suppose I personally take particular offense to picking on estimates. However, I will never fight that some estimates are superior to others, that is indeed a fact. A good conversation regardless, and isn't that why we're all here? Have a great day Atte. :)

I'm not sure what a professional estimator is, but I hope the implied precision in your estimates is reasonable. In this case it was not the act of estimating itself which was pissing people off - it was the ridiculous level of implied precision. As another commenter noted, presenting the estimate at "5 years" wouldn't be nearly as ridiculous as presenting the estimate at "5.5 years", as the latter implies a level of precision that is entirely unrealistic for non physical processes.

Have a great day as well!

What if the level of precision is posed as "within X months"?

5.5 years is just 66 months...

The claim that an estimate of 5.5 years is "a level of precision that is entirely unrealistic for non physical processes" is absurd. In this context, how can you possibly believe that businesses and organizations worldwide are not capable of estimating non-physical procesess to within a month?

There is no conceivable way in which an estimate of 5.5 years in a non-physical process is anything other than bullshit. If you're estimating paperwork in years, then you're already giving enormously rough estimates. 5 years maybe would have made some sense, but .5 years at that scale is just a way to make a gut feeling sound precise.

Even more importantly, the process of acceeding to the European Union is a political and economic process. The pace at which such things go and the exact requirements are in a constant churn. Today you might need some paperwork, tomorrow some other. You might meet all the technical requirements but not be accepted, or you might not meet all the technical requirements but exceptions can be made, all at the whims of other states' current leaders. Long-term estimates are not even close to plausible for such a process.

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