Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

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> Outsourcing thinking is bad.

I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things.

What needs to be clear is who owns what. I never send something I wouldn't stand by. Not in a correctness sense (I have, am and likely will be wrong on any number of things) but more in a "yeah, that is my output, and I stand by it now" kind of way. Tomorrow it might change.

Also remember that google quip "it's hard to edit an empty file". We have always used tools to help us. From scripts saved here and there, to shortcuts, to macros, IDE setups, extensions and so on. We "think once" and then try not to "think" on every little detail. We'd go nowhere with that approach.

IMO it helps to take a scenario and then imagine every task is being delegated to a randomized impoverished human remote contractor, with the same (lack of) oversight and involvement by the user.

There's a strong overlap between things which bad (unwise, reckless, unethical, fraudulent, etc.) in both cases.

> We outsource thinking everyday. [...] What needs to be clear is who owns what.

Also once you have clarity, there's another layer where some owning/approval/delegation is not permissible.

For example, a student ordering "make me a 3 page report on the Renaissance." Whether the order went to another human or an LLM, it is still cheating, and that wouldn't change even if they carefully reviewed it and gave it a stamp of careful approval.

Right. I don’t think I disagee with anything you’ve said here.

However, if I had an idea and just fobbed the idea off to an LLM who fleshed it out and posted it to my blog, would you want to read the result? Do you want to argue against that idea if I never even put any thought into it and maybe don’t even care?

I’m like you in this regard. If I used an LLM to write something I still “own” the publishing of that thing. However, not everyone is like this.

Managers and business owners outsource thinking to their employees and they deserve huge paychecks for it. Entrepreneurs do it and we celebrate them. But an invention that allows the peon to delegate to an automaton? That’s where I draw the line.

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