ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
If you sit down to play chess against Stockfish, you can say "this is just a matrix of evaluation functions and search trees." You would be correct. But if you actually want to win, you have to model it as a Grandmaster-level opponent. You have to ascribe it "intent" (it wants to capture my queen) and "foresight" (it is setting a trap), or you will lose.
No. When top GMs talk about how they play against computers, they clearly treat it in a significantly different way than how they treat humans. They know what kind of things are included in the evaluation function, like the 'contempt' factor, that can cause it to sometimes behave in non-human ways. They know that it is a perfect calculator (or at least as perfect as it's set to be, so often they're trying to probe how it's set to be), and that colors the way they think about positions and how they choose to spend their own time calculating.
One might occasionally anthropomorphize in terms of "it wants to capture my queen", just because that's easy to do, since one is so used to talking about human opponents in that way. But this is done even when one is not playing against any entity, human or silicon. Take, for example, the process of solving a puzzle. This is just purely a practice exercise. There is no human, no evaluation function or search tree, no model weights (many modern engines also use NNs) actually sitting on the other side of the board making actual moves against you. Sometimes, those puzzles are from actual games, so you can at least see what one other human thought. Sometimes, they have annotations for other lines, so you can see additional thoughts from other humans. Sometimes, they're computer checked (or you check it yourself), so you can see what compy "thinks" (computes). But fundamentally, you're just thinking game-theoretically, which requires you to think about two different (opposed) value functions. Some 'puzzles' aren't even puzzles; they're just evaluation exercises. "Here's a position, what do you think about it?" There's no actual entity on either side. But imprecisely thinking, "What does black 'want' here," "What does white 'want' there," is almost universally helpful, if not mandatory, just to keep in our mind the tension between differing payoff functions and how they interact.
I've done a fair amount of game theory, and it's natural to anthropomorphize purely abstract payoff functions, no model weights or neurons or anything required. When I'm working with new students, it takes work to get them to be able to reason about them, so it's an extremely helpful crutch to regularly poke them with, "...and suppose that player did what you're proposing; now, imagine you're on the other side; how would you respond?" And so, you just sort of get used to imagining a human-like (or for many of my purposes, a human augmented with computational resources) entity on each side, actually thinking in a self-interested way.
But back to GMs playing computers. They've been thinking this way for decades. Sometimes with actual humans on the other side, sometimes just a puzzle, whatever. They've honed the skill of rapidly thinking right past the step of, "What would I do if I were on the other side at that particular moment?" And these days, top GMs are pretty comfortable distinguishing between the different ways that engines "think" about positions. Watch a few of Hikaru's many many videos where he plays against a bunch of different bots. He very clearly understands that they're evaluation functions and search trees, and different combinations of evaluation functions and search trees of varying lengths have different strengths and weaknesses. He still regularly plays variations of 'anti-computer chess' where he's 100% banking on there being a significant difference between modeling it like a particular evaluation function with a particular set of search tree parameters (potentially also with a particular opening book/endgame tablebase) and modeling it like a GM-level human opponent.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Anyone who is an advocate for reducing the price of housing but isn't for building new construction is a liar who is a part of the problem.
The thing is though, if you are for building new construction, possibly in connection to wanting to reduce the price of housing, the predictable surety is the value of houses currently owned by people will go down.
Trump is just being honest in that he is siding with the landowners.
I should have spent more time trying to find the rest of the context of that clip. I debated it, but was lazy. There is a clue in that he briefly says, "We're going to make it easier to buy." A longer clip is here. He talks about this repeatedly. Making it "easier" for people who don't own houses to buy houses. The repeated message of the Secretary of HUD is about how they're making it so that millions more people "can afford" to buy houses. How is it "easier"? How is that they "can afford"? The major talking point is interest rates. ...as if lowering interest rates has no effect on the sale prices of houses. Lowering monthly mortgage amounts, offering lower down payment options like FHA loans or whatever, sure, these things get people into home borrowership, but they have other effects, too. Do people already forget the impacts of the drive to push more and more people into home borrowership twenty years ago, even resulting in significant impacts to government coffers as they were left picking up the pieces.1 These things are the sorts of ridiculous tinkers one comes up with to try to look like one is solving the problem when one hasn't grasped the reality of the core tension.
Trump is honest in that he's saying that he's siding with landowners, and he wants you to believe it. He's honest in that he's saying he's siding with people who want to buy houses, and he wants you to believe it. So we'll keep pushing the same flawed fake solutions, try to play whack-a-mole in the process, and never accept the limit of technocratic solutions.
1 - I've been lucky in that I decided a few years ago to start listening to the entire back catalog of EconTalk. It started in 2006, and I'm around 2011 now. There are plenty of episodes that aren't housing-related, but there is an incredible breadth and regular stream of folks grappling with and trying to understand the housing crisis, the crash, and the process of recovery. I guess I've been stewing in it enough that it's clear what people thought they were trying to do, how it sounded nice, how it all went wrong, and now we're basically repeating the same tune, just a different key.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I almost didn't write this, because from my perspective, "In a world where most people don't have coherent thoughts on Topic X, here's a politician who also doesn't have coherent thoughts on Topic X," may be a bit boring. I decided to write it anyway, because it gives a quick hook to the root of the issue, and I might as well lay it out in detail somewhere.
So, Trump speaks on the price of housing. For some societal context, there has been a bit of a movement toward trying to lower the cost of housing. YIMBY is oriented somewhat in this direction; I've even heard the phrase "Housing Theory of Everything" describing the perspective the high housing costs have a variety of other knock-on effects, and so it would be desirable to lower the cost of housing.
Trump highlights the core of the problem. He doesn't want to lower the value of "existing" housing. "People who own their home" should be kept wealthy with high house prices. But the kicker is that there's no way to economically separate the value of "existing" housing and the "people who own their homes" from, uh, "non-existing" housing? As sure as the day is long, if you have a stock of houses, each worth $1M, and then conjure out of thin air a plentiful amount of previously "non-existing homes" that only cost $500k to buy but are otherwise just as desirable, what's going to happen when an existing homeowner decides to sell their house? They'll list it for $1M, but all the potential buyers will look at that, look over at the same deal for only $500k, look back and think, "WTF? Why would I spend that much?" They're going to buy the cheap one. And so, if the existing homeowner wants to successfully sell his home, he will have to lower the price.
...but since everyone already knows that he would have to lower the price (since the price of whatever magical disconnected-from-existing-housing has been lowered), then everyone already knows that the "value" of that existing home is, uh, lower. These things are obviously connected; you can't just hold one constant and tweak the other.
I continue to maintain that the vast majority of folks out there simply do not have a coherent view on the simple question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" They want to magically keep the value just exactly as high or higher for existing homeowners, but somehow magically make housing otherwise generally cheap.
You can try (and oh boy does the government try) to come up with ways to just throw cash at the problem, but these efforts generally run into two major types of problems. First, that cash has to come from somewhere. Almost always, that's taxes. Who do you think is paying those taxes? This one we might file under the "obfuscation theory of government". If you hide it well enough that people don't realize that the cash being thrown at the problem to make it look like their right pocket is just as wealthy as it ever was is in fact coming out of their left pocket, they just might not realize?
Second, most schemes end up having to play endless whack-a-mole for the follow-on effects if they want to maintain general cheap housing while keeping house prices high. For example, all the business about throwing cash at first-time home buyers. Some of that reduces the cost to folks who don't own a house, and some of that increases the price of the houses (going to the sellers), and that seems like it could just solve the problem, right?
Well, consider a renter. They're not getting the bag of cash thrown their way. But the price of the houses that they'd like to rent are going up. So their rent is going up. So the cost of "housing" isn't going down for them. Are you going to play whack-a-mole and start subsidizing rent, too? This way Venezuela lies. What if you just jack up the FTHB cash-throw? Just accept that renting is going to be basically infeasible, because getting into the home-borrowership (to use a phrase from Arnold Kling) carousel is now too economically attractive in comparison. Sure, you'll end up with fake and gay high house prices, but everyone "gets in", right? But even then, your 'wealth' is fake and gay. Suppose you want to sell your house and reap the sweet sweet value that you have. Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price? Suddenly, your gainz disappear. All the while you're paying more interest, more property tax, and more transactions costs (that realtor still costs 3% of a fake and gay high price).
Someone will surely try to come up with this scheme and that scheme to whack this mole or that mole, but I press X to doubt that you can technocrat your way to a solution, especially one that doesn't cost gigantic bags of cash coming out of the general treasury (and ultimately, taxpayers' pockets).
The fundamental question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" confuses a lot of people and is probably one of the core problems of our time that produces a multitude of political dysfunction.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
My thought upon reading these comments was, "How the hell does Congress have the authority to pass such a law in the first place?"
The Wikipedia article on the law references a locked article, but the internet exists and has ways to fix the glitch, so I found that the case that Wiki refers to for noting that a federal district court upheld the law is American Life League, Inc. v. Reno. The opinion helpfully provides a concise little Section III. Congress's Authority to Enact FACE. Concise enough that I'll quote in full, only removing references:
At the outset, the Court rejects the plaintiffs' argument that Congress lacked authority to enact FACE. Congress has the power, under the Commerce Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 3, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 18, to regulate interstate commerce and intrastate activity that affects interstate commerce. This authority extends to enacting criminal penalties for individual acts, even if not all of the potential defendants had actual connections to interstate commerce. The legislative history of FACE shows that Congress had evidence both of numerous women crossing state lines to obtain reproductive services no longer available in their home states and of anti-abortion organizations crossing state lines in order to orchestrate violence against abortion providers and patients. The Senate hearings also include extensive testimony concerning the inability and, in some cases, unwillingness of local law enforcement authorities to provide adequate protection for reproductive health service clinics, their staffs, and patients. We find that Congress had ample evidence of the impact upon interstate commerce of myriad threats, bombings, stalkings, blockades and assaults inflicted on reproductive health services providers and patients, and that the prohibitions in FACE are a reasonable and appropriate means to address the problem.
Now, if you noticed, the Wiki article says this was in 1995. ...but the opinion says it was June 16, 1994. Lopez was handed down on April 26, 1995. Contrary to what one might have heard, Lopez has aged... well, not perfectly, but at least acceptably well. There is no way that such an argument for Congressional authority flies that easily today. If I had to take a position right now without briefing or oral arguments, I'd say that the hack took place when the law was passed and that it was an unconstitutional overreach of Congressional authority from day one. Would be the peak of irony if a leftist protester raised this challenge now and won, demonstrating that all the harassment of pro-life folks for decades was never legal.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
The claim that governmental action is always backed up by an implicit violence
First, I would make a distinction. In this thread, it was not just claimed that every governmental action is always backed up by implicit violence. Instead, it was that every single action was inherently, definitionally violent. I think the latter claim is pretty bollocks. Your change of the claim to being "backed up" by "implicit" violence is far more defensible.
Generally, what it takes to argue that it is backed up by implicit violence is to posit a sufficiently oppositional figure whose opposition contributes to getting into the "back up" situation, where the implicit becomes explicit.
The claim that governmental action is always backed up by an implicit violence, is bad
I have not said anything about the claim being "bad".
every interaction with any other agent is also backed up by implicit violence based enforcement. So government action being so, is not unique and thus calling it out is not special.
Instead, this is more accurate. It's not unique to government. Because of reasons, many times other agents outsource the back up enforcement, the turning of the implicit violence into explicit violence, to the government, but not always. Regardless of whether they insource it or outsource it, if they want to make a rule/action/decision/what-have-you that controls another individual, and if you posit a sufficiently oppositional individual, there is likely an implicit threat of violence as a back up. Now, this implicit backup threat is not always actualized in every case; of course not; it's not always actualized in every case with the government, either. But it seems to me that the same form of the argument holds.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Ah, so I realize now that the comment I was replying to was talking about the rising cost of low-end labor more generally; when I had written my reply, I was for some reason just focusing on the change in hotel cleaning strategies.
I do not know fully what the nature of it is. There's probably a JMP somewhere that does a good job. Here are a couple fed papers talking about it.
I did, however, notice that there was an NYT article this morning claiming that the price for crops is apparently low enough that some farmers are considering letting it rot in the field. Not even unharvested; it's talking about possibly dumping them back onto the field. Also last week Brian Potter took a longer view, observing that crop prices have trended significantly down. These things would be a bit strange for a view that is sort of one-dimensional (labor shortage from immigration restrictions/COVID/magic/etc -> higher wages -> higher prices). These things are obviously multifactored. That second fed paper definitely talked about higher wages on the low end being a thing. Perhaps the price of crops would have been even lower if we could have counterfactually, magically tweaked just the one variable of agricultural workers/wages.
The multifactored nature of an incredible interdependent thing like an economy makes it pretty dangerous to overly focus on any one component. That's why I find it useful to scope back out to more broad reasoning to at least level set. Tightening immigration restrictions moves the supply curve to the left, which raises prices and reduces output. How much? It depends. Probably not infinity. It will likely also have effects that spread beyond the narrow markets that employ the most illegals. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? More information is required about the value function in question.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
I'm not sure whether the roll back was entirely supply-side. Hotels probably thought that consumers wanted hotel staff to stay out of their rooms during COVID. Then, different consumers likely had different preferences over time (some folks wanted to "get back to normal" very quickly, while others stayed in "pandemic mode" longer), they probably pretty rationally came up with the idea of just making room cleanings a bit more optional rather than routine. At some point, the light bulb probably flipped, and they realized they could probably save a fair amount of money by just fiddling with the default.
Even pre-COVID, it was still 'optional'. You could just put up the Do Not Disturb sign if you didn't want it. But the default was every day. More recently, I've seen defaults that are every other day or twice a week or whatever; I don't remember the details of every one. It's always been, "Don't worry, we obviously thoroughly clean for new guests, and also if you ever want a cleaning, just ask," but this allows them to skimp on costs with almost no consumer bad will. Honestly, this is probably part fluke that they just somehow didn't think of it before (or felt like they couldn't get away with deviating from the 'industry standard' until they had COVID push everyone off the equilibrium).
ControlsFreak
8d ago
eventually I will need to leave
You may choose to. They may choose to wait.
The SCIF
...but I kinda doubt they'll wait.
The Government doesn't describe arresting law breaking citizens as "Maximal-Opposition" and my parents very much spanked me as a kid and I doubt they would consider corporal punishment as "Maximal-Opposition" in respect to defiance either.
That's not at all what I've said. I've said that you can very very easily find examples of the government or parents doing things that are non-violent. Nevertheless, if you persist at coming up with ways to be oppositional (example), they either have to escalate or give up on enforcing the rule. If you repeat the steps of being oppositional and escalating enough times, you end up in violence. That doesn't mean the first thing was violent.
When your parent says that you can leave the dinner table, but if you're hungry later, you're just going to get the dinner that you didn't eat, that's not violent. If later comes around, the kid escalates, and the parent moves on to corporal punishment, that doesn't somehow convert the first encounter into being a violent encounter.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave
What if you don't leave? Remember to apply the assumption of maximal-opposition at every stage.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
It's probably unlikely that we'll end up with zero janitors, general construction workers, drywallers, or hotel maids. Prices find equilibria. Both supply and demand matter.
the end result of that is far fewer janitors, not janitors getting a pay raise.
Adding illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the right; removing illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the left (at a first approximation in the linear range). Both elasticities will matter, but the only way that you can shift the supply curve to the left and not have the price rise is if the demand for janitors is almost perfectly elastic. That seems unlikely.
As I mentioned, removing illegal immigrants very likely has both the effects of increasing price and decreasing output. That is, both increasing wages and decreasing jobs. The proportion depends on elasticities as well as factors in the rest of the general equilibrium, as the market adjusts.
Nothing in anything I've said has any claims on which occupations will or will not make "well above average salaries". That will be up to the market to decide. What counts as "completely unaffordable" is also subjective, but could in theory be supported by quantitative estimates. Prices will rise; wages will rise (they are prices, after all); output will fall; jobs will fall. This is all very standard economic theory and not really contestable. Any other statements about magnitudes of effects require quantitative argumentation.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on
...at what price? If you raise the price, you can likely get American labor force on it. If you don't have to raise the price massively to get American labor force on it (because illegals don't make massively less than citizens doing the same job), then it seems somewhat minor. If you do have to raise the price substantially to get American labor force on it, well then I guess we're back to potentially significant cost increases for various crops/clean hotel rooms/etc.
far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.
If one raises the price, it is not clear to what extent the people attracted to those jobs will come from the currently-non-working and to what extent it will come from folks working other jobs. You can generally get the reliability you desire by raising the price. Of course, this will compete with other job opportunities, pushing wages up more broadly and likely ending some jobs that are at the low end of value. This could increase costs for other goods/services that don't directly employ illegals now.
The open boarders economists like Bryan Caplan make the argument well that immigration restrictions have effects like ending those low value jobs, reducing overall economic efficiency and total output. I've already observed that, for example, hotels have significantly rolled back on regular room cleanings post-COVID. You could imagine effects that feel kind of like that, possibly still in combination with price increases, as the market adjusts. Some folks think the tradeoffs are worth it (and may point to various different things that are trading off, one prominent example being distributional affects purely in terms of American wages), others disagree, and well, yeah, some are probably ignorant of how they're likely to be connected.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply.
This is a perfect example of precisely what I spoke about here:
There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
When I last looked at it, there was no navigation. They had disabled it as an experimental feature, because apparently it was really bad, and the rumor was that they were going to focus on other features with no estimate for when it might come back. So it's not a system where you can set, "I'd like to go to X," and then sit back and let it take you there.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
We might need to come up with a catchy cartoon name for this strategy, otherwise it will lose the memetic war to bumbling Ralph Wiggums.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
the Christian-Socialist-Democratic-Party/Liberal-Unionist-Secession-Party/Green coalition in [Euro country] is breaking down over the question of whether state pensions should cover ceiling fans.
I would love a full comment explaining this one.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
I don't know what you're talking about. You gave a nice definition and the properties of your definition. I'm not even asking for more at this point. Yes, I did ask you to say at least something about what your words mean, because if you can't manage to explain it at all, it's highly likely that you're confused about your own words. But at this point, I'm just looking at your nice definition/properties and observing that you solved your own problem from before. This is good news! This is wonderful news! Shouldn't you be happy that you had a problem before, and now you've solved it? The "inherent tension" in your philosophical positions has evaporated! That's the whole point of this OP.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
They're very not new to me, but apparently, they're pretty new to you, because you thought that this was a very serious issue for you. But now you've solved your own problem, in like a quarter of a second. Record time in philosophy! Just needed a common sense and consensus definition of evil!
ControlsFreak
13d ago
I need to go hunting on SMBC, because he had to have made a comic about this. If not, he really needs to.
That is, I'm pretty sure you've just solved your problem of evil, in quite the unique way.
It certainly seems logically plausible that whatever god may have created the universe, at the time that he/she/it created the universe, thought, "Hmmmm, I wonder if it would be evil to create a universe where eventually, one day, maybe, depending on how things go, a two year old will get ALL?" Perhaps this deity looked around, took an opinion poll to gauge the vibes, determined from the (presumably otherwise empty) room that it seemed a-ok, and proceeded to create said universe. Guess that just wasn't evil, by a common sense and consensus definition of the term.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
This dovetails a bit with my footnote below about figuring out what "box" a person's world is. CSRs have scripts for the majority of the issues that they see on a regular basis. Task number one is to figure out whether your issue fits within one of their scripted boxes. If so, you're probably in good shape. If not, then individual quality can vary substantially. I've had multiple experiences where, after determining that my situation did not fit their script, it was very apparent that it would be important to get a person whose box extended beyond the scripts and included the knowledge/intelligence sufficient to work the problem. I've had times where, for example, they told me they could solve the problem, but they could not explain how the steps would work well enough that I was comfortable proceeding. A hang-up and a call back later, and I got someone who was very capable of conceptualizing the problem properly, taking a few minutes to work through how a solution would work, and (critically) explaining how it was going to work. Whether a simple call back to another Tier 1 CSR will get you that type of person versus having to fight to get to a Tier 2 person may vary.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
When I talk about consensus morality, I'm talking today.
This definition is valid at, like, every snapshot point in time, then, yes? The same action could be "evil" at one point in time and "not evil" at a different point in time?
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Those are all necessary and sufficient conditions in your definition of evil? We can go through them one by one, but maybe let's just start with the last one. If, uh, someone (who?) isn't "willing to enforce" a "preference", then it's, uh, not evil to go against it? What even is "willing to enforce"? Like, does the enforcement need to be realized? Can it be weighed against other things? If the someone (who?) is like, "Yeah, I'm willing to enforce this, but due to other considerations (other priorities, something inherently difficult about detection or enforcement, etc.), I'm not going to put too much time and effort into it," does that still count for determining whether something is evil or not?
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Whence a consensus that evil means "in bad taste"? I guess perhaps you're not incorporating consensus at this level of generality, so are you instead just asserting that your definition of evil is "something done in bad taste, as measured by some vibes about a consensus" or something?
ControlsFreak
13d ago
I'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil
What's that? Whence consensus?
ControlsFreak
14d ago
@P-Necromancer I think I'd like to bundle these two, as they're getting at a similar thing.
I agree with what you both say. Plenty of humans will come up with ridiculous things to do, or even just things that might make sense but have problems, and if you're not supervising them appropriately, they may just do their things. But that's like, the essence of technical debt?
For the example of fixing some OS issue, imagine I didn't have really any technical knowledge of how things work (say, I don't really even know what the registry is unless a tech/LLM tells me something about it). Maybe I'd take my computer to a human tech. Could even be a corporate IT guy. Perhaps, knowing that I don't have a clue, I just give it to him. "Here's my problem; please fix it Ralph Rufus."
Who knows what he'll get up to? What stuff he'll mess with along the way. Things he'll try just because, and then maybe leave it in a changed state, even though it didn't progress toward a solution to the actual problem. This cruft can build up. After years of having this corporate IT guy and that corporate IT guy and the other corporate IT guy just doing who knows what, maybe at some point, things get bizarre enough that the next one says, "Dude, stuff is wild here; we probably should just wipe it and clean install."
That makes sense, and it's utterly routine in the world with humans. I hear my wife tell me about weird stuff that's broken on her work computer... and even weirder stuff that whatever IT guy she talked to did. She doesn't have a clue what's going on. I get it.
I also agree that as of right now1, the best is when you know enough about what's going on that you can get it to explain things and are able to then understand it, yourself. Get it to document things fully, provide a suite of tests, have a back-and-forth. It can provide tons of utility!2
...but, if you genuinely lack enough knowledge to be a competent participant of that back-and-forth, it still may let you "just do stuff". There can still be tons of utility here, as it may still get things right a lot, and folks who have had some problem that they've wanted to fix for ages and could never get the time with a competent human and certainly couldn't figure it out on their own will be able to fix many of those problems, and it will be wonderful. It may also, occasionally, along the way, build up technical debt.
Note that I'm not saying that this is some unique problem that is fundamentally different from dealing with humans. Instead, I'm now conceptualizing it in the same way that I conceptualize human-driven technical debt. I think that dovetails well with both of your descriptions. If there is a downside, it's probably that many folks who wouldn't have ever tried to fix that OS problem or make that code will now do it, and they might be building up technical debt while they're also accumulating utility. They may choose to do it a lot, and they may jump into it with both eyes shut. This may still be the right choice! They may still get more utility from all the wins than they lose from either discrete bad events or built-up cruft.
This is a conflict, a tension, which is why I said that I was, indeed, conflicted. I'm am still neither an "LLM good" or "LLM bad" person.
1 - I continue to take no position on the question of to what extent future progress will render this concern de minimis.
2 - To briefly respond to the 'shouldn't you just hang up on a human customer service agent who you can tell is going to be unhelpful', yes. Absolutely. I didn't bother with the specific issue of it getting hung up on deleting the registry value, because I was close enough that hearing it append its bad idea one more time wasn't important to me. I did mention that I used multiple LLMs, and that was part of it; I left out every twist and turn of the story, but yeah, I not only just scrapped the prior context; I even just jumped to different models. This is a useful skill to have, when dealing with humans and LLMs. Even when dealing with some human professionals, my life changed long ago when I realized that I could grasp some understanding of what their "box" of the world was, and once I realized that my situation was outside of their "box", I just moved on from them. But the concern here is that you have to have just enough knowledge about the thing to be able to gauge where their box is, when you're outside of it, or when they're going off the rails. There are a lot of people who don't have that with humans, and they're not going to have that with the many many more things that they're going to want to do with LLMs. I don't have that with all sorts of different humans or things that I might want to do with LLMs.
I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I can. There's a lot of little things that stick out. Little nuggets here and there that I remember. If there's anything big picture, it's that most people don't think much about economics or complex systems. Sometimes, the downside to something that sounds good can be right in front of their face, and they won't get it (the price gouging for ice after a hurricane story is legendary). Other times, the dispersed nature of information, thinking, and actions masks implications for how tweaking one thing can change other things. He's very Hayekian in that. It's been kind of a long absorption process, hearing how One Neat Trick failed and Another Neat Trick failed and Another Neat Trick failed that you don't just become skeptical of One Neat Tricks, but you start to gain an intuition for how the next One Neat Trick is likely to fail.
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