Fully agreed. Maybe a better analogy here would be something like "drinking water from a pond filled by a creek, with a clear outflow, without boiling it" - it's safe enough to encourage repeat behavior, especially if, say, the pond is convenient, but if you make a habit of it, you'll get sick eventually. Or maybe I'm too wedded to my metaphor. My main point is that there's something short term that leads to folks making the call fairly regularly, that i slikely still unwise, but is not immediately or obviously hurtful enough to get them to turn away, even if they really should.
For what it's worth, my day job is teaching folks how to write and speak to function in the PMC (I teach "Business Communication") and the pressure to just teach them how to prompt an AI is, shall we say, rather strong, but it keeps striking me as a a short-sighted way of promoting seeming success without true progress. It's like an argument to cheat on a test that everyone has to do well on to determine their course in life - sure, immediately, doing well on the test is the goal, and cheating is the obvious way to do that, but to whatever extent actually being good at what the test is meant to ascertain will better prepare you for the life passing the test will give you, you're actually hurting yourself in the long-run, even if in the short run it seems obvious that cheating is the way to go.
Outsourcing your own thinking and ability to express yourself seems like cheating at the very game the PMC is expected to play, and play well. You might get into the game by cheating, but at some point, you'll either falter or find yourself so dependent on your means of cheating that you have to make some pretty gnarly compromises about your actual self and what you can do, which seems like a bad tradeoff, all-told.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-06-01 03:57 am (UTC)For what it's worth, my day job is teaching folks how to write and speak to function in the PMC (I teach "Business Communication") and the pressure to just teach them how to prompt an AI is, shall we say, rather strong, but it keeps striking me as a a short-sighted way of promoting seeming success without true progress. It's like an argument to cheat on a test that everyone has to do well on to determine their course in life - sure, immediately, doing well on the test is the goal, and cheating is the obvious way to do that, but to whatever extent actually being good at what the test is meant to ascertain will better prepare you for the life passing the test will give you, you're actually hurting yourself in the long-run, even if in the short run it seems obvious that cheating is the way to go.
Outsourcing your own thinking and ability to express yourself seems like cheating at the very game the PMC is expected to play, and play well. You might get into the game by cheating, but at some point, you'll either falter or find yourself so dependent on your means of cheating that you have to make some pretty gnarly compromises about your actual self and what you can do, which seems like a bad tradeoff, all-told.
Cheers,
Jeff