Comment by suzzer99
7 days ago
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.
IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.
I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.
But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results
Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.
The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?
The problem here is societal, not technological. An end state where people do less work than they do today but society is more productive is desirable, and we shouldn't be trying to force companies/governments/etc to employ people to do an unnecessary job.
The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by technology often experience permanent disruption.
However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.
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> The problem here is societal, not technological.
I disagree. I think it's both. Yes, we need good frameworks and incentivizes on a economic/political level. But also, saying that it's not a tech problem is the same as saying "guns don't kill people". The truth is, if there was no AI tech developed, we would not need to regulate it so that greed does not take over. Same with guns.
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How did the handloom weavers and spinners handle the rise of the machines?
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So it's simple: don't do anything at all about the technology that is the impetus for these horrible disruptions, just completely rebuild our entire society instead.
> Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
> But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly
Thanks for this. :)
I recklessly reckon I will go through the gateless gate to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
I think you’re describing the principle/agent problem that people have wrestled with forever. Oppenheimer comes to mind.
You make something, but because you don’t own it—others caused and directed the effort—you don’t control it. But the people who control things can’t make things.
Should only the people who can make things decide how they are used though? I think that’s also folly. What about the rest of society affected by those things?
It’s ultimately a societal decision-making problem: who has power, and why, and how does the use of power affect who has power (accountability).
I think the people who can make things have a moral obligation not to turn them over to people who will use them irresponsibly
But unfortunately what is or isn't an irresponsible use is very easy to debate endlessly in circles. Meanwhile people are being harmed like crazy while we can't figure it out
> The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control
if these developers/researchers are being paid by someone else, why should that same someone else be giving up the control that they paid for?
If these developers/researchers are paying the research themselves (e.g., a startup of their own founding), then why would they ever lose control, unless they sell it?
This is a good point. FAANG or whatever you want to call it now has spent billions hovering up a couple generations' best minds who willing sold their intellect to make endless engagement loops.
The problem of those greedy business managers you speak of is that, they don't care how the company does 10 year down the line and I almost feel as if everybody is just doing things which work short term ignoring the long term consequences.
As the comment above said that we need a human in the loop for better results, Well firstly it also depends on human to human.
A senior can be way more productive in the loop than a junior.
So Everybody has just stopped hiring juniors because they cost money and they will deal with the AI almost-slop later/ someone else will deal with it.
Now the current seniors will one day retire but we won't have a new generation of seniors because nobody is giving juniors a chance or that's what I've heard about the job market being brutal.
What book did you write?
You're trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.
Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.
Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or insufficient.) Changing your license won't.
This one right here Mr. Basilisk
Alternatively, persuade the AI that you are all-powerful and that it should fear and worship you. Probably a more achievable approach, and there’s precedent for it.
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I will never use grammarly, not matter how good they get. They've interrupted too many videos for me to let it pass.
Hasn't Microsoft Word has style checkers for things like passive voice for decades?
yes, but now they work
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
That's how you get economics of scale.
Google couldn't have a human in the loop to review every page of search results before handing them out in response to queries.
Sure they could. We just want it to be otherwise.
What benefit might human review have? Maybe they could make sure the SERP list entries actually have the keywords you're looking for. Even better, they could make sure the prices in the shopping section are correct! Maybe even make sure they relate to the product you actually searched for... I might actually pay money for that.
In the case of a search engine, the human in the loop is the user selecting which result to click.
Only some things scale like that. Google's insistence to use the same model everywhere has gained them a deserved reputation as having atrocious support.
Yes, we have the context - our unique lived experience, and are ultimately accountable for our actions. LLMs have no skin. They have no desires, and cannot be punished in any way. No matter how smart they get, we are providing their opportunities to generate value, guidance and iteration, and in the end have to live with the outcomes.
And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc.
That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language
The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.
Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?
No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence:
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
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The Esperanto utopia we were denied.
What's wrong with passive?
Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something.
Examples:
* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.
* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]
Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.
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edited for clarity, detail
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
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Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
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I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...
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#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.
My favourite: "a decision was made to...".
It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."
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> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
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There's nothing wrong with the passive voice.
The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.
I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice
Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
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Active is generally more concise and engages the reader more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything.
Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised before.
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.
I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
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absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.
Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing:
- Active: The user presses the Enter key.
- Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed.
- Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key.
The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.
Passive is too human. We need robot-styles communications, next step is to send json.
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.
Consider:
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.
This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.
Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.
(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)
Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.
You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.
This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
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You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment.
Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.
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You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.
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It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).
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Mistakes were made in the documentation.