Comment by HDThoreaun
1 day ago
It doesnt have to be perfect to be useful. If it does a decent job then your wife reviews and edits, that will be much faster than doing the whole thing by hand. The only question is if she can stay committed to perfection. I dont see the downside of trying it unless she's worried about getting lazy.
I raised this point with her, she said there are times it would be ambiguous for both her and the model, and she thinks it would be dangerous for her to be influenced by it. I'm not a professional historical researcher so I'm not sure if her concern is valid or not.
As a scientist, I don't think this is valid or useful. It's very much a first year PhD line of thought that academia stamps out of you.
This is the 'RE' in research, you specifically want to know and understand what others think of something by reading others' papers. The scientific training slowly, laboriously prepares you to reason about something without being too influenced by it.
I think there's a lot of meta thought that deserves to be done about where these new tools fit. It is easy to off handedly reject change, especially as a subject matter expert who can feel they worked so hard to do this and now theyre being replaced so the work was for nothing. I really dont want to say your wife is wrong, she almost assuredly is not. But it is important to have a curious mindset when confronted with ideas you may be biased against. Then she can rest easy knowing she is doing her best to perfect her craft, right? Otherwise she might wake up one day feeling like symbolic NLP researchers trying LLMs for the first time. Certainly a lot to consider.
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. I try my best to be encouraging and educating without being preachy or condescending with my wife on this subject. I read hn, I see the posts of folks in, frankly what reads like anguish, about having a tool replace their expertise. I feel really, sad? about it. It's interesting to be confronted with it here (a place I love!) and at home (a place I love!) in quite different context. I've also never been particularly good at becoming good at something, I can't do very much, and genai is really exciting for me, I'm both drawn to and have love for experts so... This whole thing generally has been keeping me up at night a bit, because I feel anguish for the anguish.