This is a special post for quick takes by Phib. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Kinda commenting on stuff like “Please don’t throw your mind away” or any advice not to fully defer judgment to others (and not intending to just straw man these! They’re nuanced and valuable, just meaning to next step it).
In my circumstance and I imagine many others who are young and trying to learn and trying to get a job, I think you have to defer to your seniors/superiors/program to a great extent, or at least to the extent where you accept or act on things (perform research, support ops) that you’re quite uncertain about.
Idk there’s a lot more nuance here to this conversation as with any, of course. Maybe nobody is certain of anything and they’re just staking a claim so that they can be proven right or wrong and experiment in this way, producing value in their overconfidence. But I do get a sense of young/new people coming into a field that is even slightly established, requiring to some extent to defer to others for their own sake.
LLMs as a new benchmark for human labor. Using ChatGPT as a control group versus my own efforts to see if my efforts are worth more than the (new) default