[HN Gopher] The 'invisible', often unhappy workforce that's deci...
___________________________________________________________________
The 'invisible', often unhappy workforce that's deciding the future
of AI
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-12-13 12:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unite.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unite.ai)
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You could just stop all the crap you are doing and believe what
| you want. If prejudice is already in the question, you cannot
| gain "neutral" answers. Or nuanced for that matter...
|
| I personally think that the fight against hate speech in the name
| of minorities is far more offensive than a visit to the darkest
| corners of 4chan. Perhaps objectively so, since the latter group
| is more diverse (international audience) and inclusive (low
| standards) than contemporary academia, which proposes these
| metrics as a gold standard.
|
| But the technical challenge is not solvable as soon as there are
| different standards of allowed content. Everybody has to decide
| those limits for himself, parents in case of minors. At least
| that is true for universal platforms. Some people live up when
| they get headwind, some people might feel inhibited. The quest
| against hate speech is intuitive one but still very foolish.
|
| In my experience is that people search out offensive material to
| be offended. There are cases of harassment that are separate from
| this and often people seem to misjudge this. But AI is far away
| from making competent choices here.
|
| An annotator service like suggested here would mainly be a
| service to select the sample group to spit out predetermined
| results. Maybe that is a service Google like to provide. They are
| also just people pleaser I guess.
|
| You could strip people of their anonymity and they will get
| happier in polls, more content with management. How would you
| evaluate the change in the data you see?
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| "In my experience is that people search out offensive material
| to be offended."
|
| Lots more, it seems, seek out people to try to deliberately
| offend / intimidate others.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| strongly worded here; insensitivity ("I don't care about you")
| and disregard ("not in your shoes, don't care") are fertile
| ground for casual offensive speech and no, it is not
| technologies job to fix that .. BUT in the real world there are
| a series of feedback loops, from discomfort, to yelling, to a
| slap in the face or an arrest by an officer. This works in the
| real world, where is the feedback in a digital world?
|
| The cue here for me was "You could strip people of their
| anonymity and they will get happier in polls" as an unexamined
| backing into the feedback topic.. real people have feedback
| that sticks
|
| What "feedback that sticks" is natural in digital realms, and
| how can it evolve, not dictatorially?
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Those international flags on 4chan are put there by shills to
| make you feel good about chatting with Europeans but behind the
| scenes its all internet research agency scumbags sitting in a
| call center at 55 savushinka, Moscow. US Congress has released
| mountains of information on this subject. You are trapped in a
| cult!
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you are angry about here because you
| dont seem to be arguing against the main conceit that bias of
| whatever form is a factor in constructing these data sets. Is
| it just that, for you, bias is inevitable and we simply have to
| toughen up?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| In general I am angry about censorship ambitions and futile
| and mislead attempt to get rid of hate by banning it from the
| internet. Even while I am aware that hate can reproduce in a
| simple scheme that can lead to mutual radicalization,
| previous attempt to contain it all made the situation worse.
| But correction is nowhere in sight, it is as if people try to
| implement insanity by committing to the same mistakes over
| and over.
|
| But I am not that angry and I don't think that can be read
| out of my comment aside from general disapproval.
|
| I would assume that gig workers did not care as much about
| hate speech as some academics do and did not flag content as
| expected. This discrepancy is declared as bias. Fine, be that
| way...
|
| > The Google researchers suggest that '[the] disagreements
| between annotators may embed valuable nuances about the
| task'.
|
| On that I agree with the researchers, but would propose that
| any annotation (hate speech yes/no) would have to fall back
| to the 'no' and solve the dispute. Otherwise only asking the
| target will provide any additional understanding. Perhaps
| asking as supreme court too, but that is not feasible and not
| even the highest courts are infallible.
| b409ba0801cd21 wrote:
| I wonder if there have been any efforts to sabotage crowdsourced
| AI training and content moderation by signing up on crowdworking
| platforms and intentionally providing false responses. A large
| and tech savvy enough sabotage ring could use a browser extension
| or the like to keep their responses straight and increase the
| odds of their fake answers being accepted.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Speaking from my experience working at data labeling companies,
| the sabotage does occurs, but is not intentionally malicious.
|
| What ends up happening is that some labelers learn what the
| pre-determined questions and answers are and share these via
| Facebook and Discord to other labelers. That way, the other
| labelers can stay on the task longer while providing garbage
| responses to the non-predetermined question/answer pairs.
|
| It's an arms race with labelers on one end, trying to make a
| quick buck, and data labeling platforms on the other, trying to
| get quality labeled data.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It was tried. 4chan tried a coordinated "penis" prank on
| Recaptcha. Despite the much vaunted community power of the
| website, and despite being coordinated, nothing happened.
|
| It turns out that they are a drop in the bucket. Not only is
| there low RoI but also the group is too weak.
| gruez wrote:
| like this? https://i.imgur.com/aU21k.jpg
| Aulig wrote:
| Did anything ever come of that? Because nowadays, those
| captchas are no longer used.
| theamk wrote:
| It is pretty common to "verify" workers: a fraction of
| questions (often 1% to 10%) is asked-before questions with
| known correct answers. If those are not answered correctly, the
| entire dataset from this person is ignored. Depending on the
| platform, they might get paid less as well.
|
| This is designed to detect workers who either did not
| understand the instructions, or those who don't care about
| those and answer randomly. But this works against intentional
| sabotage as well.
| erehweb wrote:
| Seems like a lot of tedious work at low pay for little impact,
| particularly for people who are tech savvy enough.
| d--b wrote:
| Haha, and this is how the singularity is going to turn out
| socialist. Mike Judge should make a movie about this.
| andreyk wrote:
| Not a very novel point - The Ghost Workers Powering The AI
| Economy https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2019/09/02/the-
| ghost...
|
| AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/11/1014081/ai-machi...
|
| That being said, this one covers two recent research works that
| are quite interesting (Whose Ground Truth? Accounting for
| Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Dataset
| Annotation , The Origin and Value of Disagreement Among Data
| Labelers: A Case Study of Individual Differences in Hate Speech
| Annotation)
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| Lol, that's great, the working class will get their revenge one
| way or another.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| The gig economy doesn't lead to happy employees- truly shocking.
| Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon
| valley corporation?! To be a replaceable cog in the machine is
| the American dream.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| The funny thing about the American dream is that the
| quintessential examples used to be blue collar or back office
| labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to
| the top. Kind of a pipe dream but it did happen. Even if you
| believe that to still be true, gig workers start even lower,
| below the bottom rung of the ladder. They're contractors doing
| spot jobs in mailrooms. Most janitor jobs are gone. They're now
| contractors too. Healthcare is to blame for a lot of this. The
| cost of a low level employee is simply too high when companies
| need to cover the healthcare coverage costs.
| medio wrote:
| Wow this escalated hilariously fast. Coming from a country
| with universal healthcare, I find it amazing how you believe
| your absolutely shitty coverage is to blame instead of, I
| don't know, corporate greed?
|
| But yeah, I guess low-level employees should do without
| healthcare, they just shouldn't be poor AND sick after all :)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| You've got it backwards. By not directly employing low
| level workers for roles like janitors, companies do not
| need to pay for their healthcare. It is a very expensive
| cost per head even if the plan is shit. In America,
| employees get health insurance from their employer.
|
| Your eagerness to shit on America made you entirely miss
| the point. Believe it or not, it is extremely obvious to
| many that universal healthcare would be a cheaper and
| preferential option.
| asdff wrote:
| Most companies just get around this by only scheduling
| you for 38 hours a week or something like that.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| That is a common way, yes. Contractors from a firm is the
| other big one. There are folks who can spend decades
| working at the same org, full time, without technically
| being a real employee
| m0lecules wrote:
| the point is that healthcare costs have to be socialized -
| if you put the burden on the employer, you necessarily end
| up with the US system.
| zmix wrote:
| In Germany, the employer must pay half of the monthly
| healtcare plan and the employee pays the other half. Goes
| like this since decades in one of the strongest economies
| of the world. Of course, Apple is more worth than the
| whole DAX...
| xwolfi wrote:
| Be careful of market cap numbers, they hide information
| and are almost meaningless: they don't describe volume
| behavior. If suddenly people realized Apple had to be
| sold as fast as possible, most of that value would
| evaporate to reach a more reasonable tangible asset
| value.
|
| It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a
| regulated, slow and rational market that cares about
| fitting the price with the value of the company, and
| would hold most of their current market cap much more
| than Apple, were it liquidated.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a
| regulated, slow and rational market that cares about
| fitting the price with the value of the company_
|
| LOL, well regulated and rational my ass. The Deutsche
| Bank and Wirecard scandals (puls numerous more) proved
| the German government is just as corrupt when it comes to
| manipulating the market and threatening honest
| journalists, so that some rich and well connected
| scumbags can get even more obscenely rich. I've worked in
| several western countries but never saw more high-level
| corporate corruption than in Germany.
| zmix wrote:
| > Wirecard scandal
|
| Oh yes, the regulation (BaFin?) totally was out of order
| on that one!
| burntoutfire wrote:
| DAX P/E at the end of 2020 was 27, while Apple's was
| 35.5. Higher, but not shockingly so.
| zmix wrote:
| Thanks for that insight. When it comes to Stocks & Co. I
| don't know much, if anything. I find it always
| interesting to read information, that puts things into a
| relative perspective. The information I had was from an
| infographic I saw a few weeks ago.
| m4x wrote:
| Your response is rude and completely misses the point of
| the person you responded to.
|
| If companies have to provide healthcare coverage for their
| fulltime employees, but not their gig workers and
| contractors, which type of employment do you think they are
| going to prioritise?
|
| If healthcare costs were applied uniformly through tax (as
| is done in most countries with universal healthcare) then
| there would be less reason for employers to prefer one type
| of employment contract over another for low level jobs.
| justtologin wrote:
| > blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom
| processors could work hard and rise to the top
|
| I'd guess a factor in ending this has been the rise or at
| least growth of an administrative or managerial class in most
| businesses.
|
| An apprenticeship model lets people grow, and to some extent
| a similar model used to apply in business, where the
| executives and managers were all career industry people who
| started on the shop floor.
|
| The current system is closer to (closer, not the same as) a
| feudal system where there is a group of nobility that manages
| a group of serfs, and there is not much movement between the
| groups, at least at the same company. Admission into the
| nobility is based on education and other pedigree, and can
| never really be had by work experience.
| mandevil wrote:
| So one factor here is the actually computers: 50 years ago,
| store clerk was a medium prestige job, that had medium pay
| and growth prospects- there are plenty of stories of people
| who started a clerk and ended up in a senior position. But
| that was because clerks had to know the prices and goods: a
| major risk to the store owner was customers swapping price
| stickers, so you needed a clerk who could spot the
| difference between the expensive onion and the cheap one
| and knew what the price should be and these clerks had to
| stay in one place long enough to know the prices.
|
| Then along came the laser/UPC/computer system and deskilled
| the job. No longer did you need to know the difference, the
| computer printed up a natural language description of the
| item. This allowed stores to get much larger, because no
| one could know all the prices in a large store (early
| department stores handled the size by making you pay for
| items in each department, using store balance accounts to
| not create too much friction). This fundamentally reshaped
| the relationship between capital (who owned the stores and
| the computer system) and labor. It's actually the exact
| same alienation of the individual from their labor that
| Marx was writing about in the 1850's, just for jobs that
| didn't get the same attention.
|
| Similarly, an in-law worked as a teller at a bank. 50 years
| ago that job would have more upward mobility because banks
| managed their risk locally: after many years as a teller
| and then as a loan officer you could move up to be the
| local person making the decision on loans. Nowadays large
| banks have centralized that with fancy computer systems to
| guide the decision, so there are entire paths of
| advancement that essentially don't exist anymore because
| computers spit out the answer. There is only shift and then
| branch manager, with once again the owners of the computer
| system using it to de-skill jobs and cut off promotion
| opportunities. (See, e.g. Better.com, using poorly paid
| contractors to do all the tedious stuff that can't be
| automated, and then letting the computer do all the high
| skill work.)
|
| This is, by the by, one of the reasons that computer
| programmers continue to get paid well, because we are
| enabling capital to de-skill and bifurcate jobs better and
| better.
| justtologin wrote:
| Interesting take. So if i can restate it, automating
| people's agency - basically their decision making or
| judgement - creates a "disposable" class that there is
| (from management perspective) almost no point in
| investing in their growth, meaning they have little
| mobility because there is no demand for a better person
| who has built on their experience.
|
| Alternatively put, we've commodified human hand eye
| coordination and basic speech recognition and intent
| resolution. This view is definitely supported by the
| current state of the gig economy.
| mandevil wrote:
| 15 years ago, Circuit City laid off their highest paid
| retail employees, to be replaced by new hires:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17837882
|
| That is, management was declaring that there was no value
| in experience whatsoever (until you got to management
| levels, naturally), and that they could replace anyone
| with a new hire without loss of performance. (After all,
| the way you got to be a highly paid retail person was to
| stick around for a long time and be pretty good at your
| job.) And while most managers in a retail setting aren't
| quite as obvious about it, that sure seems to be how they
| feel: employees are completely fungible, and it isn't
| worth paying them enough to get them to stay.
|
| (Costco is a notable exception in the US: notice how the
| standard Costco name badge includes their start year on
| it, that is one of the ways Costco signals that they do
| value experience. They are also significantly more
| profitable per sq/ft than Sams Club, their competitor in
| the warehouse segment operated by Walmart. I strongly
| suspect that those two facts are related.)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. There is no way to "hard work" your way from
| junior employee to Founder or CEO. When the CEO leaves,
| their replacement always comes from the executive class.
| The junior can work their way up to senior or even low-
| level manager. But at some point high up on the ladder,
| employees come from a totally different aristocracy, and
| you can't work or even buy your way into that clique. Every
| company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a
| VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat
| --they'd always go externally and look for someone from the
| nobility.
| xwolfi wrote:
| The American dream was also a concept for non-Americans. I
| mean, it's not like a formal, natural phenomenon we can just
| observe, so everyone has its own interpretation.
|
| So here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in China
| instead of the US: the idea was that you'd come from your
| bum-shit country into that vast new land of opportunities
| where everything was to build, you build it and are rewarded
| in a fair meritocratic system in ways your rotting homeland
| could never have provided.
|
| But now, you have to get your Twitter account scanned to be
| allowed entry under a temporary visa (or hey, try a green
| card lottery), risk upsetting an untreated schizophrenic
| while crossing the streets, to go to a gun-heavy anti-police
| protest anarchists use as an excuse to empty their Molotov
| stock while the police, too happy to finally have a purpose
| for their military weapon stocks, shoot at random. And if you
| are at the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be sent to
| a private jail. All the while, any accident you would have
| would not have been covered by any sort of socialized
| insurance but you'd be under one of the most punitive
| international tax system. And if you're unlucky, you can
| always take a payday loan, and join the merry mass of
| indebted grassroot people who have negative equity for no
| reason a rational mind could understand.
|
| The American nightmare, it seems to me :s
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in
| China instead of the US [...long paragraph of US bashing
| ...] The American nightmare, it seems to me :s_
|
| Mighty ironic of you to go on such a lengthy rant to bash
| the US off your Western European high-horse (white male too
| I presume?) living in China like a priviledged westerner,
| but where the stuff you bashed the US for is amateur level
| stuff.
|
| Be careful with all those Winnie the Pooh memes or you
| might loose your social credit points, comrade. Could you
| please point out the free nation of Taiwan on the map, in
| public, for everyone to see please? My geography is a bit
| rusty. Also, how are them force labor death camps this time
| of year over there?
| tengbretson wrote:
| >blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom
| processors could work hard and rise to the top
|
| The American dream is not about starting low and making it to
| the top, it's about upward, intergenerational class mobility.
| diskzero wrote:
| The definition has changed over time, but you have reduced
| the definition to a single component. It is true that an
| element of the ethos is to improve the outcomes of your
| descendants. The American Dream can be reduced simply to
| mean America exists as a place where you can live a better
| life. This concept is predicated on the statement in the
| Declaration of Independence that "all men are created
| equal." We may agree that this statement was not enacted
| with sincerity, but we may hope that is will be.
|
| Much of the world views the American Dream as America as a
| place where one can come, work hard, be treated fairly and
| be rewarded regardless of social class or circumstances of
| birth.
|
| The extrapolation of this concept into a larger ethos that
| includes upward, inter-generational class mobility makes
| sense, but is just one element of an ethos based on the
| basic principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of
| happiness."
| onemoresoop wrote:
| > could work hard and rise to the top
|
| What are the odds of that?
| jhgb wrote:
| Well at the very highest it's 1/N, where N is the number of
| employees at the organization.
| lordnacho wrote:
| There's lateral hires with their eyes on the same job
| too.
| simplestats wrote:
| But they leave a company somewhere else so don't affect
| the average number unless they move from a smaller
| company.
| jhgb wrote:
| That's why I wrote "at the very highest". It can't be
| more that that, but it can be less than that.
| wyager wrote:
| If the odds were high that people underwent meteoric career
| trajectories, that would imply that our sorting mechanisms
| for placing people into well-matched jobs worked very
| poorly. In general, I think these mechanisms work pretty
| well, so people typically end up in gradual career
| trajectories they're well-suited for.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Technically non zero
| cbozeman wrote:
| Not good, because getting to the top of any enterprise is
| inherently competitive.
|
| Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to go
| around.
|
| This is the reason you see such similar personalities
| occupying extremely high positions in companies. You need a
| certain mentality and dedication to set everything to the
| wayside for the pursuit of climbing the corporate
| hierarchy.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to
| go around.
|
| no, everyone does not want that job. People who do want
| that job reduce the equation that way, though
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Your point about employee costs rising with healthcare is
| terrific and needs wider cultural recognition.
|
| This increases the cost of labor, and therefore cost of goods
| across the economy. Its a big part of the reason why US based
| manufacturing is increasingly impractical.
|
| Your point expands to all social services our government has
| outsourced, from retirement benefits to transportation, too.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| We'd still have the costs if the government took those in-
| house. Germans pay around $1500 a month (personal +
| employer costs) for healthcare. Other government programs
| add more cost. Bring those in cost would not really bring
| the cost of the employee down. Rather it would expand the
| weight and power of the government via increased taxes.
| bserge wrote:
| Germans pay at most $750/month (incl. employer
| contributions), and that's practically for the upper
| middle class (4500+/mo).
|
| The healthcare tax _is capped_ at that, you can 't pay
| any more.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| Not that it matters, their healthcare is garbage.
|
| Emergency services and surgery, sure, great. For that one
| time in your 80 years that you need it.
|
| Anything non vital? Weeks and months of waiting time.
|
| Mental healthcare? Non existent.
|
| Want the latest medicine? Fuck off to the US.
|
| Homeopathy? Paid for by insurance.
|
| You're part of the "Untermensch"? Pay and shut up or fuck
| off back where you came from, you dirty monkey.
| [deleted]
| gmadsen wrote:
| it distributes the cost across all sectors, which as the
| above poster commented would be beneficial to hiring low
| skill workers
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon
| valley corporation?"
|
| A lot of people here do that but at least they make good money
| doing it. Gig workers don't get the money.
| skybrian wrote:
| This particular article points out specific problems, but I
| think your assumption that being a replaceable cog is
| necessarily bad shows a lack of imagination.
|
| An advantage is that you can set your own hours and drop the
| work whenever you like and not think about it, because someone
| else will do it. Combined with working from home, it doesn't
| seem like all that bad a way to make a few extra bucks? At
| least, if the problems in the article can be fixed.
|
| It seems like a decent fit when something else is more
| important in your life and the job comes second or third.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| When you use Turks the toughest problem is managing the workers
| who work at a high rate but do poor quality work. Some of these
| people might do better work if they got feedback (e.g. would be
| willing to pay them a bonus if they slow down and do a better
| job. It's tempting though just to cut them off.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Ground truth basic dynamics are similar to the basic dynamics of
| Prediction Markets. Having experimented with creating Prediction
| Markets from scratch I have witnessed first hand how the bias of
| the participants will skew or even nullify the wisdom of the
| crowd, with wisdom-free results.
|
| > '[A] large majority of crowdworkers (94%) have had work that
| was rejected or for which they were not paid. Yet, requesters
| retain full rights over the data they receive regardless of
| whether they accept or reject it; Roberts (2016) describes this
| system as one that "enables wage theft".
|
| So, what was the source of wisdom in rejecting the results?
| visarga wrote:
| > So, what was the source of wisdom in rejecting the results?
|
| You can run the same task 3 or 5 times and take the consensus
| option rejecting the others. But from experience unless the
| taggers have had special training in the current task the
| quality of annotations is crap. Then you have to do it all over
| again with someone in-house and gain nothing from the whole
| crowd sourcing ordeal.
|
| Outside people tend to think anyone could label examples, but
| practice shows that it takes a special kind of person to do it
| well. Probably this is why many get their work rejected.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| >Probably this is why many get their work rejected.
|
| It's interesting we've built a system where people are
| allowed to be given a job and then told they're unqualified
| to perform it. If a construction site hired someone as a
| heavy machine operator and then immediately decided to fire
| them, they'd still be owed some form of wages.
| bjornsing wrote:
| The owed wages wouldn't be the major problem though...
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| A days work at least, definitely isn't free
| visarga wrote:
| Some tasks are only given to people who have completed a
| training course. But not all customers do it.
| willcipriano wrote:
| If you want to bring workers into a store and train them
| you have to pay them for the time they spent even if they
| leave halfway though.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Its worth hiring people full time to do high quality labeling.
| Benefits, 401k, the whole 9. A good technician who can interpret
| nuance has value.
| hooande wrote:
| It's just not as efficient because the size of a dataset is
| often the biggest factor in determining performance. simply, I
| get way more labels if I'm paying $0.10 each vs the cost of a
| full time salary. And individuals are prone to burnout with
| repetitive tasks
|
| Data labeling is one job that seems to lend itself well to gig
| work. There were many times where I would have gladly spent a
| day labeling images in exchange for $50, no need for benefits
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| >It's just not as efficient because the size of a dataset is
| often the biggest factor in determining performance.
|
| I fundamentally disagree. Its not the size of the dateset
| that determines performance but the quality. Sure. Bigger is
| better. But simply better is * _way*_ better. I can do more
| with 1000 high quality examples of the thing than I can with
| 40k low quality ones.
|
| I've gone as far as bringing on 40 digitizers at once full
| time. I would never have been able to accomplish that project
| with turks. I would never have been able to call a team
| meeting and explain a very specific shift in interpretation
| we would be doing regarding the relationship of feature apple
| to feature banana, and when and where it would apply.
|
| The difference between thinking you need oom more examples
| over a few quality ones I think depends on how in the thick
| of it you've been with regards to ML on theoretical grounds
| versus doing the boots on the ground work to get a product
| out. Having control over digitization and labeling and being
| willing to pay for high quality label's has allowed me to get
| results that directly meet my clients needs as opposed to
| sitting in some uncanny valley where the results are close,
| but no cigar.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| In general, good technicians that can interpret nuance are
| extremely valuable in every domain.
| avs733 wrote:
| >A good technician who can interpret nuance has value.
|
| I want to highlight this phrase, because I think it is
| _critically_ important and frequently missing from the
| worldview of the technical workforce. It is a serious risk that
| is created by the narratives around STEM education - especially
| engineering. Good technicians are incredibly valuable.
|
| My first job out of engineering school was in a semiconductor
| factory. From the day I walked in, I was absolutely dependent
| on the technicians who worked on the tools to do my job well,
| as was every other engineer. I could do things they couldn't,
| but they _absolutely_ could do things I couldn 't. There were
| two types of early career engineers there (1) those who valued
| what the technicians could teach them and built those
| relationships and (2) those who did not. That second group
| struggled. They struggled because they didn't know how to
| listen to someone who they perceived as having less
| knowledge/education/value compared to them. Some of them got
| really upset when they found out senior technicians (typically
| with an AS) earned more than junior engineers (BS/MS). The
| reality was, the young engineers were a hell of a lot more
| replaceable and much easier to automate.
|
| Google recently published a paper on this topic[0] and it is
| now a required read in the basic and advanced statistics
| courses that I teach, because a lot of my students are very
| excited about getting into machine learning roles. Unless you
| have quality data and information, the complexity of analysis
| you do on it largely doesn't matter.
|
| [0] https://research.google/pubs/pub49953/
| dchichkov wrote:
| This can be somewhat resolved, if the engineers working on
| the model are required to do 1% of labeling.
| avs733 wrote:
| 100%...in our case it was 'do 1% of the
| cleaning/wiping/scrubbing'.
|
| As if I haven't outed myself to any of my students reading
| this...we do it on the first day in my stats class:
|
| Spend the day collecting data using the board game
| operation. I tell you the categories of data to collect, I
| don't tell you exactly how to collect the data. Then you
| clean that data for homework...the discussion about whether
| that data is good quality creates a lot of insight.
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