[HN Gopher] You say 'silo' as if it were a bad thing
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You say 'silo' as if it were a bad thing
Author : HR01
Score : 20 points
Date : 2025-06-21 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com)
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| At my company siloing yourself is the only way to get anything
| done.
| esafak wrote:
| It's possible for the locking up of knowledge to be bad, and for
| the preservation of the integrity of knowledge to be good at the
| same time.
|
| The mistake the article makes is of modeling the flow as
| bidirectional. And since she doesn't want integrity to suffer,
| she says siloing is good. You want information to _get out_
| without getting diluting. It is never good for the left hand not
| to know the right hand. Information should flow freely, subject
| to ingress monitoring; don 't admit bad information, but don't
| close the border.
|
| The question is whether you have the ability to police your side
| of the border.
| bigyabai wrote:
| The conclusion to this essay doesn't make a convincing case. How
| do we _know_ that academics are doing things correct when
| "sparks of AGI" is two years old and we don't have serious
| agentic software? How can you assert that isolated knowledge
| improves AI cognition when LLM performance directly correlates
| with the volume of training data? How could anyone actually prove
| that "academic silos" are challenging old paradigms when we
| aren't allowed to see what's inside them? What heuristics are you
| using? Why can't we see them?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This author is taking the analogy to silos too literally, and
| constructs a weird argument around it that makes absolutely no
| sense.
|
| The silo analogy is not about protecting academic integrity (in
| the way grain silos are meant to protect grain), it's about
| isolating teams from each other. If the physics department never
| spoke to the math department, that would be an example of what
| people mean by "silo" and a bad thing. It weakens both
| departments to be so severely isolated.
|
| I have seen this in real academic disciplines, not just
| hypotheticals. CS academics have done a _lot_ around modeling
| formal systems. Then you go over to systems engineers and they
| have done the same thing (especially around critical systems and
| safety properties of systems). Both have good ideas, but both
| domains operate largely in isolation from each other. This
| impedes their work, it 's a pair of bad (though naturally
| occurring, rather than forced) silos.
|
| If the author actually understood what people meant when they
| said silos need to be torn down, they wouldn't have written this
| bizarre blog post.
| esafak wrote:
| I agree, she is conflating things.
| vishnudeva wrote:
| There are too many blanket statements in this article that aren't
| well argued or even explained. This for example is just a series
| of assumptions:
|
| """ The attack on "silos" usually comes from people outside of a
| silo, generalists who don't have deep disciplinary knowledge or
| focused training. These people don't want their ideas validated
| by a community of experts. They find expertise to be
| inconvenient. The image of the silo as narrow, contained, a kind
| of ivory tower, seems to support the claim that those in them are
| narrow, out of touch, or secluded. """
|
| The links in the first paragraph actually do quite a good job of
| explaining what people mean when they say Silos are bad. No one
| claims that disciplines and departments and teams should become a
| single blob. This article might be defending something that needs
| no defense and is not under any attack.
|
| I did enjoy reading about the history of Silos :)
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