I at least partially buy this, but it seems pretty easy to update the human analogies to match what you’re saying. Rather than analogizing to e.g. a product designer + software engineer, we’d analogize to the tech company CEO trying to build some kind of product assembly line which can reliably produce good apps without any of the employees knowing what the product is supposed to be. Which still seems like something for which there’s already immense economic pressure, and we still generally can’t do it well for most cognitive problems (although we can do it well for most manufacturing problems).
Thanks, I agree that’s a better analogy. Though of course, it isn’t necessary that none of the employees (participants in a sandwiching project) are unaware of the CEO’s (sandwiching project overseer’s) goal; I was only highlighting that they need not necessarily be aware of it in order to make it clear that the goals of the human helpers/judges aren’t especially relevant to what sandwiching, debate, etc. is really about. But of course if it turns out that having the human helpers know what the ultimate goal is helps, then they’re absolutely allowed to be in on it...
Perhaps this is a bit glib, but arguably some of the most profitable companies in the mobile game space have essentially built product assembly lines to churn out fairly derivative games that are nevertheless unique enough to do well on the charts, and they absolutely do it by factoring the project of “making a game” into different bits that are done by different people (programmers, artists, voice actors, etc.), some of whom might not have any particular need to know what the product will look like as a whole to play their part.
However, I don’t want to press too hard on this game example as you may or may not consider this ‘cognitive work’ and as it has other disanalogies with what we are actually talking about here. And to a certain degree I share your intuition that factoring certain kinds of tasks is probably very hard: if it wasn’t, we might expect to see a lot more non-manufacturing companies whose employee main base consists of assembly lines (or hierarchies of assembly lines, or whatever) requiring workers with general intelligence but few specialized rare skills, which I think is the broader point you’re making in this comment. I think that’s right, although I also think there are reasons for this that go beyond just the difficulty of task factorization, and which don’t all apply in the HCH etc. case, as some other commenters have pointed out.
I at least partially buy this, but it seems pretty easy to update the human analogies to match what you’re saying. Rather than analogizing to e.g. a product designer + software engineer, we’d analogize to the tech company CEO trying to build some kind of product assembly line which can reliably produce good apps without any of the employees knowing what the product is supposed to be. Which still seems like something for which there’s already immense economic pressure, and we still generally can’t do it well for most cognitive problems (although we can do it well for most manufacturing problems).
Thanks, I agree that’s a better analogy. Though of course, it isn’t necessary that none of the employees (participants in a sandwiching project) are unaware of the CEO’s (sandwiching project overseer’s) goal; I was only highlighting that they need not necessarily be aware of it in order to make it clear that the goals of the human helpers/judges aren’t especially relevant to what sandwiching, debate, etc. is really about. But of course if it turns out that having the human helpers know what the ultimate goal is helps, then they’re absolutely allowed to be in on it...
Perhaps this is a bit glib, but arguably some of the most profitable companies in the mobile game space have essentially built product assembly lines to churn out fairly derivative games that are nevertheless unique enough to do well on the charts, and they absolutely do it by factoring the project of “making a game” into different bits that are done by different people (programmers, artists, voice actors, etc.), some of whom might not have any particular need to know what the product will look like as a whole to play their part.
However, I don’t want to press too hard on this game example as you may or may not consider this ‘cognitive work’ and as it has other disanalogies with what we are actually talking about here. And to a certain degree I share your intuition that factoring certain kinds of tasks is probably very hard: if it wasn’t, we might expect to see a lot more non-manufacturing companies whose employee main base consists of assembly lines (or hierarchies of assembly lines, or whatever) requiring workers with general intelligence but few specialized rare skills, which I think is the broader point you’re making in this comment. I think that’s right, although I also think there are reasons for this that go beyond just the difficulty of task factorization, and which don’t all apply in the HCH etc. case, as some other commenters have pointed out.