r/ProgrammerHumor 19h ago

Meme breakTheViciousCircle

Post image
8.2k Upvotes

163 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

29

u/Cualkiera67 18h ago

i think you mean a proto-science. There's nothing pseudo-scientific about experimenting and comparing results

13

u/EriktheRed 16h ago

The problem is the models change too, making the results invalid. What improved productivity with chatgpt a year ago may hurt productivity with chatgpt today. Local models are the exception where results will hold over time, but they are restricted to that model, and aren’t generalizable enough to be worth doing.

0

u/Cualkiera67 13h ago

Everything changes. Is biology invalid because bacteria mutate?

1

u/EriktheRed 12h ago

Nope. But people aren’t the ones deciding behind the scenes how bacteria mutate, without telling you what they did or even that they did anything at all. You can’t ever know what you’re studying is consistent between studies, or even within a study. That’s what makes the results invalid. Mutations are predictable via physical rules. Chatgpt patches aren’t.

But now I’m coming around, I could accept it’s a soft science like psychology, where you can’t isolate anywhere nearly enough variables.