Today's threads (a thread)

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Process knowledge; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/

#Pluralistic

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[syntaxxor@sk.girlthi.ng]

@pluralistic@mamot.fr There's an excellent point at the end here that I never really considered before:

"And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know."

Online posts and chats and documentation and everything else a chatbot might train off of are generally written to explain the output and structure of a thing to someone else. And while that generally means they'll be on the simpler side, easier to digest, it also is usually a very lossy process. I'm most familiar with how it works with programming, but I'm sure it applies to anything technical enough. And by "technical" I mean basically anything which involves process knowledge. So most positions outside the Board and the C-Suite.

Explaining how something works rarely gets into the nitty gritty of exactly why each coding decision was made. Yet that's by far the most valuable thing to understand about any given piece of code. Those important conversations of imparting knowledge will happen in far more personal contexts. Usually through word-of-mouth, which means it never gets documented. Because how can it be documented? Even when it's talked about online, in things like those tumblr posts, it often only scratches the surface of the sheer depth of knowledge needed to actually do something.

The best teacher, the only one whose lessons can really be trusted, is experience. And a chatbot that can only be trained by reading existing text will never be able to learn from experience. Thus, it can't really be trusted to actually make correct, informed decisions based on real knowledge of what's needed in a specific context.
</rant>