I invite you to upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers have told me they have appreciated my thoughts & ideas in the past & would like to see more of them in the future. In addition, paid subscribers form their own community of folks investing in improving software design—theirs, their colleagues, & their profession. I came across the following example & I wanted to write about it but I realized it was a good example of a Thinkie & I haven’t written about thiat Thinkie yet so here it is. Whew! Quite the opening sentence. Pattern: You’re stuck thinking about a complicated problem. Transformation: Look at the problem in its wider context. What are the “sources & uses” (from Permaculture) of the problem? What feedback loops does it participate in? Okay, here’s the motivating example. I’ve been hearing the slogan, “Profit is theft.” I’m not convinced but where does the idea come from? Here’s the quote that got me thinking about wider scope:
The paper goes on to talk about how training LLMs is exploitive in this way, which I happen to agree with. However, not my point. The structure above—paid a wage→produce→sold—isn’t the whole picture. “Profit is theft” makes good sense if that’s the whole picture. However, there’s a larger sequence into which this picture fits:
What incentive does the capital owner have to build the factory, without which there is no production, without step 5? If we give all the profit to the worker, the factory never gets built. We’re going to have to find a way to split the excess of sales price - cost of production. Now, I realize I have stepped into a giant centuries old debate, no, war, but that’s not my point (although my question about incentives for those producing content digested by LLMs holds). My point is rather than pick apart the pieces of a complicated problem, sometimes it’s more productive to zoom out & see the problem in context. You’re currently a free subscriber to Software Design: Tidy First?. Buying me more time to think & write means more thoughts & ideas for you. |