Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I learned the wrong way. I learned. Is there a wrong way to learn?

Once in 7th grade, I was on a self-study path in a math class. I read a few pages, took a test, graded my test (usually a bad grade), read the correct answers, and, “Oh, that’s the answer. That is what we are doing here!”

The teacher saw me doing this and told me I was learning the wrong way. I was supposed to know the answers before taking the test. I was supposed to learn the material by reading a few pages.

I shrugged. The test grades were not recorded. The test grades were meaningless. So I learned from the tests, not the few poorly written pages I read before the test. And I learned. And the teacher kept telling me that I was learning the wrong way.

Is there a wrong way to learn? I suppose there are some learning methods that are more efficient than others. Some learning methods may be less painful than others in real life. In school? Is there a wrong way to learn?

In a recent case, I asked a chatbot to write some Python code to (1) pull information from WordPress-generated XML then (2) pull information from an mbox (MS email) file.

I looked at the code and learned that there are Python libraries for these two types of solutions. Oh, I learned about the libraries by reading the answer. Was that wrong? I don’t know. I do know that I learned.

by Dwayne Phillips

Just because something could go wrong doesn’t mean it will. Perhaps we should let well-meaning try it.

Look what is possible with the new AI, robots, machines, chemicals, etc. Yes, but, I have found a way to turn the good possibilities into bad possibilities. I have devised a test that the new whatever-it-is will fail. See? Harmful.

Let’s form a group of half-a-dozen people to monitor this. In a few years we have grown from four to four hundred and our budget has boomed some multiple of a thousand percent. We are succeeding and need to bust out of the basement of some agency into our own four-letter government agency. Then it’s just a few years until we are a three-letter agency. We are regulating the world!

Okay, perhaps a bit farfetched, but not by much. I have seen it happen. There is risk (potential problems) and there is reward (potential good). Perhaps we are a bit too pessimistic and see more problems than good. We need to regulate to prevent the potential problems.

Enough politics. We don’t have to be inside government agencies to regulate. We can do this in business and not-for-profits as well. Kids must wear expensive gear to protect themselves while playing soccer. Those five-year-olds can play pretty rough, you know. Okay, that was farfetched, but not as far as a “reasonable” person might go.

Let’s allow the kids to play and wear t-shirts with Gumby on them (yes, there are elementary schools that ban cartoon characters at school). Let’s allow someone to try delivering medicine to the infirm via an autonomous ice chest with wheels. Yeah but someone could…yeah, and some well-meaning person could do the opposite. How about giving the well-meaning persons among us a chance? We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Perhaps we have become a bit too smart for our own good. Time to swing the pendulum back to practical, in-real-life activities.

Yet another pendulum swings back and forth. We are in the 21st century and harnessing the power or our brains and augmenting our brains with AI and all such marvelous things.

Hey, could you fix the leak in the toilet so it stops making noise and I can sleep at night? Uh, oh, well, you see… flashback to the Big Bang Theory episode where the scientists can’t change a flat tire.

We live in a world of publications and published thoughts, i.e., the PDF file. I am so smart. I dominate here.

And then there is in-real-life or IRL. Fix the toilet or the lawnmower or remove the green stuff that forms on the north side of the vinyl-sided house. And how about wire the wires that bring power to that new datacenter? Yeah, instead of a degree with $300,000 debt in college loans from fill-in-the-blank-with-your-least-favorite-private-college, what about a year at a trade school to learn Ohm’s law and where the white, black, and green wires go on the outlet?

Knowledge is good (wasn’t that in some movie?). There are many types of knowledge. Some are in real life, not publications. Time to adjust.

by Dwayne Phillips

Chatbots can answer questions about written pieces. They can be good tools for feedback.

I was recently testing several different chatbots to understand which performed better. I fed a 200-page document I wrote into each chatbot and asked them questions. There were several questions which all the chatbots failed to answer. The questions were obvious. The answers were in the long document. Why couldn’t any of the chatbots answer the questions?

I manually searched through and reviewed the long document. Oops. The chatbots couldn’t answer the obvious questions because I had failed to put the obvious information in the long document.

How could I have left out the obvious? Simple, stupid mistake. Back to the drawing board or the text editor or something. Fix the obvious mistake.

Chatbots can answer questions about written pieces. They are pretty good tools at reviewing long written pieces and providing feedback. A chatbot a good tool for writers. Tell me what I should have put in the piece but forgot. Let’s get to work and do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

To use AI to write reports requires a person who can write well.

Let’s use AI to write our reports or essays or deep research or whatever AI will write for us now. That’s not cheating, that’s using good tools … some disagree violently with that statement.

The AI tools are quite capable. Write a prompt and viola’ out comes the words. Oops. We have to write a good prompt to produce good words. Wait a minute: we have to write well to have the AI write for us. There is something wrong here or so it seems.

We have to be able to write to have AI write. No one told us this. We have to learn to write well before the tool writes. Well, if we can write well, why use the tool? Something must have been lost in translation.

Back in the summer of 1976 (yes, I am that old), during my one and only college English class, the composition professor told us everyday: precise, concrete, specific. Over and over and over again without fail. Five days a week. We had to write in journals seven days a week. One essay a day. Precise. Concrete. Specific.

Almost fifty years later. To have AI produce usable words we have to prompt with precise, concrete, and specific words. RATS! And I thought this would be easier. We still have to do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

A chatbot can be used to check a longer piece of writing for content.

I was recently testing chatbots to determine if they could pull information from long pieces of writing. I attached an autobiography that was more than 200 pages long. I then asked the chatbots what seemed like obvious questions. Three different chatbots failed the test.

Hmm. When three big-tech AI systems cannot find information in something I wrote, who failed the test? Perhaps it was me.

I opened the autobiography and searched for the information that the chatbots missed. Uh, er, well, it wasn’t there. How could I have omitted such important information? Well, I’m only human. I have made and continue to make mistakes.

The good news is that I found a new tool for performing a deeper test of what I have written. Attach a piece of writing to a chatbot. My written piece should contain certain information. Ask the chatbot to repeat that information. If the chatbot can’t, perhaps the information isn’t there. Perhaps I intended to put the information in the piece. Perhaps I felt it was obvious and didn’t need to be there. Perhaps I merely made yet another mistake.

The good news is that I found a new tool for performing a deeper test of what I have written.

by Dwayne Phillips

Like the TV game show Jeopardy, lets make suggestions in the form of a question.

The TV show Jeopardy always had the answer in the form of a question. This always seemed silly to me, but the show was and still is successful, so what do I know about TV game show design?

Perhaps there is something to asking questions. The question’s meta message is, I don’t know everything. What do you think about this? Please help me here.

Instead of making suggestions for the new guy, how about asking a question?

Instead of: Those people should submit their materials five working days before the meeting.

Try: How far in advance of meetings do those people submit their materials? Ten days? Seven days? Five days? What is the purpose of submitting materials early? How can we improve this?

Instead of: Tell them specifically what we want.

Try: How do we inform them specifically what we want? Email, chat, phone? What is the purpose? How can we do this better?

Instead of: Try what I have just suggested in this blog post.

Try: What do you think of this idea of suggestions in the form of questions? How might we improve this and other communications?

by Dwayne Phillips

Experts know heuristics or “rules of thumb.” Consult these folks before attempting something of importance.

Did you know that a pizza will feed three people? Did you know that you should have half the food cooked and ready to serve at a picnic before the picnic-ers arrive? Did you know that sandstone is not a good base of house construction? Did you know that diesel fuel is the best cleaner to remove tar? Did you know there are 500 words on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper?

The above is a bunch of heuristics or rules of thumb. Experts in various subjects know various rules of thumb. The experts learned these things after many experiments that provided experience. Hmm, expert, experiment, and experience seem to have the same base word or something like that. A language expert would be able to explain that to me.

I have attended several picnics that were … disasters. Folks stood in line for an hour waiting for a hot dog. The heuristics on picnics were unknown and unused. Ask experts? Why? This is a picnic. Surely, we can… wrong. Even picnics can be tougher than expected. So can buying pizza, building houses, washing hands, printing essays, writing silly blog posts, and many other things.

Ask experts. Learn some rules of thumb. APPLY those rules of thumb. Do I need to reinvent the wheel? (On that subject, there are many heuristics on making a wheel. If it were simple, everyone could do it and everyone cannot do it.)

by Dwayne Phillips

I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.”

I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days when writers banged out stuff on mechanical typewriters, there writers of pulp magazine articles and pulp novels who wrote ten novels a year along with a few dozen short stories at the same time.

Wow! How could anyone do that? Well the revision time alone would mean sleeping only 15 minutes a day. And then the review time. And then … and then … and then … NOTHING.

Writers who wrote at pulp speed simply pumped out the stories. They were story tellers. They didn’t know that the real work of writing was in the revising and all those things English teachers teach today.

Me? I took one composition class in college. Nothing in high school. My writing professor during that seven-week semester in the summer of 1976 assigned us to write in a journal notebook everyday—hence the name journal, which has something to do with a French word that has something to do with day. And we had to turn in one typed essay each Friday.

Just write.

Well, I guess I never learned anything since. I still just write. Along the way, I have picked up some rules about revising and such, but I haven’t been very good at applying the rules. I still mostly just write and then press the PUBLISH key on the keyboard. Most keyboards have this PUBLISH key, but most folks have never found it.

I recently interviewed for a job as a Technical Writer. The interviewer didn’t believe that I had written all the things I said I had written. I didn’t get the job. Oh well. I didn’t have some sort of writing certification. All my books, articles, posts, essays, and all that stuff didn’t count as a certification. Oh well.

A recent experiment showed that the dictation feature on that popular Word processor from Redmond, Washington is better now. I needn’t even use the keyboard and type words. I can sit in my Lazyboy chair and tell stories to the Word processor as if my grandchildren were sitting at my feet and listening attentively. I think that “grandchildren at the feet” thing is just a myth as I have four grandchildren and they never sit at my feet. Where’s the fireplace that is in all those Rockwell paintings? Huh? But I digress.

Can’t type? No need. Just dictate. Tell stories at pulp speed. It seems to work.

There may not be any money in this. There is no guarantee of money in any writing. But there is something in writing or telling stories or pretending that my grandchildren are sitting at my feet enthralled by my stories. Try it.

by Dwayne Phillips

AI tools are here. They don’t do everything, but they boost productivity. Use the tools.

I am old enough to remember a time in the late 1980s when word processors appeared. There were many older managers who were accustomed to writing in cursive on yellow pads with pencils and handing those to secretaries to type. All of a sudden, they had to type everything themselves. Many of these well-meaning fellows couldn’t type. Try learning that at age 55.

In early May 2025, Jensen Huang said, “You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it. I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don’t be that person.”

The word processor multiplied productivity. No one said to keep out the word processor. Some, as mentioned above, hurt a lot at work when the word processor arrived. Still, they adapted. They adapted or lost their jobs. No one was going to pay for typists any more. Type it yourself.

Why are you sitting there typing? Prompt. Copy. Paste. Edit. Ship it. Same goes for drawing pictures. Same goes for making a video. Sames goes for…the list becomes longer daily.

I can be that person who huffs and puffs and loses my job.

I can be that person who thinks about how to use new tools. I can be that person who creates when the AI cannot and then uses the AI to do all that other work.

We all have choices. Let’s choose well.