🍿 Heretic (2024) was a low-budget, high-suspense portrayal of a psychopathic Hugh Grant, and unlike his prior attempt it just flew by even at 110 minutes run time. The movie has four actors, a few set pieces and no highfalutin' special effects: kudos to A24 for still making them this way.
The FT and NYT both have stories about the dollar’s poor start to the year, which sounds alarming. But then NYT shows this graph to back up the claim and you know what, it really doesn’t seem to be all that dramatic. In fact, the very beginning of the year has been quite average, as have the last two months. It is only the period from March until mid-April that saw two unusual slumps, but does that count as “dollar having its worst start to a year since 1973”, as the NYT put it? It might, depending on your definition of “worst” and “start”, but hardly a foregone conclusion. I know that newspapers need to prepare for the slow news week with the holiday coming up, but come on. “Worst start to a year in more than 50 years” is a bit too dramatic for what the chart shows us.
What kind of data would deserve some drama? Well, again the NYT provides the perfect example with their front page news on April 2020 US unemployment data. The headline, in much deserved all-caps, says “U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT IS WORST SINCE DEPRESSION” and has the unemployed bard dip so far below anything in the past 50 years that it falls all the way down to the bottom of the front page. A true extreme value.
As an aside, if you thought you could call either “an outlier”, think again. Here is a 12-minute explainer on the difference from Pasquale Cirillo’s Log of Risk podcast but in short: outliers are impossible values, extreme values are, well, extreme but still in the realm of the possible. The dollar’s decline this year is neither but you wouldn’t know it if you just read the headlines.
Some good news to start the week:
Microsoft claims their new medical tool is “four times more successful than human doctors at diagnosing complex ailments”. Unsurprisingly, what they meant by “diagnosing a disease” was the thinking-hard part, not the inputs part:
To test its capabilities, “MAI-DxO” was fed 304 studies from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that describe how some of the most complicated cases were solved by doctors.
This allowed researchers to test if the programme could figure out the correct diagnosis and relay its decision-making process, using a new technique called “chain of debate”, which makes AI reasoning models give a step-by-step account of how they solve problems.
If and when deployed, how likely is it that these algorithms will get a query comparable to a New England Journal of Medicine case study? Most doctors don’t reach those levels of perception and synthesis, let alone the general public.
📚 Finished reading: A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, having no idea how it ended up in my Kindle library. I am glad to have opened it, as I now have some semblance of a framework for how this thing we call intelligence might work. Note that the newest developments in neuroscience are just a starting point, as most of the book deals with their implications for AI and the future of humanity. If that sounds like overreach, know that by the end of the book it is. Still, these wafer-thin speculations don’t detract from the book’s meatier parts.
Confirmation bias alert: the framework repeats almost word for word the thought I had a while back — and more recently — about AI, that true general intelligence needs to be able to interact with its environment. So I may be blind to some obvious deficiencies in the argument. But then again, great minds, etc.
I will have more to write about this soon (ha!), but until the stars align for an extended writing session here is a good opinion piece from FT’s John Thornhill about why LLMs may not be all that great for lay people dabbling in, for example, medicine:
When the test scenarios were entered directly into the AI models, the chatbots correctly identified the conditions in 94.9 per cent of cases. However, the participants did far worse: they provided incomplete information and the chatbots often misinterpreted their prompts, resulting in the success rate dropping to just 34.5 per cent. The technological capabilities of these models did not change but the human inputs did, leading to very different outputs.
The emphasis is mine, because it is a neat summarization of what I wrote 2 years ago. Humans are unique not because of what’s inside our heads but because of how we interact with the environment. There will be no artificial general intelligence until that problem is solved.
Some of the best blog posts are rants, and Andrew Gelman just published one, about reckless disregard for the truth. Here is why he thinks the term “bullshit” does not apply:
In my post, I asked what do you call it when someone is lying but they’re doing it in such a socially-acceptable way that nobody ever calls them on it? Some commenters suggested the term “bullshit,” but that didn’t quite seem right to me, because these people seemed pretty deliberate in their factual misstatements.
I disagree. Whether the bullshitter is deliberate should not matter, and many do indeed BS with a specific goal in mind. In the examples he lists those are inflating the impact of a paper and getting paid for expert testimony in favor of big tobacco. Indeed, dig deep enough and you will find hunger for money and prestige to be at the root of much bullshit.
An excellent blog post that is not a rant: Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine, by Christopher Butler.
Limitations expand our experience by engaging our imagination. Unlimited options arrest our imagination by capturing us in the experience of choice. One, I firmly believe, is necessary for creativity, while the other is its opiate. Generally speaking, we don’t need more features. We need more focus.
Indeed.
The NYT is collecting readers' votes for their list of 100 best movies of the 21st century and, well, I made some interesting choices. I do stand behind each and every one of them!
For those not using X, I picked:
A few good links to start the week: