Fooled by randomness, tornado edition (from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis) 📚
To elaborate on the chatbot: it isn’t that it upgraded my view of how good artificial intelligence can be, but rather that it downgraded my view of human intelligence. ChatGPT is very good at stringing out empty phrases and filler words — in other words, at producing bullshit in the Harry Frankfurt sense. Its skill in writing plausibly-looking college essays, personal statements, and letters of recommendation reminded me, maybe even showed me for the first time, that most of those are bullshit too.
As someone who has spent the better part of the last 12 years drafting his own letters of recommendation, Thank you, USCIS! it was demoralizing to be reminded to all that wasted effort. Worse yet was the stream of college professors lamenting the new reality of now and forever compromised term papers, decorated with screenshots of ChatGPT’s essays, blind to their own self-condemnation: if an unintelligent, unreasoning, letter-guessing algorithm can produce content to your liking better than your own students, then what kind of a class are you teaching there, Professor?
Instead of hearlding the rise of artificial general intelligence, ChatGPT showed me deficiencies of human intelligence by being a variant of the reverse Turing test: can a human write sufficiently well to be recognized as one? This is, of course, not my original thought but rather Taleb’s, who wrote about the reverse Turing test two decades ago in Fooled by Randomness, and mentioned it again in light of the ChatGPT screenshot onslaught. So am I failing the test too?
If you would like to hear more about what I’ve been up to professionally for the last year or so — and maybe learn something about cellular therapy for autoimmune diseases — this 30-minute webinar organized by the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America may be of interest.
Fooled by randomness, tornado edition (from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis) 📚
OpenAI’s new chatbot produces paragraphs of text indistinguishable from what you can find in newsletters, blogs, or college essays. It even does (mediocre) poetry and regex.
Halloween came a month late this year.
“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”
This is what the bank robber Willie Sutton may or may not have once said in an interview. Regardless of source, it applies equally well to social networks and people.
I consider myself a fairly rational creature, and yet…
Alan Jacobs about Amerian health-care, or what passes for it:
I think the first thing to understand about the American health-care system is this: some people lose money from illness, and some people make money from illness. Some people pay, and some people get paid.
…
I don’t think there are many doctors who consciously make medical decisions based on their lust for money. But I do think there are a great many doctors who go along with the incentives established by the system, without thinking about it too much or at all, because on some level they know that thinking about it could well lead to their losing money.
Of course, most people getting paid from the illness of others are not the doctors, the nurses, or the pharmacists. In fact, outside of lucrative procedure-based specialties — and there aren’t as many of those as a Top Docs glossy would make you think — most doctors, certainly most of those who deal with chronic medical conditions, have no idea how much treatments and tests they order actually cost.
This is, in fact, not a feature but a bug of the system, and one of its main ones. Most doctors work not for their patients, but for amorphous “health systems” graced with all the charm and efficiency of a lumbering bueracracy. They, in turn, deal not with the patients directly, but rather with medical insurance companies or, worse yet, “benefits managers” who insert themselves as mediators nominally there to simplify the process but instead further increasing its complexity. And presto, you now have a series of matryoshka dolls each doing its part to create the mother of all principal-agent problems.
Should the patients' perspective be the primary consideration in improving American health-care? Absolutely! But lets not fool ourselves into thinking that the mess we are in is due to doctors' priorities overwhelming everyone else’s.
Magpie Murders were an absolute delight, even if the modern-day mystery was somewhat predictable. Looking forward to the Moonflower Murders, whenever they come out. 📺
Finished reading: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow 📚
Three remarkable achievements here: Hamilton’s for having lived the life he did, Chernow’s for assembling his remarkable tale, and Miranda’s for distilling and rearranging it into a Shakespearean work of art. Will read again.
Today I learned that the IMDB rating of This Is Spinal Tap… goes up to 11!
Many thanks to Russ Roberts and his recent critique of utilitarianism for pointing this out. The essay itself is a perfect Thanksgiving weekend read for both its topic and length.