I was peripherally aware that large language models have crossed a chasm in the last year or so, but I haven’t realized how large of a jump it was until I compared ChatGPT’s answer to my standard question: “How many lymphocytes are there in the human body?”.
Back in February of last year it took some effort to produce an over-inflated estimate. Today, I was served a well-reasoned and beautifuly formatted response after a single prompt. Sure, I have gotten better at writing prompts but the difference there is marginal. Not so marginal is the leap in usefulness and trustworthiness of the model, which went from being an overeager high school freshman to an all-star college senior.
And that is just the reasoning. Creating quick Word documents with tables and columns just the way I want them has become routine, even when/especially if I want to recreate a document from a badly scanned printout. My office document formatting skills are getting rusty and I couldn’t be happier for it.
In his Kefahuchi Tractt trilogy, M. John Harrison conjures up alien algorithms floating around the human environment, mostly helpful, sometimes not, motives unknown. Back in the early 2000s when the first novel came out I was wondering what on earth he was talking about but for better or worse we are now headed towards that world. Whether we are inching or hurling, that depends entirely on your point of view.
(↬Tyler Cowen)
For some Sunday pre-holiday week reading, here is a detailed analysis of what went wrong in Valencia from the Financial Times that shows both the human and technical side of the flooding there earlier this year. It is excellent throughout, and really got my blood boiling near the end with this series of paragraphs:
Cutting the risk of flash floods is not impossible. After the 1957 disaster, generalísimo Francisco Franco oversaw a vast engineering project to reroute the Turia river away from Valencia’s city centre. It is the reason why the capital was largely unscathed on October 29. But dictators do not have to consult stakeholders and such poured-concrete solutions are out of fashion today.
Still, Spain has not lacked modern proposals to stop the Poyo ravine flooding. But its slow-moving state has failed to implement them. The Júcar river basin authority put forward a risk reduction plan in 1994. Three of its four parts were blocked on environmental grounds, so it only stabilised the walls of the ravine from Paiporta to the coast — a job finished in 2005.
By then the basin authority had commissioned work on an alternative plan, which was authorised by the central government in 2009. It involved restoring forests to improve soil water absorption and building a “safety” channel to siphon water from the ravine to Franco’s rerouted river.
By the time it won environmental approval in 2011, Spain was heading into austerity. A new conservative government then shelved the plan. When the socialists returned to power in 2018, the environmental approval had expired. Pedro Sánchez’s government concluded a new plan was needed, but cost-benefit studies and new environmental demands at regional level threw up fresh obstacles. On the ground, nothing was done.
Valencia is a beautiful city as I saw for myself not long ago, and big part of it was the dry river bed-turned-park going straight down the center, orange groves and all. To think that what enabled it was a fascist dictator’s big project, when he probably didn’t care an iota about the park. And the people who care about the parks are clearly not capable of doing these large-scale projects. It’s the yin and yang of humanity.
Nate Silver, who so vehemently defended Daylight Saving Time, does not in fact know what DST means. No, I will not call him a clown — though he has made himself appear to act like one — because he may actually be on our side!
A one-two punch on clinical trials from Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman today: first their on-point agenda for clinical trial abundance as a guest post in Slow Boring, then Ruxandra’s longer essay which has been so thoroughly research that even yours truly gets a name-check. As I noted elsewhere, every US institution has made one bade tradeoff after another in how it conducts clinical trials to the point that it’s impossible to conduct a RECOVERY trial equivalent over here. That needs to change.
Never was a fan of Daylight Saving Time, but knowing that Nate Silver is a proponent gives me additional conviction.
Having three school-aged children in three different grades of (thankfully only) two schools means an unending barrage of information emails and class email newsletters that are — don’t get me wrong — absolutely delightful to receive but also become a game of “find the actionable item and its due date”. That game is no fun, and if it’s a class trip permission or payment may in fact end in tears.
The one thing to read this weekend is this NYT interview with Rick Steves. His answer to “what you would do if you couldn’t travel any more” was pitch-perfect:
I would welcome the day, strangely, when I could not travel anymore, because it would open a gate of things that I’ve not done because of my love for travel.
Which is my feeling as well. You can love what you are doing and still be OK not doing it any more because, and this is Rick again, “[t]his world is such a beautiful place to experience, and there are dimensions of experiencing this world that I have yet to try.”
Mozi is a splendid idea for making serendipitous encounters happen. On the other hand, can you truly call these encounters serendipitous if they needed an app? (ᔥMatthew Haughey)
A few sentences to make your blood boiling in this whopper from Noah Smith:
It’s mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.
[…] the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much.
And to top it off:
Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on.
Using “healthcare provider” to mean pharmaceutical companies is at best careless when the article you are writing is directly tied to a murder of a health insurance executive. But what really upsets me is that he is right: physicians, nurses, etc. have allowed themselves to be tied to these behemoths for the promise of what? A steadier paycheck that is less — for the time spent in school and at work — than what a mid-career IT professional earns? Sad. (↬Tyler Cowen)
As Nassim Taleb likes to say, no rumor is true until officially denied. Godspeed.