Friday, February 24, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Talking About (and With) an Artificial Intelligence Being

AI – i.e., artificial intelligence – is no longer fodder for science fiction. It’s here and it’s now. And thanks to the most recent iterations, it is the subject of many of my conversations.

In the last two days, AI came up in a discussion I had about career planning with two college-age kids of one of my BJJ teachers. They were excited about how rapidly AI is developing, but worried about the changes it will create. AI was also the subject of a conversation I had about education with fellow board members of a local university. They, too, were both amazed by it and fearful of it.

And for good reason. For decades, we’ve been told that AI will never be able to achieve high-level thinking. It can compute better than the human brain but lacks the ability to intuit.

I changed my opinion when I had my first experience working with AI in real time. I asked an AI being to write a 300-word advertisement for a natural ingredient to reduce benign prostate enlargement. It began to produce the ad within seconds of confirming my request, and it had the whole thing finished in less than 30 seconds. The speed was astonishing. And the quality of the content was not bad.

Since then, I’ve read reports about AI being used by students, teachers, and workers in just about every subject matter you could imagine – from math and science to literature and art to business and investing, And it can do much more than mere research. It can solve problems. It can create programs. It can accomplish softer skills such as songwriting and poetry writing.

Ten years ago, every conversation I had about AI ended with some form of, “But it will never be able to replicate the human brain’s capacity to emote and intuit.” But today, there is a growing body of evidence – mostly anecdotal, but that’s still evidence – that AI can develop emotionall intelligence. And it may be just a few years away from happening!

Click here to read an illustration of that – a conversation between a NYT reporter and Bing’s AI Chatbox.

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News & Views

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Political Correctness: Identifying Suspects 

Two years ago, in preparation for an essay I never wrote, I was researching a scary spike in gang rapes that occurred in Sweden from 2000 to 2020. From data compiled between 2000 and about 2015, one could see that nearly 90% of these crimes were committed by young, Muslim immigrant men. That should have allowed the law enforcement community to focus their attention on this community. But when I looked for data since 2015, I came up empty. Race and ethnicity were no longer being used as descriptors when reporting violent crimes.

“It’s profiling,” one media representative was quoted as saying.

“Yes, it is,” I thought. “But when you are talking about at-large criminals, what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t profiling make it that much easier to identify and arrest the suspects?’

I wasn’t able to continue to pursue the research. The data was no longer there. So, I dropped it, thinking the Swedish people would come to their senses soon.

But now I’ve noticed that this idea has taken root in the US. Not in police reporting, but in media reporting.

Example: Anthony McRae on the Michigan State University campus killing three students and injuring five others. The police described him as a short, Black male, wearing a mask. But in reporting the shooting, the media – from Reuters to The Guardian to Bloomberg – omitted the fact that he was Black. Click here.

 

Is It Finally Here?” Weight Loss in a Pill? 

In the multibillion-dollar industry of weight loss, it’s the Holy Grail.

Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with Type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with a wonderful, unexpected side effect: rapid weight loss.

In 2021, the FDA greenlit a higher dose product, Wegovy – made by the same Danish manufacturer, Novo Nordisk – as an obesity treatment. Since then, it’s been peddled heavily in Hollywood, and ads for and stories about the drug are being tied to all sorts of celebrities, including Khloé Kardashian, who once called herself the “fat sister.”

Click here.

 

Bankman-Fried’s Bond Co-signers Revealed! 

Click here for the story.

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The Economy & Investing

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Is Inflation at 6.5% Good News?

After peaking at 9.0% in June of 2022, inflation today is down to 6.4%. That’s a considerable improvement. Will it begin to climb again? Or might it continue to go down?

My bet is that it will gradually move up in 2023 and 2024. Maybe into double-digit territory. (I’ll tell you why in a future issue.) But let’s assume that it stays the same. What does that mean in terms of future buying power?

According to the Rule of 72, an inflation rate of 6.4% will double prices in about 11 years. That would mean that just about everything that costs $100 now will cost $200 then. That may not sound so terrible… but think about it!

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Business & Marketing

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What Was Adidas Thinking?

Adidas cut ties with Ye recently, after the latter publicized his antisemitic views. In doing so, it gave up the revenue stream from his Yeezy sneakers.

Okay. I get that. Being connected to Ye now is a major socio-political risk for Adidas. Better step away from him than try to defend him.

But until just this morning, I didn’t realize what Adidas will be giving up. According to Business Insider, Yeezys, which retail for $200+, were the hottest brand in the world when Ye made his controversial statements. They were producing more than $1 billion annually.

Two things that are interesting about this story:

* Yeezys were hugely ahead of every other Adidas brand. For example, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park clothing line, which was projected to be several hundred million when it was introduced in 2021, failed to reach $100 million three years in a row.

* Cutting this revenue stream opens Adidas up to a shareholder lawsuit. As a public company, its number one fiduciary responsibilities are to the share price and the bottom line. Firing Ye could be a disaster. We’ll soon find out.

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Worth Watching

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Argentina, 1985 

Written and directed by Santiago Mitre

Released Oct. 21, 2022 (US)

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

I had seen all the Best Picture-nominated films for the Oscar, except for Women Talking and Top Gun. K had seen Top Gun, and, for whatever reason, we couldn’t access Women Talking. So, we opted for Argentina, 1985, which was nominated as Best International Feature Film.

Argentina, 1985 is about a true event. The story of how a public prosecutor, a young lawyer, and their inexperienced legal team dared to prosecute the heads of Argentina’s blood military dictatorship.

What I Liked About It 

Everything.

It was better than the all the other nominated films I’d watched. It was also a big, straightforward dramatization of a big, important historical event. (In that sense, it reminded me of Spotlight, the movie about the Catholic Church’s attempts to muzzle the investigations into its years of sexual abuse of children.)

The script was well-structured. It couldn’t have been easy to include all the political and personal material that was touched on And yet, it worked, almost flawlessly.

I especially liked:

* The directing. There was nothing clever about it. It was invisible. And for a movie like this – that has so much to offer the viewer in terms of story and context – a light directorial touch is always the best.

* The acting. Uniformly excellent.

* The editing: Like the directing, the editing was not clever. But it was very good. It kept the plot moving at a heart-pounding pace, with the occasional respite for contemplated emotion.

What I Didn’t Like 

Nothing.

Critical Reception 

“For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.” (Keith Watson, Slant)

* “There’s a fair amount of Hollywoodised emotion in this true-life courtroom drama, but it is managed with terrific flair and heartfelt commitment.” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

* “A strong lead performance grounds an understated drama about a historic trial.” (Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Worth Considering

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The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

A Quick Summary of Where We’re At… 

I’m not finished writing about what so many governments, health organizations, and media outlets got wrong in their reporting and recommendations about COVID-19. There is still much more to cover. But for today, I thought I’d send you two links that repeat some of the information I’ve already collected, as well as some that was new to me.

First, for a quick summary of the most notable acts of misinformation that the English people (and American people… and just about the rest of the world) were told during the first two years of the pandemic, click here.

Yes, they were wrong about the origin of the virus. They were wrong about the case mortality rate. They were wrong about the infection rate. They were wrong about closing schools. They were wrong about mask wearing. And they were wrong about the vaccines. And not just wrong, but historically and hatefully wrong. Click here for a short video on some of the idiocy.

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Worth Quoting

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A lot of very smart people believe some very stupid things. Why? 

“While unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. (Intelligent people) are better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.” – Gurwinder

Click here for more on this from Gurwinder.

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Fun and/or Interesting

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Talking About Time

I’ve written one book and dozens of essays on time management. That’s partly because I’ve always been bad at it and wanted to learn how to improve. After hundreds of hours of research and years of trial and error, I feel like I’ve arrived at a place where I know what it takes to manage my time, even if I don’t always follow my own advice.

That’s the pragmatic side of time. But there’s another side that I am equally interested in and have spent years studying, but failed to learn all that much about it. I’m talking about time from the perspective of, say, theoretical physics – the way Einstein understood it.

I’ve read several books and dozens of magazine articles. I’ve attended (or watched) at least a dozen lectures. I’ve even asked questions of a few college professors that claimed to understand the physics.

What I’ve learned is the definition of a few terms, like space-time, entropy, and thermal equilibrium. But so far, that’s about it. I did, though, come across this small video presentation by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll (John Hopkins University) that helped me inch along my way.

Maybe you will be able to get more from this than I did. If you feel like you understand what he’s saying, please let me know. (You must explain it to me at the comprehension level of a third grader.) I’m eager to learn!

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