2023-09-18
Ethan Mollick's fantastic One Useful Thing newsletter has an overview of a recent paper he did studying the impact of AI tools on BCG consultants.
One observation in particular stood out to me:
We also found something else interesting, an effect that is increasingly apparent in other studies of AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one. Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore. AI is not quite at that level of change, but skill levelling is going to have a big impact.
This data is invaluable, but I think the framing of it (through no fault of the author's) obscures how individuals should be using LLMs. From the perspective of studying the impact of LLMs on a population of BCG consultants, there are low performing consultants and high performing consultants. But as individuals, we are a mix of low performers and high performers depending on the task.
Therefore the implication is that we should be much less afraid of our weaknesses, especially in areas that are complementary to our strengths. The quality (skill?) of being willing to learn by doing is going to be increasingly important, since the LLM will help cover the flaws. Then the way to maximize one's impact is to pick projects where you have a relative strength (beyond the jagged frontier of AI, in Ethan's framing) and pair it with tasks where the LLM can provide complementary, replacement level support.
I can't claim to have mastered this, but over the past 6 months, I've experienced this first hand across a number of domains: programming and in my day job, about material science, chemistry, and technical writing about cosmetics.
My friend Kenneth quipped recently: "What will you do with infinite junior software engineers?", but it's even broader than that. You have infinite access to baseline expertise in basically anything. What will you do with it?
2023-09-14
Fantastic ChinaTalk episode on the role of Congress in American civic live with Philip Wallach:
The specific things that stood out to me:
- The role of Congress in creating legitimate legislation: The Civil Rights act of 1968 was given legitimacy by the process it went through. The same Southern Senators who filibustered it and fought it all along the way were then able to go back to their constituents honestly and say "we lost, it's time to move on," which gave the legislation staying power. Similarly, debates over WWII policies gave those policies legitimacy with a public who felt burned by WWI.
- The facade of representative government: Wallach makes the point that virtually every country in the world has a body that is nominally representative, but in authoritarian countries, they have little to no real power. This is one of the things I find most interesting about the Roman Empire. The Republic falls, but until the end there continue to be Senators running around.
ChinaTalk continues to be the podcast most likely to introduce me to something I didn't know I was interested in
2023-09-14
From Macro Oceans:
We spoke to half a dozen farmers across the state (if we missed you, please reach out!). All the data was self-reported and although we received updates from the same number of farmers as last year, we know of a few farmers who did not respond, so this total is probably a bit lower than reality. The results: total production in 2023 was 389,900 wet lbs, down 30% on last year.
It's clear to me that the bottleneck for the seaweed industry is customer demand.
2023-09-09
So many gems in this piece by Ryan Burge, Church Attendance Used to Drive Up Trust, It Doesn't Anymore.
Trust is one of my favorite topics because I think it is one of those invisible things that makes all the difference. A high trust team can move faster and do things a low trust team can't do. Similarly, a high trust society can move quickly and do things a low trust society cannot do. Increasingly over the past 50 years, America is becoming a low trust society.
Some things that surprised me in the article:
The epic decline in trust among Republicans
As Burge points out, this isn't as simple of a story as it might seem. Trust and educational attainment are positively correlated and educational attainment is increasingly a driver of partisanship. However, the Republican coalition is filled with people that are less likely to believe that other people can be trusted than it was 50 years ago.
Increasing distrust among people with low levels of educational attainment
Quoting directly from Burge:
The main culprit for that growing divide is that those with low levels of education how grown more distrustful: 60% in the 1970s up to 77% in the 2010s. I think this should be ringing alarm bell for American democracy. There are lots of folks out there with low levels of education who are deeply distrustful of their fellow man.
Religious attendance is now negatively correlated with trust
One of the things that stood out most to me while reading Bowling Alone was the role that churches and other religious institutions played in preparing people to participate in civic life. [0] They were the training grounds of democracy where someone learns to lead at a small level, experiences what it's like, and then decides that they have the capability to take the next step. I know this is true for me; the very first times I led teams at work, I thought back to leading groups at my church in high school, what created credibility, and what destroyed it.
Burge hypothesizes that it might be due sorting, you're less likely to meet people that are unlike you and therefore are less likely become more trusting. I'm not sure if I agree with it, but I don't have a better hypothesis yet. But I do know that seeing this change is sad for me.
0: I can't link to this because I haven't imported blogposts from my old blog yet... shame on me!