10 February 2023

ChatGPT has passed a U.S. medical licensing exam.  It has also already passed the MBA exam at Wharton's.  What are the implications for this?  I don't think anyone knows for sure yet.  I could see this being a valuable asset to clinicians in getting answers to clinical questions very quickly.  But who will check for accuracy?  And A.I. models are only as good as their training and validation sets. 

NPR thinks that Asians are not the model minority that the stereotype makes them up to be.  Well, if your definition of "Asian" includes the whole continent, then yeah, sure, I guess.  Asians are not all one monolithic culture.  Yokunai!

Why EVs will not see widespread adoption:

Not to mention that charging stations are targeted for their copper cables.

Why aren't smart people happer? Perhaps we should listen to the writer's grandma?

Gen Z doesn't remember when America worked.
It was amazingly exciting in America during the dotcom boom, around 1999. Hard to remember that level of enthusiasm. Since then, it's been one recession after another, especially the Great Recession in 2008, then COVID-19. Now the Biden recession. Those in their twenties have only experienced misery.

Second order thinking - what smart people do to outperform.  Boy, wish our politicians did this kind of thinking.

09 February 2023

The best anonymity is to be in plain sight
This makes sense.  Trying to be super-anonymous is just going to attract attention.  Just create a new persona.  Someone ought to create a business around this concept.  It's probably going to be necessary to achieve any modicum of privacy in the coming brave new world.

"I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well.  Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us."