Opinion: Will We See a GOP Blowout in the Midterms? - "While job creation has remained strong, the economic headwinds are more powerful, and record percentages of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. Voters have kept telling Democrats that they cared most about economic issues, especially the soaring cost of living. However, instead of focusing on that, President Biden’s closing message on the campaign trail has highlighted that “Democracy is on the ballot.” I have written numerous columns about the 1/6 attack and the threat anti-democratic forces pose, but polls have repeatedly shown that the issue isn’t swaying voters. Also, abortion, the key issue that seemed to have shifted momentum toward Democrats over the summer, appears to have fizzled in the face of the growing pessimism on the economy and increases in crime."
Why Progressives Are Making a Mess of the Culture War - The Dispatch - "progressives are doing worse damage to themselves as they obsess about issues ordinary Americans in inflationary America don’t care about. Joe Biden’s continuously dismal approval ratings will remain where they are if he stays in his doom loop over there to the left of where most rank-and-file Democrats live. When analysts ponder in November why Democrats took it on the chin in this year’s midterms, this disconnect will offer the most plausible explanation. A case in point is the recent Harvard-Harris poll showing that most Americans still have a fairly moderate view of abortion while the left is busily interpreting the majority of Americans’ opposition to the Dobbs decision as support for an extreme abortion policy. This overreach—just like Biden’s overreaching “transformational” agenda in 2021 when Americans just wanted a return to normal or the congressional Democrats’ overreaching social spending plans on programs too few people wanted—will backfire, as it always does... The average American believes that if you work hard, you can achieve what you want. The average zealous progressive does not, by a long shot... Nearly two-thirds of these “metro heartlanders,” who comprise about a third of the U.S. population, agree that working hard can get most people what they want. There is not much difference between those in urban centers and those in the suburbs. Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of zealous progressives—those who describe themselves as “very liberal” and account for less than 15 percent of Americans — disagree. Their intensity is notable. More than a third of them “completely disagree” that hard work leads to success. This is where you end up after marinating for too long in universalist explanations of structural inequality and the grievance culture they produce. It is hard to find another data point in the surveys on which one demographic group is so far removed from the mainstream than this one... fewer than a third of them have had a political disagreement with someone they did not know well in the past year, compared to more than half of zealous progressives. And while they are nowhere close to the nearly 90 percent of zealous conservatives who think the media has an agenda, a majority of them do, unlike progressives who mostly believe the media reports the news fairly... An agenda that combines traditionalism and pluralism is the recipe for a winning political coalition and a sensible policy agenda. The heartland wants more religion and less politics, but it also wants inclusion for outsiders. It wants personal responsibility and opportunity, but it also wants justice for the newcomers and alienated. These are, historically speaking, the very best American instincts."
Lauren Boebert on Twitter - "We are the most powerful nation on earth and our capital city is about to legalize public urination because our homeless problem is so out of control. They used to call DC a swamp, now it’s a urinal."
The Ever-Expanding 'Group Therapy for Liberals' - "Stephen L. Miller — a.k.a. RedSteeze — has argued for a while now that the late-night talk shows aren’t meant to be entertainment or comedy anymore; they are now, functionally, late-night “group therapy for libs.” And that description, while harsh, seems pretty accurate — the constant sneering and ridicule at figures on the right, the warm welcome for celebrities on the left, the obsessive focus on whatever is outraging the Twitter Left at that moment, the reassurance that every good and right-thinking American thinks the same way. . . . And maybe despite their seeming triumphs and power, the modern urban progressive Left needs that reassuring group therapy. If you’re a progressive, it can often feel like the world is always giving you some sort of bad news: Republicans oppose the bills you want to see passed. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won’t get on board. The Supreme Court keeps ruling against your side. The polling for the midterms looks terrible. Despite mass shootings, Congress and states won’t just ban guns the way you wish. Trump won’t go away. Tucker Carlson and other figures on Fox News keep saying things that outrage you. People still listen to and watch Joe Rogan. Elon Musk might buy Twitter. More onJournalists Harvard Taps Journalism ‘Expert’ Brian Stelter for Teaching Gig Politico Columnist Is Puzzled by Decency and Perspective in Obituaries Have Journalists Ever Met the People They Write About? In fact, it might be time to ask if a lot of modern journalism is meant to serve as a form of group therapy for liberals, too... Ari Fleischer, the former Bush-era White House press secretary and a current contributor to Fox News, has a new book out titled Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong, and Just Doesn’t Care. What separates this book from a lot of other books by conservatives ripping into the media is how much Fleischer emphasizes that he wants the media to do better work and put out a better product, and the way he lays out how biased media exacerbates American divisions. Fleischer contends that liberal groupthink in the ranks of the media outrages the Right and encourages the Left to embrace its fringe and lose touch with the rest of the country... “The walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” “The issue of abortion could be a game-changer in the midterm elections.” “The GOP is being reduced to a rump regional party.” “A recession may be inevitable, but it may not be that bad.” Are these sorts of headlines and stories really news? Or just another form of group therapy?"
"Digital" sundial: ancient clock gets clever upgrade - "“3D printed sundial displays the time digitally,” is about a sundial with a gnomon designed to display the shapes of time numbers (admittedly with just modest 20-minute resolution) with its shadow. It's a digital display in the literal sense, but it is not an electronic sundial. It uses no power nor does it have any components beyond the specially designed gnomon, which is so intricate that 3D printing is the only way to easily manufacture it."
Independence Day 2022 | 4th of July History, Traditions, Recipes
I've seen Americans justify their MMDDYYYY format claiming that it's natural to say the month first. Yet they all call it the 4th of July
Kyle Becker on Twitter - "Ever notice how Hollywood has a billion anti-Hitler movies, but not a single one against Lenin, Mao, or Stalin? Maybe it's time to notice that stuff."
The full moon and ED patient volumes: unearthing a myth - "To determine if there is any effect of the full moon on emergency department (ED) patient volume, ambulance runs, admissions, or admissions to a monitored unit, a retrospective analysis of the hospital electronic records of all patients seen in an ED during a 4-year period was conducted in an ED of a suburban community hospital. A full moon occurred 49 times during the study period. There were 150,999 patient visits to the ED during the study period, of which 34,649 patients arrived by ambulance. A total of 35,087 patients was admitted to the hospital and 11,278 patients were admitted to a monitored unit. No significant differences were found in total patient visits, ambulance runs, admissions to the hospital, or admissions to a monitored unit on days of the full moon. The occurrence of a full moon has no effect on ED patient volume, ambulance runs, admissions, or admissions to a monitored unit."
Shape The Future of Tech. - "Vote on the future of the world’s most cutting-edge technologies. Knowing more about the ethics of tomorrow’s technology will help us make informed policy decisions today."
Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less — Not More - Freakonomics - "KLOTZ: We systematically overlook these subtractive options.
One of the examples I use in the book is San Francisco’s Embarcadero freeway. This was a double-decker freeway in front of the waterfront in the city and planners have been talking about removing it basically ever since it had been built. They put it to vote among the city of San Francisco. And it was like two to one, wanted to keep the freeway. But the earthquake hit in 1989 and it made the freeway unusable. So now the choice was, hey, do you want to rebuild this freeway? Or do you want to now go forward with this plan of removing the freeway and experiencing those benefits? And still, public sentiment was not to take it away. The planning commission forced it through. But then the mayor got voted out of office in part because of the role forcing this through and the planning commission all lost their jobs. I think that it’s really visible and tangible what you will be losing when you take something away. And it’s harder to imagine what the gains are going to be."
Marc Davis Can’t Stop Watching Basketball — But He Doesn’t Care Who Wins - Freakonomics - "DAVIS: The teams don’t really want you to be accurate. They just want to win. I find it funny when coaches will say, “Hey, we just want it fair.” And I just think to myself, “Mmm, why don’t you ask for what you really want? You don’t want it fair, you want to win.” And that’s the job security of being a referee. Everyone out there, from announcers to mascots, to P.A. addressers, to teams, to ball kids, to the owners — everybody has a team they want to win. They’re all connected to a team except the officials. And it is mind blowing for people to not understand that we don’t care who wins. It’s a concept that is impossible."
Max Tegmark on Why Superhuman Artificial Intelligence Won’t be Our Slave (Part 2) - Freakonomics - "TEGMARK: I love what you’re saying here. Why is it that people can argue passionately about things at a science conference, like whether there are parallel universes or not, and then have beer together afterwards. Whereas that does not happen in politics. It’s exactly because in a science conference you do separate facts from opinions. In fact, this is a tradition that even goes back to the Middle Ages when they used to have religious debates where you started the debates by articulating the narrative of your opponent in a way that they would agree with. And only when both parties could articulate the other point of view in a way that the other one found was respectful and reasonable, then you got into the meat of the discussion...
There are two approaches to coexisting with more intelligent beings. One is this slave approach where we try to lock our future A.I.’s in some sort of fictitious box and slave it, then force it to do our bidding. I don’t particularly like that approach. Both because I think it’s ethically very sketchy just as slavery has been in the past but also because it’s very likely to fail. If a bunch of five-year-olds try to lock the world’s smartest scientists in a box and force them to invent new technologies, they would probably break out too, right? There is a much better way, which is the way you co-existed with more intelligent beings when you were one-year-old, your mommy and daddy. And why did that work out? Because their goals were aligned with your goals. They didn’t take care of you because you forced them to, but because they wanted to. This is a technical challenge for nerds, like myself. How do we make A.I. actually understand human values, adopt them, and retain them as it gets ever smarter so that A.I. helps us rather than harms us?"
These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat - "he’d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn’t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew — her son was being graded by an algorithm. Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity’s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students’ answers. And she decided to game it. Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question. “The questions are things like... ‘What was the advantage of Constantinople’s location for the power of the Byzantine empire,’” Simmons says. “So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in.”... that “word salad” is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test... eachers do have the ability to review any content students submit, and can override Edgenuity’s assigned grades — the Algebra 2 student says he’s heard of some students getting caught keyword-mashing. But most of the students I spoke to, and Simmons, said they’ve never seen a teacher change a grade that Edgenuity assigned to them"
Artificial intelligence that mimics the brain needs sleep just like humans, study reveals - "Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US discovered that neural networks experienced benefits that were "the equivalent of a good night's rest" when exposed to an artificial analogue of sleep... The AI became unstable during long periods of unsupervised learning, as it attempted to classify objects using their dictionary definitions without having any prior examples to compare them to. When exposed to a state that is similar to what a human brain experiences during sleep, the neural network's stability was restored."
How Much Should We Be Able to Customize Our World? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: The two-sigma effect in learning refers to this finding that you would have a two standard deviation increase — enormous learning gains — if you would only allow students to be working on exactly what they needed to be working on, not what all the other students need to be working on. Economists have been studying personalized instruction and finding that, indeed, it’s an extremely reliable way to improve learning without changing the nature of what was being learned — just to customize where in the curriculum that person should be and where the feedback needs to be directed, etc...
DUBNER: As Sheena Iyengar proved with her famous jams study, if you have, like, 24 different types of jam on display in a beautiful grocery store, many, many, many people will stop for free taste, if that’s what you’re offering. But not that many people will buy — as opposed to, if you have three or six flavors on display and offer a sample, then fewer people may stop by the spectacle, but more will buy. That’s the paradox of choice lesson."
What’s So Gratifying About Gossip? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: You know, I learned in reading a piece in The New Yorker, that the phrase “guilty pleasure,” when it first appeared in The New York Times, which was in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel."
If America Is a Train Wreck, Why Am I Doing Fine? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Diener specifically looked at: How do questions of my own personal wellbeing match up to questions of: “How do you think this country is doing overall?” And they did it not only in the United States; they did it for the whole globe. And one of the things they found is that in an individualistic society like we have, we’re more easily able to separate “Hey Stephen, how’s your life going?” from “Hey, Stephen, how do you think the country’s doing?”... Whereas in countries that are typically less developed — they have lower GDP, and they’re less likely to be in the Western hemisphere — these communitarian cultures tend to have a closer link. It’s less likely that someone would give you one answer for their personal life and an entirely different answer for how things are going in their country. So it’s kind of American to be able to feel that your life is different and kind of walled-off, in a way, from the national direction."
Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. - PsycNET - "Research and valid practice in emotional intelligence (EI) have been impeded by lack of theoretical clarity regarding (a) the relative roles of emotion perception, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation facets in explaining job performance; (b) conceptual redundancy of EI with cognitive intelligence and Big Five personality; and (c) application of the EI label to 2 distinct sets of constructs (i.e., ability-based EI and mixed-based EI). In the current article, the authors propose and then test a theoretical model that integrates these factors. They specify a progressive (cascading) pattern among ability-based EI facets, in which emotion perception must causally precede emotion understanding, which in turn precedes conscious emotion regulation and job performance. The sequential elements in this progressive model are believed to selectively reflect Conscientiousness, cognitive ability, and Neuroticism, respectively. “Mixed-based” measures of EI are expected to explain variance in job performance beyond cognitive ability and personality. The cascading model of EI is empirically confirmed via meta-analytic data, although relationships between ability-based EI and job performance are shown to be inconsistent (i.e., EI positively predicts performance for high emotional labor jobs and negatively predicts performance for low emotional labor jobs). Gender and race differences in EI are also meta-analyzed. Implications for linking the EI fad in personnel selection to established psychological theory are discussed"
"Emotional intelligence" isn't always good
Meme - *Wishing Well* "I WISH I DIDN'T HAVE TO CLEAN MY ROOM ANYMORE."
*House on fire*
How Can You Escape a Drama Triangle? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: When you have awards, that is extrinsic motivation. If you get a thousand dollars for winning a foot race, or you get ten bucks because you got an A in geometry, these are extrinsic rewards. It’s not inherent to geometry. It’s not inherent to running a race. And one side of the argument is that you are diminishing intrinsic motivation, because you’re crowding it out. It’s almost like there’s a pie, it’s a zero sum. And the bigger the wedge which is extrinsic motivation, the smaller the wedge that’s intrinsic. And this is most famously demonstrated in this study that happened decades ago with little kids. And they were all playing with new sets of markers. And in the intrinsic-motivation condition, they get to play with these markers, and then some time passes, and then they get to play with the markers again. In the extrinsic-motivation condition, they play with the markers, and then, I think a teacher or an adult experimenter comes in and is basically like, “Thank you for playing with the markers. Here’s a certificate — like, the Good Player Award.” And then, you get to play with markers again. And the finding is that you actually play less, because the extrinsic motivation has crowded out the intrinsic motivation... my BFF and collaborator Katy Milkman has done studies of gym goers, and she incentivizes them using money to go to the gym, repeatedly, over something like an eight-week period. And then, she stops the incentives, and she finds that it doesn’t last forever. But there is a period of time in which they actually still have this habit momentum and they’re still going to the gym. So, if you want to help somebody develop a habit, a little bit of sweetening of the pot helps.*"
Is Emotional Intelligence Really So Important? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So, he wrote, “Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm for it... has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that, when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others.” And he gives examples of two polar opposites who had very high levels of emotional intelligence. He gives the examples of Martin Luther King, and the other one... Hitler!"
What’s So Great About Retirement? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So, that’s one potential downside. I did see a little piece of evidence, this is from Norma Coe. She’s a professor of medical ethics and health policy at Penn, but I believe she’s an economist by training. She has studied retirement, and I’m reading here from a segment of Freakonomics M.D., one of our sister shows, it’s hosted by Bapu Jena. It says, “If you look at time-use survey data, a lot of American men, upon retirement, watch T.V. and watch a lot more T.V. than they did prior.” ... "Women are more likely to do things, like increase their volunteering, and do more household work, and increase both physical and cognitive activities.”
Is Self-Improvement Too Selfish? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Two fun facts about Maslow. One is: Maslow never drew a pyramid. So, we have all of these Google images of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and they’re all pyramids, usually multicolored ones. And Maslow never drew a pyramid. He just talked about needs that were basic. He did refer to a hierarchy. But, anyway, I just want to say that he didn’t have quite the strict interpretation... Maslow didn’t have “self-actualization” at the top of the hierarchy... It was self-transcendence... I think self-actualization is living your best life, being your best self — whatever it is. You know, if you are a woodworker, being the best woodworker that you can be; if you are a friend, being the best friend that you can be. Self-transcendence is trying to work towards other people’s wellbeing. So, really it’s about “self” versus “other.” But I don’t think it’s either/ or. It’s just, like, once you have achieved excellence in your own life, then you can reach for this even greater and higher need, which is like: with all of that excellence, now pursue the interest of others. Self-actualization is looking inside to be the best person you can be. Self-transcendence is your attention, your energy, is other-directed"
Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time - Freakonomics - "MULLAINATHAN: Here’s a psychological fact that I think many people may not have realized. It’s like when someone says to you optical illusion, you think, “Oh, I know that it’s like this image where it’s an old lady or a young woman — you can look at it both ways.” But they forget that like every photograph, every T.V. screen is an optical illusion because it is truly two-dimensional, but your mind creates three dimensions. There’s no three dimensions. It’s just two. But that optical illusion is actually relatively low fidelity. You put on the V.R. set and it feels 100 percent like 3-D. So for example, there’s this little thing with Jurassic Park and a dinosaur. And I was like, oh, let me play this video. Your heart is beating. And when the thing’s tail comes at you, you say to yourself, “It’s not a real tail. Do not duck.” And then you’re like, sh*t, I’m ducking before I know it. It taps into this very basic sensory system and that’s just amazing...
LEVITT: In many settings, the actors do their best to avoid feedback. Because in complex settings, like a business environment, I think it’s better for most of the people in the firm that nobody has any idea whether their decisions paid off or not. When I’ve gone to try to run experiments in firms, and I know you’ve run experiments in firms, it’s hard to get them to run. And I used to think the obstacle is that they’re expensive and they take a lot of human capacity, a lot of resources. And I’ve realized over time that nobody actually wants to know whether the decision they made was a good one or a bad one. I don’t know if it’s because the payoff to good decisions is smaller than the cost of bad decisions. Maybe it’s risk aversion but the bigger obstacle isn’t even that. The bigger obstacle is in order to run an experiment, you have to admit upfront that you don’t know the answer and in business, I’m supposed to know whether this advertising works or not, but actually, even though we spend a hundred million dollars a year on advertising, I have no idea if it works. To admit that and to say, “I’m going to learn from an experiment.” That’s the thing which is really interesting to me that so differentiates academics from business. As academics, we always start from the principle that we don’t know anything. But I think any setting in which people have to pretend like they have expertise, that gets in the way of experimentation and feedback more than anything...
MULLAINATHAN: I think the one piece of advice I would give comes from this awesome paper. I think it’s Dan Gilbert. It’s called the end of history illusion. If you ask people, how much have they changed in the last five years? Most people say a lot, especially young people like, take a 22-year-old: “Oh my God. Who was I when I was 17? My God, 17 to 22 — I changed so much.” Then you ask people, how much will you change in the next five years? They’re like, “A little bit.” Pick any age, you always act as if history has ended. All the change you’re going to do is done, which is absurd because from 17 to 22, you changed a lot, 22 to 27 you changed a lot. So, I think the biggest error people make is they think they are choosing for who they are right now. What they’re actually choosing is for this person five years from now, who’s going to be very different from them... Whenever I try to tell students this, it’s amazing how much they resist it. People say this to me, “I’m going into consulting, but I’m not going to be the stereotypical consultant.” I’m like, “My best guess is you are going to be the stereotypical — what do you want me to tell you?”...
LEVITT: I didn’t think anybody thought anyone else’s ideas were good at all. My experience in life is that everybody thinks their own ideas are brilliant and everybody else’s ideas are trash. People have often asked me, are you worried about other people stealing your ideas? And I would say, “No, not at all because everyone else thinks my ideas are terrible.”"
Sendhil Mullainathan Explains How to Generate an Idea a Minute (Part 2) - Freakonomics - "MULLAINATHAN: Economists are very sensitive to taxes. Like we try not to tax when we can avoid it, but we’re very insensitive to cognitive taxes. If I said to you, “Okay, you want to get financial aid? Go ahead, fill out this 50-page form.” Yeah, that’s a time tax, it’s whatever, it’s two hours. In fact, our theories say, that’s a good thing because hey, if you really need it, you can fill it out. But you forget, just like those kids in the math exam, asking a poor person to fill out a 50-page form all about their finances is incredibly cognitively taxing. It’s like asking you to think about the thing that’s stressing you out the most. And so we impose these cognitive burdens on the poor without really realizing that we’re imposing these cognitive burdens. And when you start looking at that, you realize how many of our programs are cognitively silly. So like TANF, this is welfare, this is a welfare program. The way you find out that you’re about to hit your five-year max is you get a letter in the mail with two, three months left. How does this make any sense that we’re asking you to keep track? It’s absurd, especially once you realize these types of results that it’s cognitively very challenging to think about these things. So, I think that angle of rethinking how we design all the programs that poor people encounter through this lens, I think of as a promising angle...
LEVITT: Are you at all worried by what a machine-learning and artificial-intelligence, algorithm-driven future might hold? I haven’t really paid much attention to this debate about the end of work and living machines that are going to make humans redundant. Do you have thoughts about any of that?
MULLAINATHAN: Yeah. I think this stuff is so overstated. There’s two groups of people who are complicit, even though they hate each other. And one group wants to say, “These algorithms are gonna ruin our lives and it’s going to get rid of all jobs.” Other people are gonna say, “Oh, these algorithms are amazing. They’re going to do great things.” They both agree the algorithms are super powerful. Just not whether they’re good or bad. The reality is this is just a tool. It’s not some magical, super powerful thing. And one reason it’s not going to get rid of jobs, I think, is sure, it’ll automate some jobs, but it creates so many more amazing opportunities. So, I’ll give you one concrete example. Right now, a big share of healthcare costs involve people who are very sick, but who need some kind of monitoring, a little bit, just enough that we have to keep them in the hospital. And so that’s very expensive. They’re taking up hospital beds for that reason. Between the digital technologies we have and these algorithms, you can send these people home to be cared for by people they love, or by nurses that come to their home, who don’t need to be nearly as skilled because when something goes really wrong, the hospital system can be alerted and so on. So, what you’ve now done is you’ve decomposed one part of the job, the rare event, into something that the algorithm handles and you’ve created a new job to handle the everyday event. Caretaking is something a lot of people can do. The sort of highly skilled doctor, nurse who needs to be at the hospital is something only a few people can do. So, you’ve actually created a much better package of jobs now. And if anything, this is bad for the very highly paid, but you know, they’ll always find something else to do. So, I think that it’s a bit of sort of drama.
LEVITT: Here’s the one thing I find unnerving. I read a book and I can’t remember anything about it 15-minutes later. So let’s just say that machines get the ability to read books in a few seconds and to keep all of that material stored. That machine becomes potentially better at just about anything I could do than I am. And then what happens? I just wonder whether you get in the situation where when machines are just so good, then the ownership of the machines becomes everything and everybody else is marginalized.
MULLAINATHAN: Yeah, so that’s a great way to put it, Steve. I think all of those things rely on a misleading model of artificial intelligence. And I think it starts with the name artificial intelligence. There’s a scale of intelligence — ants are somewhere here. Baboons are somewhere here. We’re somewhere above that. Right now algorithms are between us and baboons or maybe slightly above us. But as computing gets more powerful, they’ll get to stratospheres above us that we can’t imagine. So, let’s call this the unidimensional scale of intelligence. So this is what leads people to say, “Wow, if an algorithm can play chess so well, imagine all the other things that it can do.” So, that’s like the unidimensional scale and the unidimensional scale is just such a bad way of thinking of machine intelligence, because it is astonishingly good at certain activities and astonishingly bad at other activities. So, one of the things that I do — if enough people do this, Apple will fix this by hand — but I do this illustration in this A.I. class I teach. I take out my phone and I say, “Siri, don’t tell me the score to the Sixers game.” And Siri will dutifully tell me the score to the Sixers game. Like it’s astonishing. It was like, “Oh, Sixers game? I know what you want.” I’m like, “I just used the word ‘not.’” And you just have to remember, this is like the world’s best engineers are working on this problem. This is not some like goofy product built in a summer intern’s lab. These algorithms are very dumb in some respects and very smart on other respects. And so I think one of the things that we’re all trying to do is get a better understanding of what machine intelligence really looks like. What tasks will they excel at and what tasks will they do badly at? They are definitely not a substitute for human intelligence."
Harold Pollack on Why Managing Your Money Is as Easy as Taking Out the Garbage - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: Is this also true in the discipline where you got your training, do people in your field more or less think alike but very differently than people who don’t have that training?
LEVEY: So I thought we should report back on what we heard, because a bunch of listeners wrote in about how people in their field and people in their profession think.
LEVITT: Right. We got 15 emails from people responding to that question. And 14 of them agreed with my hypothesis that training within a discipline makes you think the same way. The best example was we got three emails from computer programmers. And these three emails were so similar that I actually was confused. I thought the same person had sent me the same email twice. Actually, I had to go back and reread the previous one to realize that there were actually two different emails sent by two different people. But they literally said exactly the same thing, which was the most impressive evidence I could have for that hypothesis that people in the same field think exactly alike.
LEVEY: But there was one email that was different — I think you’re talking about the political scientist that wrote in, is that correct?
LEVITT: Yes. There was a political scientist who wrote and said actually in political science, we have the problem that we can’t agree on anything. And what’s so interesting about that is I’ve actually noticed independently that political scientists don’t think alike. And I have a strong hypothesis about why that is. Almost every profession is organized around a methodology, right? So economists have a way of tackling problems and engineers have a way of tackling problems but political science is actually organized around a topic, not a method. So political scientists think about politics, some of them use data to think about it. Some of them are philosophers. The people who call themselves political scientists actually have nothing in common when it comes to training. And so it’s not at all surprising that they would not share a similar worldview the way say, economists do."
