On the same note, a fantastic short visual essay on writing: Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick
Three separate quotes from different parts of Nikhil Suresh’s “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” that work together:
But the broader reality is so much worse: people who have no background in the technology at all actually believe what they are saying. As a general rule you should avoid getting into business with a liar, but if you must, you can at least reason with them even if only in private. A true believer is much more threatening because they are impervious to even inducement by self-interest.
[…]
This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
[…]
The net result of this is that almost every large organisation that I am aware of is no longer able to focus on anything important, unless they are one of the (very) few organisations where AI happens to address their highest priorities. They cannot buy sensible software, hire competent talent, communicate honestly with executives about the state of projects, or undertake any sort of sensible initiative.
The whole thing is very much worth reading. (Those of you who read too many articles on the internet may remember his 2024 gem, “I Will !$%!!$% Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”)
At least the cryptomania BS a few years ago was unintuitive enough that it was ignored by most businesses despite the desperate pivots and grifting. Adding a useless AI chat feature or calling your platform “AI native” is an easier sales pitch and management obsession than “It’s the same thing…but on the blockchain.”
Most leaders barely understand their own business, let alone the real impact of AI in recent years on their industry, the current contours of AI abilities, or the likelihood of purchased solutions and implementations maturing gracefully in a rapidly changing field. Most people don’t even know if the hard part of the job is generating the answer or verifying it. AI is magical, and yet we’re still firmly in the everyone-is-lying part of the hype cycle.
He writes a cogent summary in the middle of the article:
“Please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn.”
David Epstein, author of Range, writing about Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” in the NYT as part of his promotional blog tour for his new book, Inside the Box:
Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
Delightful. Both feet fully in as opposed to one foot out. Assuredly hard to always employ in a world where social media functions as “an infinite comparison engine,” but delightful.
From Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday:
The purpose of knowledge is action.
Too much study and not enough doing creates a paucity of knowledge, a shelter of naïveté, no matter how smart you are.
There are things that make sense on the page but do not survive contact with events.
We are living in a world where information is getting ever cheaper and ever more abundant. It still takes work to use it.
Isaac Asimov (from a 1988 interview), providing a different perspective on trust, incentives, and guardrails:
It’s insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn’t it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?
From the ending of Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior:
We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe. It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival and even happiness.
From Om Malik’s “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World,” an essay about “our zeitgeist of half-truths”:
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
Lots of lies work well in a wide variety of contexts, including businessmen selling stories and prognosticators retconning their predictions into reality. Malik argues that most of us want those tidy deceptions:
…Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs.
As Malik points out, the people of influence spending trust and other symbolic capital don’t need to be right; they need to be believed.
Dr. Cort Wernz, writing about a private equity buyout “Negotiating Blind” in his Substack, The Impression:
The upfront payout the Las Vegas radiologist described wasn’t arbitrary generosity. It wasn’t a bonus. It was his own future income, pulled forward, discounted and paid to him upfront in exchange for accepting less later.
[…]
The radiologist in Las Vegas wasn’t undone by a bad deal. He was undone by a predictable one, structured by people who understood exactly what they were buying, signed by people who understood it less well. That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when a profession doesn’t place any serious value on business literacy.
Nice to see a new voice in radiology just doing their thing.
Rabbi Zohar Atkins’ published an essay recently, “When Knowledge Is Cheap, Insight Is Everything: Jevons Paradox applied to Torah Learning.”
Articles referencing Jevons are everywhere these days. I myself wrote “Radiology Isn’t an Example of Jevons Paradox” last December. Atkins’ essay is a change of pace:
It is worth pausing here to note that the rabbinic tradition was not, in the nineteenth century, sitting around waiting for an English economist to explain to it how human desire interacts with supply.
The book of Kohelet, known in English as Ecclesiastes, already observed that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing (Kohelet 1:8). The Talmud, in Sukkah 52b, sharpens the principle into a structural law: there is a small organ in a person, the Gemara says, which when starved is satisfied and when satisfied is starved. On the same page, the sage Abaye generalizes: the greater a person, the greater his appetite. The early rabbinic anthology Kohelet Rabbah (1:13) gives the principle its proverbial form: a man with a hundred wants two hundred. The eighteenth-century ethical work Mesillat Yesharim, the standard Jewish text on moral psychology, makes the same observation as a developmental claim: indulgence does not satisfy desire, it expands desire’s capacity (chapters 1 and 13). The nineteenth-century commentator Malbim, glossing the book of Proverbs (21:17), says the same of pleasure as such: attachment enlarges want rather than quieting it.
This passage concerns the same never-full eye concept I shared last year from this parable as relayed by Gluckel, a seventeenth-century Jewish widow, in her memoirs. It is one mixed and rephrased over generations because the new formulations can still provide novel insights and continue grounding us as individuals, even if there is “nothing new under the sun” (Kohelet 1:9).
This is the same observation Jevons made about coal, transposed from industrial input to human desire. Or rather, Jevons’s observation about coal is the same one Kohelet made about the eye, transposed from human desire to industrial input.
Layers upon layers of commentary, authors quoting primary texts and each other, building up a multilayer discourse. It has become a popular theme among techno-optimists writing about AI that there is some ineffable human quality that AI makes more valuable as the raw material becomes cheaper (like critical thinking, judgment, or taste). I think that remains to be seen, but there is a parallel argument that our thinking, our judgement, and our taste matter for us, and possibly our community:
AI is the new master of wheat. It is unusually capable at producing the relevant source, the right translation, the missing citation. Information was never the goal. A learner who consumes AI-generated wheat by the handful, who asks ChatGPT for the meaning of the weekly Torah portion and stops there, has eaten dry grain and gone home thinking she has tasted Torah. She has tasted the input. The tradition lives in what gets made from it.
Great analogy.
The vocation of the learner in the age of cheap wheat is to become a baker: to take the now-abundant raw material and turn it into something a human can eat. Chiddush that surfaces structure. Communities that perpetuate the learning. Students who teach each other when the teacher is gone. This is true for the rabbi and it is true for the nineteen-year-old in Be’er Sheva, because the obligation was always universal in principle (Chagigah 3a). The economics restricted it. The economics just changed.
Chiddush is the Hebrew term for an original insight (particularly with regard to Jewish thought as it pertains to the study of Torah and the Talmud). The point that Atkins makes so well is not that such insights could only come from humans; it’s that doing so is the human thing to do. That strivers must strive. That cheap information would be best if it helped make communities of learning, which would finally fulfill the promise of the early internet/open web.
Jevons’ coal built a new England, more dependent on coal than the old one and more capable of using it. Cheap knowledge will build a new Torah world, more dependent on the corpus than the old one and more capable of working it. The question is whether the people inside that world will recognize the work for what it is and pick up the rolling pin.
I find myself thinking often about the humans from the movie WALL-E on the galactic cruise ship and wondering how we will answer that question.
In “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Joshua Rothman cuts deeply for The New Yorker:
What’s true for Little League holds for the rest of life. In some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like “you win some, you lose some,” we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good. Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what’s regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we’d like to keep doing it. We’d prefer “great” weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the “merely” ordinary.
To paraphrase: if the questions are, is this it? Is this all there is? The answer is yes.