Evan Fife

Author: admin

  • David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche

    https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/

    Super interesting read on the importance of literature, on what AI can and can’t do, and mentorship and career growth in journalism

  • The Word Made LIfeless

    Link to Article on the Hedgehog Review

    This article gave a super interesting take on the dangers of AI and how even though it seems to be mastering words, it is mastering the wrong kind. The author delves into a discussion of the platonic idea of the “logos” and describes how the word in both ancient greek and biblical sources tends to point towards a practical and a teleological meaning. The practical meaning being that the logos can be used as rhetoric to reach an end, or we can use language to discover what the logos means.

    Throughout the piece the author describes how the act of choosing words allows us to give meaning to our thoughts. In the struggle to find the right words, we determine what our thoughts actually are and come into contact with the truth. Outsourcing our word choice to AI robs us of this experience, giving us words with no meaning and no emotion. In effect, the purpose and feeling we get throuhg the Word is made lifeless.

  • SuperIntelligence and AI

    Mark Zuckerberg Says ‘Superintelligence’ Is Imminent. What Is It?

    Mark and many others have correctly identified this new era as just a continuation of history. They often miss an important detail: History shows that newfound productivity is often a by-product of progress, not a driver of it. Progress is driven by the same thing that has always pushed us forward: curiosity.

    Every new era has been ushered into being by curious people looking for secrets that open our understanding of the world. When we get those answers, we ask more questions. It is safe to say that the most powerful use of AI will always be to expand curiosity. And the curious will inherit the world, because they always have.

    Superintelligence is an interesting concept, but I agree with this position. Creativity and curiosity are the forces that drive innovation, and the jury is still out on whether AI can truly be creative.

    The perspectives in this article are varied and interesting. A very good read

  • Being Effectually Minded

    Goal Induced Blindness from Farnam Street

    Uncertainty is one of our least favorite conditions, we hate the feeling of not knowing what to do, and we dislike the frustration that comes from not having anything to really do. It leads us to believe that those who are successful are because they had the right goals from the beginning and were able to develop the skills necessary to execute perfectly on those goals. A successful entrepreneur was successful because their idea was so good and their drive was so intense that nothing could stop them from the success that they wanted. The truth is that the key to success is adaptability, or what Oliver Burkeman calls being “effectually minded”.

    Essentially, an effectually minded person has two main characteristics, they care about finding a goal that matches their abilities and they practice positive catastrophizing. Rather than finding a goal or an idea and doing everything that they can to become the person or build the relationships to reach a certain goal, they take the abilities and knowledge that they already have and find a goal or an idea that can be achieved using that. Rather than looking at (or ignoring) what they lack in the face of a lofty goal, they take what they have and find a goal or problems that can be solved.

    The other half is what the Stoics call positive catastrophizing, which is a lot sunnier than it sounds. While a lot of the time we might think of the end goal and the rewards that will come with it, an effectually minded person will instead choose to think about the cost. Instead of asking themselves how big the payoff will be at every step, they ask themselves the cost of failure for each action. Which allows them to realize that often the cost of failure is much less than catastrophic.

  • Good/Bad in business is really Long/Short Term Thinking

    Short Term v Long Term Thinking – IGY Foundation

    The legendary Nick Sleep wrote an interesting piece on how to think about thinking about business. His main argument was that what defines an organization that is well run is its position towards and relationship with it’s customers.

    When a business tries to “steal” from its customers, be it by expanding margins, reducing quality, or scaling back innovation to improve current year fiscal performance, the relationship is damaged. A business with a long term perspective realizes that growth is not a zero-sum game, the customer is their friend, not competitor.

  • So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT

    Read the full article I read on LessWrong.com

    I was reading this article about AI and consciousness, and as I was reading it there were a couple of quotes that made me think about the future of AI, specifically Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) and the possibility of AI’s having consciousness.

    Obviously, I disagree with the premise because I think there is something unique about humanity, we were created by God and have value beyond what we’re able to do. One of my old high school friends and I had a conversation the other day about AI, and he said, “If there was an AI (in a robot body that looked like mine) that had all my memories, that communicated like me, and did everything that I do, would that not be me?” I think my response would be that while an AI can infer everything, and maybe it could eventually reason through everything (i.e. One day an AI could have complete rationality), it could never be human because I’m not sure that an AI could believe, or understand the art of selectively choosing between rationality and irrationality (or better faith).

    In essence, I think the debate about whether AGI could exist boils down to the debate on whether or not Faith and Reason can coexist, and if the combination of the two is really the highest form of humanity.

    Interesting Quotes

    In my experience, you have to repeatedly remind yourself that AI value judgments are pretty much fake, and that anything more coherent than a 3/10 will be flagged as “good” by an LLM evaluator. Unfortunately, that’s just how it is, and prompting is unlikely to save you; you can flip an AI to be harshly critical with such keywords as “brutally honest”, but a critic that roasts everything isn’t really any better than a critic that praises everything. What you actually need in a critic or collaborator is sensitivity to the underlying quality of the ideas; AI is ill suited to provide this.

    Also, LLMs are specifically good at common knowledge and the absolute basics of almost every field, but not very good at finicky details near the frontier of knowledge. So if LLMs are helping you with ideas, they’ll stop being reliable exactly at the point where you try to do anything original.

  • Daily Reading

    Links

    A Healthy Response to Failure on the World Stage – The Athletic
    Tariff Limbo – WSJ
    Competing on Price and Quality, the Ethos of Costco – WSJ
    A Deep Critique of AI 2027’s Bad Timeline Models – LessWrong
    (and the original article)

    Thoughts

    • Lots of food deals WK Kellog’s acquisition by Fererro and Kraft Heinz’s Breakup being the two that got most of my attention.
    • The trade war is keeping the market volatile, businesses who are able to respond and create deals seeing huge gains, others floundering as they wait for clarity in policy
    • Trump continues to criticize rate holding behavior by the fed, but the CEO’s of some major banks are still

  • TVPI and Secondary Market Asymmetries

    $latex TVPI=\frac{(\text{Distributions}+\text{Residual Value})}{\text{Paid In Capital}} $

    Often, returns for an LP investor are measured using the above formula, Total Value to Paid In Capital, its an expression of the ratio of the Net Asset Value of a fund to the cost of the LPs investment. Essentially, it expresses how much each invested LP dollar is returning. Distributions are the liquid assets returned to LPs, Residual Value is the value remaining in illiquid assets that the fund holds, and Paid In Capital is the money invested by the LP

    Where this formula gets interesting is at the end of the fund life. Typically TVPI tends to decline as funds reach year 8 or 9, so, in order to preserve their capital, it’s in the best interests of a LP to sell their investment. Let’s say hypothetically the LP invested $100 in a fund, has received $80, and the GP claims that there is $50 in residual value.

    [latex]\begin{aligned}
    \text{Distributions} = \$80 \
    \text{Residual Value} =\$50 \
    \text{Paid In Capital} = \text{\$100} \
    \end{aligned}[/latex]

    Right now the TVPI of this investment would be 1.3x, or in other words, for every $1 invested, $1.30 in total value exists.

    [latex]\text{TVPI} = \frac{80+50}{100} = 1.3[/latex]

    And because our hypothetical fund is in its 8th year, this LP realizes that over time this TVPI metric will decline, they decide that it’s in their best interest to sell their stake in the fund. A secondaries investor offers to buy their stake at 30% discount to the GP’s estimated residual NAV, or in other words, they offer $35 for the LPs stake.

    [latex]\text{LP Proceeds} = \$80\ + \$35\ =\ \$115[/latex]

    In exchange for liquidity and short term returns, the LP takes a haircut on their already pretty low returns. While the secondaries investor already enters with a relatively high hypothetical TVPI of 1.6x.

    [latex]\text{Secondary TVPI} = \frac{50}{30}=1.66

    Even if the fund continues to “underperform” and the assets sell for 80% of the residual NAV predicted by the GP in 3 years, the Secondary investor will still exit with a 1.33x ROIC and a IRR of around 15%. The best part is that the LP doesn’t even underperform that much by exiting early. Selling at year 8 yields an IRR of 2.45%, while waiting to receive the distributions yielded to the secondary buyer through the sale, yields an IRR that is only marginally higher at 2.99%. Both IRRs are abysmal for Private Equity, so they are much better off getting liquidity and redeploying the capital.

  • How to Use Anki

    Anki is a super powerful tool, and while pretty in depth, this article gives an interesting take on how to effectively use this app:

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Q7DPSk4iGFJd8DRk/an-opinionated-guide-to-using-anki-correctly

  • The Boys in the Boat

    Daniel James Brown

    This is a book about character, connection, and how they interact to create greatness. It tells the story of the 1936 American olympic 8 man crew, and how they grew into one of the greatest crews that has ever rowed. As the book follows the life of the number 2 oar, Joe Rantz, we gain a window into the character of the boys that rowed as they became men.

    I wasn’t expecting this book to be so philosophical, but I appreciated the quotes about character given or inspired by George Pocock. Brown does a fantastic job of illustrating role of physical and mental strength needed to achieve greatness in athletics. From the beginning, the Pocock liked the boys in the boat:

    And it wasn’t just their physical prowess. He liked the character of these particular freshmen. The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out-of-doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, aded up to a to of potential in a crew, particularly if that crewe got a chance to row in the East. (page 94)

    Their rough lives gave them the strength, the predisposition, to succeed physically, but it was their character, and the bonds that forged as a result of their goodness, that gave them the opportunity to be great. I don’t know if they recognized the significance of their efforts initially, but it was clear that they knew the gravity of what they were attempting to undertake. They started racing for their school, progressed to racing for the west, and ended racing for their nation, and everything that she stands for. And they almost shrank in front of this challenge:

    All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended tto row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know–what he wouldn’t in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men–was that every boy in the boat felt exactlly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in teh boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and tht at he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen

    In the end, it was this desire, the desire to be one with their crew mates, that brought them to victory. Buy surrendering themselves to the whole, rowing with abandon, and giving everything they had, they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. While we probably won’t ever row in an olympic level crew, we can still learn from the examples of their characters and heed the call to greatness.

    Get the Boys on the Boat on Amazon