Category: Articles

  • 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
  • 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