Favorites January 26th 2023

GDP, AI Interaction design, and the AP Stylebook

July 2022, Agua Caliente

David Zipper @DavidZipper

Studies consistently show that business owners overestimate how many customers come by car, undercounting those who walk, bike, or use transit. Why? 🔹 The biz owners themselves drive, and assume others do too 🔹 Drivers *love* to complain about parking bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

bloomberg.comBloomberg - Are you a robot?

From an article in Wired, When bike lanes were added on a street in Queens, there was a significant increase in sales on that street, but the merchants didn't believe it.

Ben Dreyfuss @bendreyfuss

Stanford hasn’t actually disciplined this student for committing the crime of reading Mein Kampf yet but, like, how does someone even submit this complaint without feeling a little ridiculous? thefire.org/news/report-st…

Seems bad for universities to allow you to report a student for reading a book... My understanding is that to a modern reader, it's not exactly convincing.

Heather Long @byHeatherLong

Sometimes you need to look at the big picture: It's been an incredible rebound from the 2020 pandemic recession. The US has recovered all output lost in the crisis and gotten back on trend. GDP 2022: +2.1% 2021: +5.9% 2020: -2.8% washingtonpost.com/business/2023/… via @abhabhattarai

Also, home sales are up 2%. GDP per capita 4% over pre-pandemic. So, no recession in 2022, honestly, 2023 seems unlikely to me if not to others, but we'll see.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

One of the biggest questions with AI is how it interacts with skills. For example, adding robots to surgeries doesn't do much for the best surgeons, but benefits bad ones. Low-skill surgeons are much worse than good ones, but robots close the gap by 50%! elenaashtaritafti.com

Really interesting! Apparently with the game of Go, the opposite occurred, the best got better, the worst didn't improve much. I guess new techniques revealed by AI are hard to use if you're still a beginner? And then there's this recent study, of recruiters, where the ones given a better AI made worse hiring choices than the ones given a mediocre AI. "Asleep at the Wheel", the ones given the best recommendations came to simply do whatever the AI said. Somewhat related news: Buzzfeed stock is up 92% on news they'll be using GPT to write articles.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

People experiencing Frenchness. https://t.co/pJZgGNfDqK

APStylebook @APStylebook

We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing “the” labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant.

Noah Smith quipped "Did the French write this tweet?". One commenter went further: "Eurodivergent". More seriously Smith also notes this is more evidence for his wokeness prairie fire theory.

Threads

• Short thread explaining how ChatGPT could implement fingerprinting on text they're generating. TL;DR: dynamically blacklist certain words from the model output. And another shorter summary.

• Long thread summarizing a WSJ article about a group of women in Beijing who were arrested and became symbols of dissent. TL;DR: one takeaway is that because any experienced activist has already been caught and punished, anyone doing activism in China is necessarily inexperienced. Definitely not how Tankies envision China

• Eric Topol notes that at least the FDA is discussing Nasal COVID vaccines, but India is rolling them out today.