Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Winners and Losers in the Era of ChatGPT

Tyler Cowen discusses the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on various personality types and on various forms of knowledge and skills. He suggests that the rise of AI may benefit those who are good at sitting down and staying focused:

ChatGPT excels at producing ordinary, bureaucratic prose, written in an acceptable but non-descript style. In turn, we are likely to better understand how much of our society is organized around that basis, from corporate brochures to regulations to second-tier journalism. The rewards and status will go down for those who produce such writing today, and the rewards for exceptional originality are likely to rise.

Skeptical about what ChatGPT can do? Reread the summary above. It was written by the ChatGPT bot.

2. Can Universities Keep Up with AI Term Papers?

Professor Stephen Mache doesn’t think so. Writing in The Atlantic, he argues that AI will far outpace higher education’s sclerotic pace of change:

Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it.

3. Kyrgyzstan Open Markets

Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin staged what the New York Times called a “chatty” news conference in the Bishek. If you want to learn more about this far-flung metropolis and its “anything goes entrepreneurialism,” you can do no better than Chris Arnade’s masterful walking tour of the Kyrgyzstan capital:

Everything and anything is for sale. Chickens on a car. Spoons on a rug. A hundred identical tables of spices and nuts. Plazas jammed with people selling whatever they can. Hundreds of absurd collections of things you can buy laid out on rugs — a meat grinder, a 50s era flash bulb, and a fox-fur scarf. Or the massive bazaar in the north of the city, a two square mile mega-plex built entirely from shipping containers, where you can buy anything you want, from Russia, China, Korea, or USA, either in bulk or one off.

Arnade finds Bishek chaotic and calm, nerdy and resilient: “As much as the Russians tried to destroy the Kyrgyz culture, they didn’t.”

4. How Long Will Long Covid Last?

 Dr. Mark Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has become a skeptic of long Covid. Though Makary believes “long Covid is real,” he points to the massive investments in research that have failed to yield either theories or treatments:

The National Institutes for Health has been intensely focused on studying long Covid, spending nearly $1.2 billion on the condition. To date, the return on investment has been zero for the people suffering with it. But it’s been terrific for MRI centers, lab testing companies and hospitals that set up long Covid clinics. I’ve talked to the staff at some of these clinics and it’s unclear what they are actually offering to people beyond a myriad of tests.

5. Cornering the Tree Market

Forget Rockefeller Center. The real Christmas tree spectacle in New York takes place on the streets. Writing in Curbed, Owen Long unwraps the secrets of the trade:

Christmas trees are big business in New York. A lot of people see the quaint plywood shacks that appear on sidewalks just before Thanksgiving, each with its own tiny forest of evergreens, and they imagine that every one is independently owned, maybe by jolly families of lumberjacks looking to make a few holiday bucks. That’s what I thought, anyway. In reality, a few eccentric, obsessed, sometimes ruthless tycoons control the sale of almost every single tree in the city.  They call themselves “tree men,” and they spend 11 months a year preparing for Christmastime — which, to them, is a blistering 30-day sprint to grab as much cash as they can.

6. The High Lantern Group Reading List

At the end of each year, everyone at High Lantern Group selects a book they have read during the past year and offers it as a recommendation to colleagues. Our tradition is for each member of our team to pick one of the books as a gift from the firm. We are happy to share our list you, loyal reader of The Notebook.  We hope it brings a great start to 2023.

Websites Worth Reading

Tesla Semi: All about Tesla’s 18-wheeler

Bad Fiction Contest: “Where wretched writers are welcome”

52 Things I Learned in 2022: Tom Whitwell’s annual list

Feeds We Follow

@kamilkazani: On the near-future of Russia

@paulkrugman: Krugman on what we’re getting wrong about inflation

@ChatGPTChef: Interesting ways to play with ChatGPT