Pearls of Wisdom j24

For Fun

“Seasickness comes in two stages – in the first, you’re afraid you’re going to die; in the second, you’re afraid you’re not going to.” [Sandi Toksvig] For anyone who’s suffered at sea, this says it all. Incidentally, if you’ve never heard of Sandi Toksvig, I can recommend a YouTube search for the British gameshow “QI” (for “Quite Interesting”, but also a clever play on “IQ”), which she has hosted since 2016, when she succeeded Stephen Fry in that role.

With Intent

“You should tell your money where to go, instead of ask it where it went.” This gem comes from a friend who has no obvious connection to the financial services industry. This is a dictum he lives by and quotes to his family from time to time. Whether he picked it up somewhere else or not isn’t the point. Rather, it’s how succinctly – almost visually – it expresses what a healthy relationship between a person and their finances “looks” like. It speaks to being “intentional” about one’s spending, rather than haphazard. To be sure, just as a ship captain can be knocked off course by bad weather, so can spending intentions be upset by the unexpected. But without some idea of how much, when and where you intend to spend your money – to say nothing of the discipline to stick to the plan – it’s awfully hard to get to where you want to go.

The Ground Truth

“Without Wikipedia, generative AI wouldn’t exist.” [Nicholas Vincent, quoted in “Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth”, The New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2023] Someone once made the self-evident observation that “you can’t learn Russian from a Russian dictionary.” You need an English-Russian dictionary (or the equivalent) to understand the correspondence between a concept for which you know the English label (i.e., a word) to the sound (or lettering) for the corresponding label/word in Russian. Artificial intelligence is no different. As our keynote speaker last November, Ajay Agrawal, explained, generative artificial intelligence (the sort of AI that answers questions) is, in essence, a series of exceptionally well[1]informed predictions of what words should logically come next to form a sensible answer to a question. There are no stored answers that AI just “pulls”, fully formed, from memory. Each answer starts with the proverbial blank sheet of paper and is created from the ground up. It’s cooking from scratch every single time. To do this, AI needs a monumental store of knowledge to serve as reliable feedstock for the machine to use in crafting its predictions/ answers. It needs a source of the “ground truth” – information that is known to be real or true. It needs the equivalent of that Russian-English dictionary. The speaker contends that Wikipedia serves as precisely that for AI.