AI and cognitive decline

Last week the Journal published a story about research showing that cabbies and ambulance drivers had low incidence of Alzheimer's Disease, presumably because they are using their brains dynamically much of the time to problem-solve on the fly and figure out how to get from place to place quickly under changing conditions. This basically accords with my thesis about the deracinative effects of using Google Maps all the time, how one's ability to remember directions and think spatially is gradually eroded by the disappearance of a need to do so.

So what the heck do we think AI is going to do? There is broad speculation about how AI will help us solve ever more complicated problems and think more dynamically, blah blah blah. I for one ain't buying it. I think it's just like muscles, you lose them or lose them.

I do basic math all day even when I don't have to. The Schwab trading interface has a handy little calculator to figure out how many shares of, say, Gamestop one can buy for $10,000. I don't use it. I look at the price and then estimate the number of shares and then refine my guessing as I go till I'm close enough. The point is not to have the math done, but to be able to do the math.

I could use an AI to write blog posts. But what would be the point of that? I'm not trying to produce text but to do the thinking that allows me to write something interesting. To keep thinking and think better. I'm sure there are ways that I could partner with an AI fruitfully, eventually I may go there. I just listened to Ethan Mollick's Cointelligence in the car after seeing it pop up on a bunch of best of the year lists. Good book, smart guy. He has learned to use ChatGPT in interesting ways and he challenges his students to do the same, to the point of mandating that they use it. I'm just not feeling it. I feel a deep Andy Rooney thing coming on.

Maybe in 2025. Talk to you then.

The New New Year

With Natalie having returned to Brooklyn and then after we went to a party yesterday evening at some neighbors' home, it feels like we are on to 2025 already. I was up at a reasonable hour today and had a decently disciplined morning routine including meditation, sit-ups, push-ups, readings, Duolingo (back to Japanese after a couple of slack weeks in Italian and German, which I really feel like I should replace with Polish for freshness and challenge). And now here I am even blogging.

Perhaps I can even turn the corner on my general feeling of seasonal lethargy. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting there feeling pretty tired and decided to revivify myself through the obvious step of giving myself a haircut and the much less intuitive one of sitting down with my tax planning spreadsheet and doing some year end analysis to see where we stood vis-a-vis the wisdom of itemizing deductions and whether it made sense to pull some additional income into 2024. It actually felt good to do the work.

But in fact there are two days left to get stuff done in 2024. I have some work that has to be done this year but not that much, which leaves time free to take care of year-end organizational kinds of things which will let me start off 2025 in good shape. 

I feel not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, noting that the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future got so much done all in one night.

Limping home

A grey day today, kicked off by the sadness of putting Natalie on a train back to New York. She picked the train, mind you, though it was a good thing on this leg at least because it allowed us to send her recently refurbished bike and matching new helmet with her to help her get around Brooklyn.

It has been a slow couple of weeks, but good ones. After finishing up the book on the Caucasus, I made short work of Hernan Diaz's Trust, which I'm pretty sure Beth had given me last year. A nice solid book with a nifty twist, some but by no means all of which was foreseeable.

And now it is grey. The Christmas tree shines on here in the living room. It will no doubt be the last to go. After Natalie. After Graham. Most likely before MLKJ day, we will take her to the curb or down into the ravine out back where perhaps her needles will pester the large herd of deer that pass through every day, certainly in the morning, to drink from the creek out back and see what kind of goodies I tossed into our compost pile for their delectation.

Ode to Castorp

The second half of last week I was confined to the home nursing some sort of a bug. I was pretty sick for a few days, very sore throat, stuffed up nose and chest, headache, the whole nine. Spent a lot of time on the couch, under a blanket. At some point in time it occurred to me that I might well start taking my temperature. On my first reading, it was a little high. Sometime later, it was a little higher. Meanwhile, I was reading a novel (Hernan Diaz's Trust, a pretty good read so far and I'm guessing it just gets better) in which characters spend time at Swiss sanatoria.

And there it was. Sitting under my blanket, taking my temperature, thinking of Alps while looking down at the grey of winter, I was the spitting image of Hans Castorp, our hero in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I was lacking only a coterie of fellow-sufferers with whom I could discuss the finer points of one type of thermometer vs the other, the various factors which might influence one's temperature and/or its measurement, the nature of freedom, the dimensions of time, and so on into infinity.

Then I remembered my blog.

High Caucasus

I just made my way through Tom Parfitt's 2023 book High Caucasus, which recounts a journey he took on foot through the Russian part of the Caucaus (i.e. not Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Armenia) in the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in 2004, where he was present as a journalist. A little refresher for those of you who (like me before I read this), were fuzzy on the details: Chechens led by Shamil Basayev seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia and kept 1100 people hostage, most of them students. Eventually 334 of them died, most of them students.

Parfitt was there. It was traumatic. He decided to walk across the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. This involved going through a lot of places with names we hear infrequently: Abhazia, Adygea, Ossetia, Kabarday-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. I think that's it. It's a beautiful place (see below), so I get why he'd want to do it.

It's also a pretty rugged place, with not a ton of creature comforts. That said, the hospitality traditions for the region are sacrosanct. Pretty much every night he gets invited by someone whose house or town he's passing by to stay with them and he rarely pays. He ends of eating a wide variety of meats, many of which sound unappealing to the naked ear but would totally hit the spot if you had walked 20 miles in the mountains that day.

The reader learns a lot about the history of the region, most importantly I think about how the Russians deported pretty much everybody from the North Caucasus to Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan) around '43-'44 for some trumped up reason. They got to come back after Stalin died but it was a pretty massive shared trauma. Ironically, it also allowed much of the region to rewild itself, turning it into a great spot for Soviet hunters and outdoorsmen, and I do mean men.

If the book has one fault it is its repetitiveness. Walk. Recount some history. Come to a village. Get invited in. Eat some wierd stuff. Sleep the sleep of the just on a couch or an iron bed. Now and again get hassled by some security forces and be accused of being a spy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But these are mild criticisms and I'm well aware of how repetitive my blog is and therefore how this is the pot calling the kettle black. Part of me is just jealous of Parfitt and admiring of his courage to undertake a journey like this. I never quite got that adventurous, but am grateful for the people who have (see also Itchy Boots). 

Also, admiring though I might be, I also remembered getting to the point where I felt my adventuring, mild though it was given that it ran its coure within the staid boundaris of academic programs and conferences, had run its course and that it was time to settle down and get ready to embark on the new journey of parenting. I was hoping Parfitt wouldn't deny himself that transition. As he writes in his epilogue, he did not.

Theory of mind deficit

Twice in recent weeks I've been in situations when people I know have asked very good open ended questions in conversations that really opened things up in a way that felt utterly beyond me (Caroline at GI Board meeting, Ken talking to Carolyn at dinner at Dave and Betsy's). All too often I find myself trapped in the mire of performing myself and looking for points of intersection with the person I'm talking to that I am unable to step back and open things up or ask questions in a way that lets them move in a different direction. 

I think this is why the early films of Atom Egoyan so resonated with me and why I've come back to them in my mind so often. Egoyan's characters repeat themselves endlessly to others, albeit with slight variations, as they perform theirselves into being.

Experts say that one of the characteristic traits of autism is that the autistic lack a theory of mind, that they cannot easily put themselves in other people's shoes and imagine what the others are thinking. I definitely have more than a little of that. So I have to focus on just trying to be good natured and doing the right thing to the extent possible but also by memorizing and internalizing social rules and aping them back to others. Not entirely unlike what an LLM does.

I have probably said this before, but because I am relatively social and our livelihood to an extent rests upon my sociability Mary can't admit that I have a fair number of autistic traits. But in fact I have just to some extent engaged in brute force (in the computing sense) social learning.

The final countdown

Prepping for a colonoscopy first thing tomorrow morning, I am at the tail end of the liquid diet day and have begun the truly fun stage. I will spare you further details. Most of you will have gone through this before. The rest of you, if you haven't, likely will some day soon. Or at least you definitely should if you are fortunate enough to have decent health insurance.

I will comment only on being where I am in the cycle of consumption. On Friday I began the low fiber diet which forces one to eschew vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, etc. but allows one to eat white bread and pasta, cheese, eggs and meat. Sounds great. But in fact, even for someone predicposed to the diet of a 12-year old boy, it's more restrictive than it sounds. I've gotten used to eating a little fruit and a lot of nuts and at least a pro forma vegetable a day. Being without it is pretty wierd. But I did get an arguably gratuitous chicken biscuit from Sunrise after tennis yesterday and enjoyed the hell out of it.

Today, the liquid diet day, during which I've subsisted black coffee, apple juice mixed with seltzer, and bone broth, is a whole nuther trip. By now I am a little spacy but surprisingly at peace with the whole thing. All in all it feels kind of good for me, like a heightened state of consciousness. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Admittedly, when Mary's alarm went off at 8:30 this morning my first word was "fuck!" -- because I was definitely planning to sleep in.  I'm not proud of that, but I did at least get back to sleep. But thereafter I have been pretty chipper. Even Mary would attest to that.

Graham and I plan to watch a couple of episodes of season 3 of "The Lincoln Lawyer" this evening. It's not a great show, admittedly, but it very much fits the bill.

The Mormons

I've mentioned a number of times that I've read and appreciated Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People after seeing it on my mom's shelves and snarkily sneering at it for years, in the capacious comfort of my own mind. Even though it does seem like the apotheosization of Boy Scoutism at times, he makes a lot of points which resonate with me. Which should surprise no one since I am the fricking WASP from central casting.

I had never bothered to Google the guy. So this morning when I was reading another of his books which I must have picked up at a thrift store or when mom was trimming her library for a move, I was only slightly surprised to read that he taught in Brigham Young's business school. A quick Google informs me that he was, not surprisingly, a Mormon.

Leslie has told me that, back in the day when she was at Bain, there were a lot of Mormons running round there. Per Wikipedia seems like Mitt Romney was probably one of them but Bain's confidentiality policy and culture might have inclined her not to say. I can't recall if she said that they were in fact all as moral as their PR would lead one to believe or if there was a little bit of hair on them. I will have to investigate.

Anyhoo, this other book of Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, appears to pretty much bundle up and extend the Seven Habits stuff and apply it more specifically to corporate contexts. Which is all good. We're all just more or less recombining our own or someone else's greatest hits all the time anyway and once someone strikes a vein of gold they are absolutely entitled to mine it till all the gold is gone.

Some notes on DuoLingo

I listened to an interview with the founder of DuoLingo on ACQ2 last week and he said that the firm has lots of specialists in language-acquisition on staff. If he says it, it must be so. Certainly they are changing the game on language learning for all of us, and in a good way.

But one thing that frustrates me as someone who has studied languages in a traditional way is the complete and utter obeisance to the ideology of usage and repetition and the lack of any reference apparatus. So, for example, DuoLingo teaches numbers, family member terms, and days of the week solely by using them in sentences and there's never a list of all of them in order or in relation to one another. Certainly learning them in order has been a powerful mnemonic device for centuries.

Of course, one may rightfully argue, one has the whole internet on which to look up these kind of lists, I will not dispute this. Or one could snag dictionaries, textbooks, what have you. But having this kind of thing available within the app (click on a day of the week to hyperlink down to the list of all days?) would be useful.

Anyway, a minor quibble. DuoLingo owns 20-25 minutes of my day for now and, as the CEO has noted, its primary competitors are Facebook/Insta/YouTube and that's pretty much true for me. I am benefiting.

The darkest days

As we hunker into the year's darkest days -- which are, not coincidentally, the most brightly lit here in Greater Suburbia and throughout the world wherever electricity is cheap -- I find myself managing myself through a number of slow situations. First and foremost, Mary's reconstruction, which I commented on earlier this week. But also a temporary dental implant, which has prompted me to give my incisors a holiday while I await the arrival of a permanent implant Thursday. Which means my molars are working harder and more consistently than ever.* Plus tennis elbow to manage around.

Then there's work, where I'm slowly working up a buy in strategy with my firm while we consider outsourcing functions to others to help us focus on the most important stuff. And clients, where there are annual (year-end tax review, asset allocation framework review and true-ups), quadrennial (assessing regime change implications for tax code and investment strategy) client lifecycle (retirement and succession planning, new companies and jobs, deaths, job change, college application, college graduation, car replacement, house renovation [or not?]) and global macro shit to think about.

Plus exercise. It's all a bit much at times to balance.

Honestly I didn't have a clear plan of where I was going with this post but knew I was overdue to post to keep up even my reduced target cadence of fifteen a month for 2024. I guess where I was headed at the beginning is that the darkness, cold, mortality nudges and reflectivity they foster make it harder at times to create entertaining blog posts. Ah well.   

*I should note that the process of bypassing my incisors has instilled in me a degree and brand of mindfulness in the simple act of eating that hearkens back to the time of the pandemic when we were more attentive to and appreciative of little things like our food. Right now I am feeling grateful for the food but also I am pretty much about ready for some pizza and a burger, if I'm honest. And I want to pick those dogies up and snarf them. 

Feeling the burn

A quick review of the blog shows that I have written surprisingly little about Japanese stilt grass over the years. I won't go into a big discussion of this invasive plant, there is plenty of English-language interweb warbling about it and there's lots around here. Mary doesn't want it in our yard, and I get that.

She pulled a bunch of it out on the LFA property that abuts our lawn just before it went to seed (she's pretty sure) and then left it on a tarp on in our yard. She doesn't think it would be right to have the town haul it away and resisted my putting it down below where we haul our excess leaves each year despite thinking she got it before it started generating a lot of seeds. 

I had been thinking of burning it in our pandemic-era fire pit for some time. Yesterday, while out raking, I decided to give it a go. It burned nicely, but slowly. It took a fair amount of effort to burn the stuff in small quantities and to keep it going. But boy was it gratifying and also warm. I thought about Leslie, our family's truest and purest pyromaniac, and how much she would have enjoyed being there and watching all of this flaming and somewhat evil biomass. 

As I burned it, I wondered to myself "is this legal here in Chapel Hill?" After I went inside after burning maybe 25-30% of it, I consulted the interweb on this question. It turns out that burning yard waste is not governed by a Chapel Hill ordinance but a North Carolina statute, which does in fact ban it. Whoops. Moreover, burning it is not even considered a good way to manage stilt grass since viable seeds could be scattered to the wind by the fire itself. Of course, Mary was pretty sure (but not entirely so) that she had pulled the stuff in time.

And so ends my little experiment in burning stilt grass in my back yard. It was illegal and probably not even a good idea. But it was fun.

 

Breaking out a little

After the holiday, we were back up at the hospital for the continuation of Mary's reconstruction process, which was deferred after the lingering infection of early summer and then her show at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, which remains open for viewing until February 28. We left the hospital by a little after 2, more or less on schedule, though the procedure really didn't seem all that minor.

Because I've got a temporary crown for another week or so I am under orders to not bite down hard on things with my incisors. "Molars only!", they told me.

So around mid-day I found myself in the cafeteria enjoying a hearty baked spaghetti, a dish that is not really part of Mary's repertoire or anything I am encouraged to make at home. The seating in the cafe area off the main atrium was a little crowded, so I sat at a four top where there was a container with a hardboiled egg in it. I didn't look closely at it, I though someone had neglected to bus and I didn't really care, I just wanted to power down some food before returning to my mission of picking up Mary's prescriptions.

As I was eating a Black woman in her 40s came up and sat down with me. Turned out it was her egg and she had been trying to make sure she had a place to sit and the egg was definitely uneaten. A very nice woman. She had grown up in Newark though her dad was from Durham and she had moved back down here in her 20s. She worked in food service, taking patient orders and making sure they got served correctly. 

It was lovely, the kind of casual social interaction outside of normal social circles that happen a little more often in cities and on public conveyances but we get too little of in our heavily siloed suburbs. I look forward to my next one.

Notebook LM disappointment

I had hoped that Google's new Notebook LM might be able to ingest my blog and provide some valuable insights, particularly with its whizzy new feature which generates an audio dialog between two AI-generated podcasters discussing whatever text you feed to them. I was disappointed. 

I uploaded the root Chew Your Grouse URL to the tool hoping it would process the entire 20 years of my blog but instead all it took in was the posts that were on the splash page, so around a month and a half's worth. From this small sample it generated a 16-minute discussion which basically tried to reiterate and regurgitate the main points of what I had said since mid-October. So it took me back through my canvassing and the death of Rascal, etc. It was hard to listen to, really not a good use of my time. The only legitimate quasi-value additive observation it made was that maybe I identified more with Leon than Rascal since Leon is the more introverted of the two cats and I characterize myself as introverted. That's a little interesting. Though maybe I said that myself.

In any case, I was underwhelmed. If I could easily upload the whole corpus of the blog to Notebook LM I would, but I only have the big text as an XML export, not a text file, and lord knows I'm not spending the time to figure out how to convert the one to the other right now.

Given the energy-intensiveness of AI, I think we need to be careful in how we play with it, just as we should try to drive our cars efficiently and mindfully. While I'd be interested in seeing eventually how an AI might digest my blog and offer insight back to me, it's really no rush. No reason to do a lot of emitting for that purpose. And if it never quite happens, hey, I'll be dead and who will care then?

On the other hand, Natalie was very productive this break in going through her bookshelves and packing up ones she no longer needs. Mary saved a few, so did I, the others we took to the Goodwill store up on Weaver Dairy, which is veritably packed to the gills with stuff. I felt kind of guilty for only dropping things off and not buying anything to lessen the crush.