Asking the right questions

Last night at dinner with Rob we again got into a lengthy discussion about AI and it's use and importance going forward, one which once more I blundered into by saying "I don't have time to play with AI" (which Mary had rightly pointed out sounds snooty and holier than thou the last time I had said it). I think in retrospect what I meant/mean to say when such words issue from my lips is that I refuse to allocate time to playing much with AI.

For much the same reason that I try really hard not to buy books from Amazon and also to buy outdoor gear (which constitutes ever more of my garb) from Great Outdoor Provision at Eastgate instead of the companies that send me catalogs or even REI. I want to support distribution channels that support people.

In the realm of information, I want to find and support sources of both wisdom and good information and wherever possible cultivate relationships with them. I want to reward them for their work. In the future it does seem that AI will end up being a great source of answers but to what extent will it help us formulate the right questions? Aye, there's the rub. As answers get easier, questions could get ever more complex and we will need to build and maintain cultures which help us formulate them. Which won't happen if we're ceaselessly searching for the quickest path to answers.

Updates from my psyche

Yesterday I went to the most recent extravaganza of my mom's musical theater troupe, the Prime Time Players, at the Seymour Center, Chapel Hill's community center for the 55+ set. Generally I go to see what mom has been working so hard at and to support her. Over time they have been getting better, which I have historically attributed to the fact that they've been working hard at it for increasingly long amounts of time.

This show was a compendium of Broadway hits from the ages, going back to the 40s. I was surprised at how many of them I knew. I've seen many of the performers before, so I've been getting to know them too. I found myself thinking things like "I should really watch the movie version of My Fair Lady again." Then came a couple of tunes from Fiddler on the Roof, and when this rather pretty woman who was about my age was doing a duet of "Do You Love Me?" with a somewhat older guy in the Zero Mostel role, I found myself, much to my embarassment, crying, as he kept asking plaintively if she loved him and she kept listing out all the shit she'd been doing for him around the house for 25 years. Eventually, she confessed, after thinking about it, "I do." A few decades into a marriage, I get it. Those wasn't just shtetl shtick. 

It occurred to me as the show went on that one of the reasons I know many of the songs, probably, was from seeing high school productions of them back in the day. And that, moreover, since many of the performers were more or less my age, that they were probably people who had done high school musicals and that therefore many of my friends who had been in plays in high school were good candidates for my mom's theater company.

This was most unsettling. I was edging ever closer to being in mom's core demographic.

........

This morning I went to one of the worst AA meetings I've been to in years. The culture of the meeting has always been an open show of hands or just people piping in when their spirits move them. This time the guy running the meeting kept picking out people and/or going down rows. There are meetings where that's how it's done, but this is pointedly not one of them. After half an hour or so he tried to move to a more open format but he couldn't tolerate more than 15 seconds of silence before he'd call on someone.

About a third of the people there left early. The only reason I didn't was that there were all these newcomers there who come in to this meeting in vans from a rehab and I didn't want to cut out on them. I left feeling pissed but was at length able to reclaim the day.

A Wealth of Well Being

Not too long ago I got a message on LinkedIn from the account of Meir Statman of UC Santa Clara, a pretty reputable behavioral economist, plugging his new book, A Wealth of Well Being. I was impressed that a senior academic like that would be doing direct sales so energetically and proactively, though I assumed he had engaged a graduate student or something like that to actually do the pushing and I replied to the message saying that. No no, he responded, this is actually me, Professor Statman.

So I bought the book and started reading. The book promises to provide the most many-faceted expostulation of the holistic financial planning value proposition that so many are working towards these days. And indeed, Professor Statman has thought about people's financial lives from many angles, I daresay all of them, perhaps, and he has done so in an exceptionally thoughtful and respectful manner. The author comes across as one who has read broadly and been to talks at all the departments around the academy and thought about how all of it fits into people's lives financial and otherwise. Of about 350 pages, about 1/3 is devoted to end notes.

The problem is that it is all a little underdigested. I'm sure it all fits together fairly neatly in Professor Statman's head and he probably can spin it out well orally. But as a written text it's a little too much data, too little thought. It is, indeed, too respectful of it's source material. The good professor would do better to throw away the pieces, step forward and present us with a whole.

I sympathize, of course. As someone who rolls out experience day after day, week after week, in three paragraph chunks, I sense that I am long overdue for some synthesis. I am, however, like Jim Sinegal, working. Honestly, I am.

Learning from Hiragana

Studying Japanese definitely calls on a wide range of parts of my brain. So much differs from English, though sometimes it seems like a very large percentage of words have in fact been borrowed from other languages, primarily English, since English has long held primacy as the dominant language of seafaring and Japan, Great Britain and the UK have, after all, been very much seafaring nations over the centuries.

But the writing systems wrench the old noggin more than anything. There's not one but three systems of writing, after all:

1. Kanji -- Chinese symbols adopted into Japanese -- the most complex of the darned things
2. Hiragana -- a syllabary (not exactly an alphabet, that would be too simple) used primarily for native Japanese words
3. Katakana -- yet another syllabary, primarily used for foreign words 

Not infrequently the same words can appear in both Kanji and Hiragana, and DuoLingo helps us learn how to translate from one to the other. 

Oh yeah. There are no spaces between words! As in semitic languages. Thanks a lot.

Then there's learning how to write the durned things. Like I'm ever going to actually do that! But I have to to proceed forward in the app. When forced to do this, I just have to submit to the process and accept that there must be something to it.

After all, in the end I am in it for the work and the growth that comes from the work.

More sales tactics from the Red Cross

Just reviewed my prior posts about the Red Cross and I saw that once in the past a guy who had called me had executed a pitch perfect assumptive close (in sales literature this is where the salesperson just assumes that the the prospect will roll forward with the sale and moves without skipping a beat into working out the details of executing the transaction: "Will that be cash or charge, Dr. Troy?"

In recent calls they've displayed other signs of good sales training. The woman who called me last week -- I answered because I knew it was in fact about time for me to give -- started in by saying "Your blood type -- O Positive -- is in heavy demand right now" in a very upbeat way. Today the woman who called to remind me of my appointment tomorrow said: "Should we go ahead and set up a time for your next available window in June?", also with an upbeat lilt.

These Red Cross call center folks have a hard job. It's not quite as bad as cold-calling to sell life insurance, but probably somewhere in the same ballpark. But it gets a little old to be on the receiving end of it. At least they're not selling life insurance.

On fertility rate and being careful with facts

Of late I have been looping Tyler Cowen's podcast "Conversations with Tyler" into the mix of things I've been listening to. Cowen is an interesting figure, definitely not toeing the line with anyone's orthodoxy of anything, really pretty much a polymathic egghead. Really smart guy who has produced a lot and has many interesting thoughts.

So I was surprised last week when, in conversation with Ezra Klein about the latter's most recent book on abundance, he said that the United States's fertility rate (the number of children women have on average over the course of their lives) had been at replacement rate (2.1) before the pandemic. That did not accord with my recollection, so I decided to look it up.

Here's what the St Louis Fed's FRED data bank shows (click on image to expand):

As I had recalled, the US fertility rate has in fact been below replacement rate since just before the financial crisis. Even more interestingly, what we see here is that since the Nixon years, US fertility has only inched above replacement rate momentarily, that moment just before the financial crisis when the whole world was zooming on a combination of the sugar high of credit expansion and the long commodities and economic liberalization boom ushered in by Deng Xiaopeng in China, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in India and, to a lesser extent, the opening of Eastern Europe post-Gorbachev.

Which further complicates the story of America's economic dynamism from Reagan (credit must be given for his cheerleadership) forward. If we have been below replacement rate for substantially that whole time the entire portion of our economic growh which is population growth as opposed to productivity growth must be put down to immigration. Certainly much interesting in our cultural life also has come from newcomers to our fair land, though regional renaissances (think Bill Neal and Crooks) have also helped.

Certainly it's a complex story and it obviously doesn't ultimately come down to "all immigration is good." But overall what I see leads to me to believe that immigration is net positive by a long shot.

Back to Cowen for a second. He has said that we should "write fot the AIs" which I have interpreted as an echo of Public Enemy's classic line "you can't copywrite a beat." We need to just be fruitful and get ideas out there and not worry about maintaining ownership of their economic potential. As I say this I have to admit to myself that another expression of the same idea is seemingly illegal immigrant Elon Musk's contention that patents are for the weak.

All the same, when we are in the public sphere and in positions of influence it behooves us to get our facts right as often as possible.

Expiration dates on laws

I saw somewhere that Musk had advocated for expiration dates on regulations. After a while, they have to be validated again by the legislature. If we could have some sort of campaign finance reform and campaigning reform whereby members of the House in particular could spend less time fundraising, campaigning and more time gaining domain competency through committee service so that they might know what the fuck they were talking about, on average, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.* 

But what about the Alien Enemies Act from 1798 and Trump's Orwellian invocation of it in saying we are at war? By contrast, of course, with Putin's even more absurd insistence that Russia is not at war. Shouldn't antequated laws like that fall off the books? Just like statutes banning sodomy and so on and so on. Or they should have explicit termination dates on them. We could have a culture where laws are expected to have end dates. Or classes of laws: class 1 is good for 50 years, class 2 for 20, etc. 

*Turns out there is an executive order out on this called Zero-Based Regulatory budgeting. The sunset provision (1-yearish) for it is probably too rapid to be executed in a non-chaotic way but it's not the worst thing Trump has proposed. 

Return to Maigret

When I took my recently finished Japanese mystery novels back to the library, I picked up more books, including a Maigret novel by Simenon, into which I had dipped my toes a year or two back. I blasted through it over the weekend.

Simenon and Maigret provide their own flavor of fulfillment. The most purely procedural of novels, there aren't typically huge and dramatic reversals or surprises. Their pleasingness inheres very much in the neatness of the world in which they function, in Maigret's ability to logically work through human-sized puzzles and make his way to a conclusion, all the while dipping into the pleasures of France. A beer here, a recollection of his country house there, a walk on the beach. Oddly, more like the Scandinavian fictions of Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson (in which the detectives are always eating and drinking generic "sandwiches" and "coffee") there is little descriptive elaboration of Maigret's pleasures. We don't learn too much about what he eats, though his wife does once make him a nice coq au vin. So it's not really like he's one of the sensualist mystery writers, the greatest of which may be Qiu Xialong. Still, one catches the groove of France. At least I did, but I also took the time to look up on Google Maps the places he daydreams about and travels to, just for a little taste of France.

Ultimately, the pleasure of Simenon's world inheres in its extreme orderliness. Not only does everything return to where it belongs, evidence of a monde bien fait which is common to all mystery novels, it never really gets too far out of joint to start with.

Birthday doings

As many of you are likely aware, today is my 59th birthday and I am passing it in a fashion suitable to a man in a prime year (59 being a prime number). Which is to say, I am doing as little as is respectable, if not quite as little as possible.

One sad point: New Hope Market, my preferred purveyor of fine cakes, has no coconut cake today. 9th Street in Durham, which also does well by coconut cake, does have some. Which presents me with a quandary. Is it worth driving all the way to Durham for cake? Or should I make due with carrot cake from New Hope (also quite fine). Or just wait till later in the week for cake and thereby extend the birthday celebrations? We shall see which way I go.*

I had been thinking of going down to Pittsboro to Circle City Books to do a little grazing, but now that also seems like a lot of effort, particularly if I'm going to ride my e-bike over to the Farm for tennis with Z at 4:30, as I plan to. 

As you can see, there are a lot of decisions to make. Plus I still haven't decided what to do for dinner. Last night we did a joint birthday dinner with my mom (who turned 87 a couple of weeks ago) at the Washington Duke Inn in Durham. This was a good solution to the problem of restaurants being too loud for us to be able to hear mom's voice, something that happens all too often in today's noisy boites. It was a little stuffy but the food was good, so all in all it was a good trade off. I think we may start hitting that circuit (also the Carolina Inn, the Umstead, Fearrington and probably more in Raleigh) for family dinners.

*In the end, I decided to go to New Hope on my way to pick up pizza from Sal's (I am a very simple guy) and see what they had. And the Lord did see fit to shine his Light down upon me. As I had suspected they might, they baked a coconut cake during the day and it was waiting for me there in the case. After all, someone calling in and asking about something is a clear signal that a product is desired by the market. Also, Jesus loves me.

Perfect Day

Yesterday was a more or less perfect day. I went out in the morning to my meeting, then did some errands, in the middle of which Natalie called from JFK on the way out to Juneau for Spring Break. Back home, we confirmed that Mary is healing nicely.

After lunch I read my Maigret mystery on the couch while looking at Mary sitting in her chair, taking time to look up some of the small French towns mentioned on Google Maps. Then I had a short nap, followed by tennis with Rob. While at the Farm, we heard cheering through the trees, so we stopped over to the UNC Tennis Center and found that UNC was playing Duke. We even had a small snack provided free of charge by Al's. It was pretty funny listening to the guys on court and in the stands grunting, fist-pumping and yelling "Let's go!" and the like. At such a small scale it was all very ape-like and I can see why some women just hate being with men watching sports. 

Then home, where I did a little laundry and basically finished my novel before we settled in on the couch to eat Indian leftovers from the night before and start watching The Residence on Netflix, which is pretty funny. Then a cocktail of tennis, soccer and Itchy Boots on YouTube before bed.

All in all, a fine birthday weekend Saturday. 

Are we done?

Mary had what we hope will be is the last surgery in her breast cancer treatment on Wednesday. All went well. We are seasoned old hands at this by now.

After staying at home all day yesterday, I am headed into the office today because, after all, the weekend is fast upon us and as we have learned during the pandemic, if one has an office, one should use it to give that little absence to help the heart grow fonder. Living on top of one another 24-7 rarely engenders optimal marital relations.

Took a couple of Japanese mystery novels back to the library the other day and picked up a few books, which immediately hopped the queue and got in front of the myriad unread books on my shelves. Funny how that works.

A conversation at the office with a guy about his intricate shelving system at home made me think about my own, somewhat helter-skelter system. Last night I started just cramming the books I happen to have read onto a shelf of their own, by definition separating out those I had not read. Pretty revealing.  

25 Years

Yesterday marked 25 years since I entered the private sector at Princeton Consultants after walking away from a post-doc at Columbia's Harriman Institute. The post-doc basically paid me (albeit not that much money) to do nothing more than polish my dissertation to make it a publishable book -- which I wasn't even doing as I focused primarily on finding a next job. So leaving seemed like a foolish thing to do from one perspective. 

But Natalie was well on her way at the time. Mary was about seven months pregnant and Natalie joined the family exactly two months later, joining Leslie and also Mary and me (who were married on that day) as a member of the June 7 club. So it made sense for me to get started early so that I'd know shit from shinola before my paternity leave kicked in a couple of months hence.

As I have discovered, the business world is not all wine and roses. But net net, I'm pretty sure I've learned more by leaving academia then I would have by staying in it. Who knows? It's not really a fruitful line of inquiry. I'm here. I'm doing fine.

Little Marco

Running a little behind, so quickly: Marco Rubio in recent days said something like "I've revoked 300 student visas or so and I think other nations would do the same: you don't want people coming into your country and opposing the government and its policies." The Secretary of State on the United States of America, the erstwhile home of the free.

Spineless idiocy. Trump was right to deride him as "Little Marco."

One of the values immigrants bring is new ideas, which means occasionally they will oppose the government. Deng Xiaopeng went to France as a student and ended up a member of the Chinese Communist Party there. You can be sure he wasn't supporting the French government in all of its endeavors.

The things that Deng saw there formed the kernel of an understanding that would allow him to lead post-Mao China out of the complete self-immolation of the Great Leap Forward of the 50s and the Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s and bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and become one of the primary economic drivers of the last 40 years. He wasn't perfect. He ordered troops to move on and crush the uprising at Tiannanmen Square. But net net he did a lot of good in the world, and not just for the Chinese. All of our living standards are higher than they would have been in the absence of China's rise.

We want immigrants for their ideas, so we need to accept that we will disagree with some of them. Just like we have historically tolerated neo-Nazi speech in America. Which we are coming to regret. 

Making Mary smile

I woke up a little early this morning and so went downstairs early for my early morning routine, very much the favorite part of my day. Thankfully, after a drought, the Post Office finally decided to start delivering my Economists* again so I don't have to bring my laptop down to have something to read while eating breakfast. 

So I made coffee, meditated, did a small increment of stretching and core work, sampled the Tao and some Emerson, ate breakfast, and then did a little Japanese on Duolingo. 

Then Mary came downstairs. I kissed her good morning and then made some witticism or something, I have no idea what it was. She smiled and laughed a little.

It's hard to describe how much this means. After 30 years together, half a lifetime, coming up on 28 years of marriage. After the innumerable instances of my "wit" to which she has been subjected, to be able to still elicit a warm smile and laugh on occasion (not at every joke, to be sure. She quails and rolls her eyes not infrequently) is incredibly meaningful.

Later OneDrive threw some memories at me. "On this day in 201X" Photos from spring breaks in Austin, college travel with Natalie. I am such a sucker for that stuff.

*Still no relief on The Atlantic, which hasn't come in months

DOGE at Kitty Hawk

While Mary and I were down at the Outer Banks over the weekend we stopped into the Wright Brothers National Memorial. First off let me just plug it. It's a really great museum. It focuses on the Wright Brothers' process of achieving flight through various stages. Four years in a row they came back to Kitty Hawk from their home in Dayton, Ohio. After the second year (1901) they were despondent at their lack of progress over that summer, then they were invited to speak at an event and they discovered that they knew more about flight than anyone else there and they had been learning through their struggle.

At some point in time I looked over at the front desk and the young guy there had his right hand raised and was talking to some young children there with their parents. It looked very much like he was swearing them in as honorary park rangers, something like that. A really good touch.

There were some tributes there that seemed like they might get wiped away by DOGE's furious drive to wipe DEI from all things US government. There was a picture of a black guy -- I think his name was Dunbar -- who collaborated with the Wright Brothers back in Dayton. There was a portrait of one of the Tuskegee airmen.

Later I went up to the guy at the front desk and asked if there had been an effort to wipe some of the DEI stuff from the exhibits, like the portrait of the Tuskegee Airman. I should clarify that the guy at the front desk was not of exclusively European descent. He looked like he might have a Latino parent or grandparent or something. He surprised me when he said he would honestly prefer it if that stuff was taken out, then mentioned that they had briefly lost a couple of employees, including the people who took payments at the booth at the entry to the facility. Instead they had put a QR code where people could choose to pay. Apparently their receipts diminished and they quickly changed course.

Part of me wanted to stop and discuss his earlier response about removing the portrait, but he was at work and needed to focus on that so it would have been inappropriate. Interesting nonetheless..