Tag Archives: history

record adoption rate for ChatGPT

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I mentioned recently that I had couldn’t remember any technology being adopted into widespread commercial and public use as fast as the large language models. Here is some empirical confirmation of my impression, from Reuters:

ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.

The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.

Websites and apps are not exactly technologies, and the large learning models are more than just websites or apps. What about cell phones themselves, or radio, or electricity, or toothpaste, or the plough, or the wheel, or fire? I think the adoption of all these critical technologies probably had a half life measured in years at least, probably decades or even centuries the further back you go. I’m sure there are many scholarly studies out there.

Turchin’s End Times

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I got through Peter Turchin’s book End Times. It is definitely an interesting book. To summarize, organized human societies tend to develop a “wealth pump” whereby the wealthy and powerful influence the rules of the game to appropriate an ever larger share of a society’s wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is not just the median or what we think of as the “middle class”, it is the bottom 90% of the wealth and income distribution. He shows hard evidence that the policies enacted in the U.S. represent the preferences of the top 10%. Not only are the preferences of the median citizen under-represented, they have NO statistical bearing on what is actually enacted. This situation tends to eventually reach a point of instability unless intentional and effective steps are taken to “shut down the wealth pump”, which happens occasionally. Instability can sometimes look like outright collapse into chaos, but it can also look like fracturing or breakup of a society into smaller entities, as happened with the “fall” of the Roman empire.

What makes the book a little different than other “cyclical theories of history” is first that he backs it up with statistical evidence gathered from many societies over a long period of time. Second, it is not the “immiseration” of the common people that leads to instability, but actually the growth of the “elites” due to the wealth pump. At some point, there are more elites that want to be in power than available positions of power. They fight amongst themselves, and their rhetoric may allow them to gain a following among the masses, but their preferences and interests still represent the rich and powerful class of which they are a part, and switching from one elite faction to another will not shut down the wealth pump.

Peter Turchin has a new book

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His new book is called End Times but it does not appear to be about the apocalypse, but about a cyclical view of political history with some evidence to back it up.

When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.

Peter Turchin

I haven’t read the book, but I have officially added it to my queue of too-many-books-to-read-before-I die. (I’m not terminally ill that I know of, it’s just a long and growing list.) The queue is periodically randomized, so just because it already has too many books to read before I die does not mean I will never read this particular book.

Anyway, one disturbing implication just from the brief description above is that we may not be able to educate our society out of economic inequality. That seems to go against the data which clearly show that people with more education earn more than people with less education. So it’s a case where a dynamic model leads to a different, counterintuitive conclusion compared to a linear extrapolation of data from the recent past.

March 19, 2003

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As I write this on March 19, 2023, today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. launching its attack on Iraq. This article in the Intercept reminded me of something I had forgotten – that in addition to the supposed weapons of mass destruction, which the administration probably knew was doubtful, part of the narrative to build support was the narrative that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. This article tells a story where the CIA looked and looked for connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and was never able to prove anything despite the administration pushing the theory in public. Only when it finally and embarrasingly became clear that the evidence could not support case did the administration throw its full weight behind the “missing weapons of mass destruction” theory.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it…

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Intercept

So maybe some people pushing the narrative understood that it was a lie, but many, it seems, fooled themselves with their own bullshit. They started a war that broke hopes for a peaceful world emerging from the Cold War.

2022 findings on human evolution and anthropology

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Highlights of things that caught my eye from this Smithsonian article:

  • “there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors.” [sorry, Liver King] But learning to cook meat was probably important. We knew how to make and control fire for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using it for cooking, probably starting with fish.
  • Beer is about as old as agriculture, with the oldest known examples originating in Egypt. “Dating to 5,800 years ago, hundreds of years before Egypt’s first pharaoh, this beer was thick like a porridge rather than watery and probably used for both daily consumption and ritual purposes.” [Sounds like alcoholic oatmeal, and maybe not so delicious, but it fits with the idea of beer as a basic food.]
  • Dogs came from wolves, which we know, but the precise group of wolves serving as the genetic ancestor of modern dogs has not been found [aliens?].
  • The earliest known chicken domestication occurred in modern-day Thailand, and again is about as old as agriculture.
  • One of the oldest “possible hominims” (6-7 million years) was identified in modern day Chad. They could walk, but based on their bodies still spent a lot of time in trees. [Stop the planet of the apes, I want to get off!]
  • Modern humans and Neanderthals were both around in modern-day Europe as long as 50,000 years ago, meaning they co-existed and interbred for longer than previously thought. The Nobel Prize went to a scientist who sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010.
  • Chimpanzees and gorillas sometimes hang out and let their children play together in the wild.
  • Evidence of successful limb amputations (meaning the patients lived) predates agriculture. This might seem gross, but is evidence of “advanced medical knowledge”.
  • Humans have more genetic defenses against dementia than other animals, and this may have resulted somewhat by accident thanks to genes that evolved to cope with gonorrhea.

Troy McClure was Phil Hartman. Rest in peace, Phil Hartman.

Bloodlands

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was on my list for awhile, and I suppose I finally decided to read it because of the war in Ukraine. This is a good book and a horrible book, in the sense that it is a well-researched, well-written account of probably the worst series of events in world history. It is first and foremost a book about the Holocaust. It is also a delightful romp through the famine Stalin intentionally imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s, Stalin’s internal terror unleased on his own citizens in the late 1930s, Nazi mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the siege of Leningrad, and the forced relocation of people (including Germans remaining in newly Soviet-occupied areas) at the end of the war that resulted in additional deaths.

I certainly don’t have much to add to scholarly discourse on the Holocaust. I have read more than one account and feel that I have a grasp of the facts, which is a very different thing than wrapping my head around the events, which I am not sure anyone can do. I think everyone needs to have a grasp of the facts, grapple with them, and then not think about them all the time. One thing that surprised me is Snyder’s explanation of how the complete picture really became available only after the end of the Cold War. This is because many of the worst atrocities happened in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war, and western (i.e. outside the Communist countries) scholars after the war tended to focus on the evidence and accounts available to them of Jews and others in Western Europe. These people suffered horrible atrocities, but the atrocities further east were of another magnitude in terms of both body count and utter depravity. The Soviets did not exactly deny the Holocaust, but for propaganda reasons they tended to downplay the mass murder of Jews and portray events as atrocities committed by Germans against Soviet civilians, sometimes glossing over the fact that people in these areas came under Soviet control only late in the war, and in some cases were also subjected to Soviet atrocities.

Something I was not aware of was Stalin’s antisemitism in the early 1950s. This fit into his general pattern of paranoia that groups within the Soviet Union, whether Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, etc. might be under foreign influence and therefore be a threat to the Soviet state. In his paranoid mind, the ties between West Germany, the United States, and the newly formed Israel were a threat. There is some evidence he was planning a purge of Soviet Jews at this time. Luckily, he was not taken as seriously by underlings at this point as he had been in the 1930s, and he died before he could set any of these events in motion. Echoes of his paranoid rantings linking Nazis and Jews surfaced in Poland as late as the 1960s and 1970s, and I think we hear some echoes of this in the bizarre and seemingly illogical Russian rantings about “denazification” of Ukraine today.

Another theme that struck me was the underlying tension of food insecurity in Europe and the Soviet Union in the pre-war era. This was a motivating factor both in Hitler’s plan to colonize Eastern Europe and exterminate whoever was in the way, clearing the way for German farmers, and in Stalin’s depraved grain quotas imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, in which peasant farmers were forced to grow grain for export but executed if they were found eating it themselves. Neither of these was a rational response to food insecurity, of course, but I think it holds lessons for us today. In the United States and much of the world, we have taken food security for granted for many decades now. As climate change takes hold, other environmental problems mount (soil erosion? ocean acidification? groundwater mining?), and population continues to grow (though slowly decelerating), the future of global food supply is not secure. On top of the technical and environmental challenges, food insecurity can trigger mass migration, civil unrest, geopolitical instability and even war, which in turn can exacerbate environmental and food supply problems in a vicious feedback loop. These are tough, tough problems, but one thing we can try to do is keep a focus on global peace and stability so we at least have a chance to focus our technological and economic prowess on solving the food security issue.

“not an inch to the East”

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Here is some more historical background on the promises made by NATO at the end of the cold war. One lesson Trump taught me is that U.S. Presidents don’t feel bound by promises made by their predecessors to foreign parties (examples: Trump pulling out of climate change and nuclear arms control agreements, the W. Bush overthrow of Iraq and Obama of Libya). And the U.S. Congress does not feel bound by promises made by Presidents (examples: the original Kyoto climate change pledge). But this has been going on for a lot longer than the Obama/Trump era, since at least the end of the cold war. And you could go back in history and look at promises made to Native Americans and Mexico among others and conclude that talk has always been cheap. It’s not just the U.S. of course – here is an article about promises made by Russia and others to Ukraine in exchange for giving up the nuclear arsenal it inherited at the end of the cold war. And of course you could go back to promises made by Hitler and Stalin that most likely neither ever intended to keep.

I guess a lesson that could be learned by the political class is that you don’t make deals in exchange for a promise of some future action beyond the political lifetime of the party you are making a deal with. You need something tangible in return in the short term in exchange for whatever you are giving up. It seems like a sad, cynical world sometimes.

January 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draw the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.

Most hopeful story: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: “Big history” is an Australian program that attempts to unify everything from the Big Bang through our current era of intelligent life.

fairy tales

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The Spectator has a review of a new book on the origin of fairy tales. I tended to think “fairies” were Celtic in origin, but this article talks about Middle East, French, and Nordic origins among others. And some were just invented by Hans Christian Andersen, who apparently stayed in Charles Dickens’s house at some point and severely outstayed his welcome.