(Truncated) Quick hits

Busy and exciting weekend in the Greene household.  My 18-year old son graduated Cary High.  He’ll be joining me at NC State in the Fall to major in (probably Chemical) Engineering.  My 22 (in two days) year old son graduated Athens Drive High (you can can to high school through age 21 if you are in special education classes). And we celebrated his birthday since we had a lot of family here.  A great weekend, but not a ton of time for quick hits.

But, here’s some!

1) One thing I did this weekend was extoll the virtue of LLM’s to my visiting family members.  I shared this Ethan Mollick post with my sister, “Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play”

We are in a brief period in the AI era where there are now multiple leading models, but none has yet definitively beaten the GPT-4 benchmark set over a year ago. While this may represent a plateau in AI abilities, I believe this is likely to change in the coming months as, at some point, models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.0 will be released. In the meantime, you should be using a GPT-4 class model and using it often enough to learn what it does well. You can’t go wrong with any of them, pick a favorite and use it (Claude 3 is likely to freak you out most in conversation with its insights, GPT-4 is pleasantly neutral and has the most complete feature set, and Gemini often gives the most accessible answer).

However, even as you use these models, get ready for the next wave of advances. Even if LLMs don’t get smarter (though I suspect they will, and soon) new capabilities and modes of interacting with AIs, like agents and massive context windows, will help LLMs do dramatic new feats. They may not exceed human abilities in many areas, but they will also have their own superpowers, all the same.

2) Vulture ranks the streaming services.  I quite enjoyed this.  Netflix comes out on top in a big way. 

3) A great NYT guest essay on the crisis for boys and young men.  I shared this with my 18-year old son, so you get the gift link, too.

I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising my own three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness. This is a new problem bumping up against an old one. All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality. But in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.

The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.

 

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged. But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.

The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché. Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.

As a mother of boys, I get a chill down my spine at these numbers. And my own research has fed my fears. I talked to boys of all types. Jocks and incels, popular kids and socially awkward, rich and poor. And the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.

4) Yglesias’ intern, Ben Krauss, on the awful job of being a college president:

The college presidency is nasty, brutish, and short

A 2022 survey by the American Council on Education found that the average tenure for the position has fallen from 8.5 years in 2006 to 5.9 in 2022, with nearly 45% of schools having presidents with tenures less than four years. In a recent New York Times article, Nicholas Dirks, the former U.C. Berkeley chancellor, said candidate pools for opening jobs are shrinking due to lack of interest.

So why are so many people fleeing this extraordinarily high-status, high-paying job?

Daniel Drezner, a Tufts international politics professor and a nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, has some ideas. He recently wrote an op-ed titled “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President.”

While Drezner told me he’d be terrible in the role, he specified why exactly the job is so hard in the first place. “The job of any college president is to simultaneously inspire, but really you’re just dealing with a whole bunch of ridiculously entitled interest groups.”

These interest groups can range from dogmatic students and faculty to the dueling, and sometimes conflicting, voices of the alumni, big-shot donors, and the state (for public institutions).

The university president’s job is to satisfy all of them, all while dealing with an exceedingly long list of core job responsibilities. Michael T. Miller, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas, said, “The college president is responsible for everything that happens on a college campus.” This extensive mandate ranges from fundraising (far and away the number one priority) to student performance, graduation rates, and quality of campus life.

Interestingly, this extended presidential portfolio is actually a new concept. In a Washington Post article, Jeffrey J. Selingo, the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, described the evolution of the college presidency:

“A century ago, the college presidency was often described as “a club,” as those in the position came largely from the faculty ranks and were from a similar pedigree. In the 1970s, as financial pressures grew on higher education, presidents were hired for their administrative experience. These days the president is expected to be a multidimensional leader able to navigate a range of challenges from technology to sexual assault as well as keep up with the changing nature of learning and emerging academic disciplines..

In my conversation with former UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor, Holden Thorp —who resigned from his position after several sports related scandals — he added another issue that is prevalent at many universities: declining trust between the board and president. “Boards are spending more time deciding whether to support the president than they are in how they will support the president.”

So it’s a tricky time to be a college president. You have to manage a weary board, juggle a wide range of responsibilities, and deal with constant pressure from interest groups. On top of all that, the higher education business model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain at many universities.

This all invites an existential question about the presidency: Should it really be done by one person?

5) This is amazing– an AI that generates a conversation based on research papers.  It’s so good. 

6) Enjoyed reading about this Duke professor who is working hard to create civil discourse and challenge students:

In 2021, Rose, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the virtue of open-mindedness, published an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, diving into “How I Liberated My Classroom.” In the piece, Rose noted that he surveyed more than 100 of his students, with eye-opening results. “Sixty-eight percent told me they self-censor around certain political topics. That includes self-described conservative students and also half of the liberals.”

Reading the Journal that day was Washington, D.C., attorney and former Duke trustee Peter Kahn. He said Rose’s words struck a chord. He would later come to find out that other alums felt the same. After a series of discussions among them, Kahn led the creation of a working group in spring 2022 with Rose and other faculty and alumni joining in. Eventually, he attended Rose’s class to see for himself what it was like.

“I was blown away,” said Kahn. “These are great kids. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. And they had this open and respectful discussion.”

Buoyed by the classroom climate, Kahn and his group met with university leadership – President Vincent Price and former Provost Sally Kornbluth, among others – and they found support for a proposed new alumni group. At the reunions this spring, their group, Friends for Free Speech & Intellectual Diversity at Duke, debuted. About 300 people showed up for a panel discussion, and it was clear, said Kahn, that there was a need and interest.

“The climate is ripe for someone like John at Duke, and at other universities as well, to take this on and give it the support it deserves to create a widespread culture of free speech and viewpoint diversity,” says Kahn. “I think what we are seeing is that faculty and students are very much afraid to have these open discussions lest they be censored or shamed.”

7) Drum on the short-term polling impact of Trump’s conviction. And the amazing inanity of voters:

I didn’t notice this when it was published, but I see that polling from the New York Times confirms the YouGov results I mentioned yesterday. Donald Trump’s conviction on felony charges has moved voters only slightly:

The Times interviewed some of the folks who were previously Trumpish or undecided. Here are their complaints about Biden:

Jack: Earlier this year, he said he considered himself a Trump voter primarily because of his anger over Mr. Biden’s economic policies.

Eric: Mr. Tabor said he had turned to Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was rejected by the Supreme Court, and Mr. Tabor was left with the feeling that the president was getting little done.

Jamie: She blamed him for not saving abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Carla: She watched Mr. Biden perform the job as president and could not envision voting for him again. “Sometimes Biden says things without thinking,” she said.

This is all crazy. The economy is great under Biden. Biden has gotten a ton of things done. It makes no sense to blame him for a conservative Supreme Court that Trump appointed. As for saying things without thinking, has Carla ever listened to Trump?

But crazy or not, this is how a lot of people think. You just have to figure out a way of getting through to them.

8) And let’s stick with Drum.  This one is really important as I think it gets to a fundamental problem in so much left politics these days: “Bogus doomsaying is bad for progressives”

Why do so many people think that things in the US are far worse than they really are? A big part of the reason is that it’s not just individual scientists who are manipulating data to protect their own fiefdoms. On the left, practically the entire think tank industry is dedicated to doomsaying in order to keep the public focused generally on the need for stronger social programs.

We need an eviction crisis to maintain focus on the homeless. We need a safety net crisis to maintain focus on the poor. We need an incarceration crisis to maintain focus on racism. We need a wage crisis to maintain focus on the working class. We need an education crisis to maintain focus on the children. We need a police shooting crisis to maintain focus on social justice. We need a jobs crisis among the young to maintain focus on Gen Z. We need a democracy crisis to maintain focus on Donald Trump. We need a tuition crisis to maintain focus on higher education. We need a lead crisis in Flint to maintain focus on Black people. We need a pandemic education crisis to maintain focus on in-person learning. We need a cyberbullying crisis to maintain focus on the ills of social media.

Never mind that there is no eviction crisis. Never mind that social spending has skyrocketed over the past few decades. Never mind that incarceration rates among all races have been falling for over a decade. Never mind that the debate over flat wages is way out of date. Household earnings have increased 0.6% a year for the past 20 years and 1.4% a year for the past decade.¹ Never mind that test data suggests American children are actually doing pretty well. Never mind that police shootings of unarmed suspects—of all races—have plummeted over the past decade. Never mind that Gen Z is doing fine, both on the employment front and elsewhere. Never mind that democracy in the US is in excellent shape, both before and after the Trump era. Never mind that university tuition hasn’t actually risen more than a smidgen over the past several decades. Never mind that the kids in Flint are fine. Never mind that pandemic learning losses seem to have nothing to do with remote learning. Never mind that cyberbullying hasn’t increased and social media has mostly positive influences on teens. [emphasis mine]

Needless to say, conservatives do the same thing: They cherry pick statistics to “prove” dubious points that are politically convenient. But generally speaking they use anecdotal outrage to keep their audience motivated. Lefties use an endless barrage of social crises.

What this means is that both sides are in a relentless battle to paint America as a hellscape. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people think America is a hellscape?

This is a particularly bad strategy for progressives. When people are frightened and scared, they tend to vote conservatives. That’s why scaring people is a core part of movement conservatism. Conversely, people tend to be more generous and open-minded when they feel good. In the long run, an endless cascade of crises isn’t good for the progressive cause, and that’s especially true when the crises aren’t even real. At the very least, we need to focus on real crises—fentanyl, climate change, Black schoolchildren—and spend a lot less time on the fake ones.

9) As someone who monitors my heartrate on a smartwatch (a lot more on that soon), and definitely paid attention when I had Covid last year, I really enjoyed this from Jeremy Faust, “Could a smartwatch have prevented my Covid illness?”

Smartwatches, it turns out, can provide advanced notice that something is amiss in our bodies. In fact, colleagues of mine recently published a study in a Lancet network journal that demonstrated the power that smartwatches may have in giving us notice that we may be sick.

Volunteers were given smartwatches, and they wore them for years. During that time, of the 4,700 participants, there were 490 confirmed cases of influenza, 2,206 Covid-19 illnesses, and 320 bouts of bacterial strep throat (Group A Strep).

What did the smartwatches reveal? Heart rate changes. The baseline heart rates of smartwatch wearers had statistically detectable increases well before testing for the three pathogens was sought out. In the case of flu, heart rates increased around 68 hours prior to when they actually got tested; for Covid, increased heart rates were detectable 64 hours prior to testing; for strep, the lead time was 58 hours. Two or three days of advanced notice is huge in disease transmission dynamics.

On top of that, the participants kept track of their symptoms. So from this, we can see that there’s a pretty predictable pattern:

1. Heart rate increases.

2. Symptoms develop (on average 2-3 days later).

3. Testing occurs (on average 1.5-2 days after symptoms).

So the interval between the smartwatch “canary in the coal mine” and the time that patients actually got tested was often 2-5 days. This is massive…

It looks to me that smartwatch data applied at the individual level has a real chance to lower the reproduction number of a pathogen—that is, to how many people the average infected person spreads a pathogen. In a world in which even someone like me can’t stay vigilant with rapid testing forever, perhaps a smartwatch could be the nudge I need to do a test. (There are commercially available apps that supposedly do this; I have not vetted them.) Instead of doing a rapid test when I think of it, I would do one when my watch alerts me that my biophysical baseline has changed unexpectedly.

10) Great take on Ibram Kendi from deBoer, “I Think Ibram Kendi is Just… an Academic: with academic problems, of multiple kinds” deBoer is often hard to get pull quotes from, so Claude’s (for the record, free Claude, this month, not the paid I have been using) summary:

The document is a commentary on Ibram X. Kendi, a prominent academic and author known for his work on antiracism. The author reflects on a profile of Kendi by Rachel Poser and offers their own thoughts on Kendi’s ideas and public persona. Key points include:

1. Kendi is portrayed as a professor who got in over his head, rather than a nefarious figure as some right-wing critics suggest.

2. Kendi has moderated his central claim about “racist vs. antiracist ideas,” stating that it applies only to ideas about race, not to everything. The author sees this as a classic “motte-and-bailey” tactic common in the modern “ideas industry.”

3. The author compares Kendi’s situation to other academic works like the 1619 Project, arguing that they often present a more provocative version for publicity and a more nuanced version when criticized.

4. Despite his branding, Kendi is seen as temperamentally not a radical but rather a reformist within academic norms.

5. Kendi’s struggles as an administrator at his research center are seen as typical of academics thrust into management roles, though the financial mismanagement is noted as scandalous.

6. The author concludes that Kendi is a “mostly-harmless dork professor” who is more comfortable in academia than in the public eye, and who has become a target for conservative anger despite having some dopey and some inoffensive ideas.