Now that we know how the story ends, let’s discuss…
12 minute read
November 10, 2024, 10:15 AM
That was certainly an interesting election night. First of all, I couldn’t help but think that the news coverage reminded me of an episode of Deal Or No Deal, in that there was a lot of yakking amongst the talking heads, then it’s suddenly time to make a call, which felt like opening a case. And then depending on what was in the case, we all went “yay” or “awwww”, and then finally at the end of the night, we open up our own case and find out who the next president will be. The only thing missing was the banker.
That observation aside, the night felt a lot like election night in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump. There, Elyse and I were at home, watching the election results roll in, and we saw a lot more states get called for Trump than we expected to see. I remember when they called Ohio, Elyse said to me, “Trump is going to win, isn’t he?” I was doing the math there, and I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was looking like that was going to be the case. Then the next morning, we found out that it was.
This time around, I was at work, and checked in on the election on my breaks. I couldn’t help but notice that with every check of my phone, Trump remained ahead of vice president Kamala Harris. I expected a Trump lead early on due to the red mirage/blue shift phenomenon, where precincts with lower populations, which typically tend to vote Republican, get counted quickly because they’re small, giving an early bump to the GOP candidate – thus the red mirage, because the Republicans get that early boost. Then as larger population centers, which typically tend to vote for Democratic candidates, get counted, the Democrats catch back up – thus the blue shift. So when I saw all of the early returns come in and saw that Trump was leading, I was like, okay, red mirage, nothing to worry about here, because it will correct itself later on. Then after another trip across the line, I checked my phone and was surprised to see that Trump was still leading. I was starting to think, okay, when is the blue shift going to happen? As it would turn out, it never came, as Trump ultimately pulled out a victory over Harris. I would check my phone after each trip across the line, and watched as Harris’ path to victory got narrower and narrower. Then I watched it some more when I got home. Once Pennsylvania had been called for Trump, I realized that it was over. At that point, in order for Harris to make it to 270, she would have had to win in every single state that remained in play, but one of those states was Alaska, which is a very reliable red state. In fact, Alaska has only cast its electoral votes for a Democratic candidate once in its entire history as a state, in 1964 for LBJ. Every other time, it’s voted for the Republican, and there was no reason to think that this election would buck that trend. It was a certain sinking feeling to know that the path to a Democratic victory had fully closed, and a Harris presidency just wasn’t going to happen.
Continue reading…Categories: National politics
Revisiting ChatGPT…
22 minute read
November 1, 2024, 11:55 PM
Recently, a former colleague of mine shared a post on LinkedIn by Benjamin Stein (no, not that guy) that read, “Go ask ChatGPT: ‘Based on our previous interactions, what do you know about me that I may not know about myself?'” My colleague said in her post that she was using ChatGPT to help with a job search, and shared some of the things that the bot said about her. Not bad.
I responded to her post about my own experience with ChatGPT, saying, “All I know is that ChatGPT knows exactly who I am, probably because of my large online presence, and it told quite a few whoppers about me,” and then cited the Journal entry that I wrote about it last spring. My colleague responded that she loved the entry, but considering that the original entry is now more than 18 months old, as well as the rapid pace of advancement in this kind of technology, I should run it again to see what it comes up with. I liked the idea.
So I ran the entire process over again, asking the exact same questions, i.e. “What do you know about Ben Schumin?” and “Tell me about The Schumin Web,” and running each inquiry five times, using the default model, GPT-4o. My methodology for scoring each of the responses was exactly the same as before, counting the number of factual claims, and then determining the accuracy of each one. Accurate claims scored a point, inaccurate claims scored no points, and a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information scored half a point. Then take that number and divide it by the total number of factual claims made, and that’s the final score in the form of a percentage. As was the case before, I still don’t know what an expert in this sort of thing might do to rate the accuracy of these responses, but this is the best that I could come up with, plus this is the same method that I used before, giving us apples-to-apples results.
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta, Social media