Author: James David (Page 17 of 27)

I’m spending this week and next in Nashville. I’ve visited many times through the years, but the purpose of this visit is different. I’m staying in a different part of the city than where some family lives and deliberately walking around and eating out (including with family) more than I normally would. This is a scouting expedition and while the first of this year it will not be the last. Last year included scouting in Europe, but that was for a place to spend a month. This is about finding a place where I could spend years. Not in the short term, as that is already accounted for, but in the medium term.

It’s a different mindset. I’ve walked through neighborhoods and tried to guess what they will look like in a few years and wondered: would I want to be here? Having contemplated some of my old friends moving as I’ve been with them during the last few weeks, being somewhere where I don’t have to start from zero again is something that has been bouncing around in my head a lot. Nashville is one of those places where I wouldn’t be starting from zero, but the traffic is only getting worse and that doesn’t look like stopping any time soon. I don’t have any answers to any of the questions about where I want to live if given an unconstrained choice, haven’t had any in quite a while. At least now I’m asking those questions with the intention of finding an answer.

For the first time in several years, I attended a youth baseball game on Saturday. It was a chance to watch two of my very favorite people swing a little pink bat and hit ground balls that resulted in infield hits and RBIs. When I was 5 and 6 years old we played tee ball and everyone went station to station in a train until everyone had an at-bat and scored every inning. This was coach pitch, complete with strikeouts and put outs in the field. In further conversation about this change, I was also told that some leagues use a hybrid model where the coach pitches a couple of pitches to each child and if the kid hasn’t hit the ball then they put it on a tee. If I were a league commissioner, I’d probably use the tee as a backup but allow the fielders to actually record outs. Well, when I say field what I actually mean is that the kid who corrals the ball runs to whatever base to try to beat the runner. The only times throws were attempted while the ball was in play were from the pitcher or second baseman to the first baseman. The outfielders also just ran the ball back into the infield. Teaching this isn’t a great lesson to young children about how baseball is played, but it did tamp down on the possibility of Bad News Bears baseball and Little League homeruns.

The worst part of youth sports is overbearing parents, and this game was no exception even if the parents were by and large well-behaved. Most commentary was positive and instructive and all of the negative yelling was from parents directed at their own children. I’m not sure if that is better or worse, but I will say that it isn’t the kid’s fault if you never taught them to run through first base or how to slide into second. Maybe when I’m actually in the position of a father watching my children play I’ll react negatively too. I do thing that the youth coaching I’ve already done should help. Yelling is counterproductive on so many levels. And that applies in more contexts than a children’s baseball game.

Last weekend, I returned to upstate South Carolina to attend the wedding of my college roommate and one of my dearest friends. The summer heat and humidity had not yet arrived, so it was a pleasant time to be there. It was also a chance to reconnect with a few people I hadn’t seen in too long and to reminisce on some hilarious incidents from the past.

The bride was lovely in her long and flowing white gown and her bridesmaids wore Carolina blue, an ode to their shared alma mater. The old gold and black of the alma mater I share with the husband was nowhere to be found, and that was probably for the better. The whole evening was at the same venue: the ceremony outside in a little amphitheater; drinks in a breezeway inside; dinner inside upstairs; and the reception inside downstairs. I find those easier than weddings that involve a lot of transportation between different elements of the evening. As for the reception, I’ve become more attuned to my limits over the years so I was sure to have earplugs in my pocket to help me deal with the volume. The ear plugs did the job as my introvert self was able to live with the slightly reduced din for the length of the event.

I’ll end with a few words about the couple. I knew there was something different about her from the first time I heard him talk about her. He was even crazy enough to have me meet her for the first time without him there due to some quirks in geography at the time. I’m so happy for them, proud of what they’ve already overcome, and can’t wait to be part of their continuing journey together.

I attended my first baseball games in the pitch clock era this weekend. The Cubs lost both of the games I watched as part of a three game sweep, but we won’t dwell on that painful reality. Miami marked the eighth team whose home venue I’ve visited, a number I expect to grow further this season. It is a sterile ballpark, not helped by it being indoors, and one where artificial noise plays too much of a role in the atmosphere. In that respect, reality met expectations. I also still pine for the days when it was possible to sit somewhere other than the outfield bleachers without having to watch the game through a net, but Stephen King did a much better job expressing those feelings in an op-ed in the Boston Globe than anyone else ever could.

The pitch clock has shaved about a half hour off of the average major league game so far this season, and it’s a noticeable difference. There is a crisper flow to the viewing experience and the ticking clock isn’t too intrusive in the line of sight. It also might be possible now to attend an evening game and not be zonked the next day, something that hasn’t been true for several years. There was only a single pitch clock violation across the two games so there was little direct impact on the result, but there were a few moments when players seemed rushed and other moments where the tension didn’t have time to build in the way it would in games I attended in the late 2010s. I hope that these are just teething pains and that players adjust before more pressure-filled games later in the summer. You also cannot make a trip to the bathroom without missing half an inning and these weren’t especially well-attended games, so there is a little negative even in the positive. Overall, I rate the pitch clock positively. I was also surprised by how large of an impact the new pickoff rules and base size had on the games (lots more stolen bases). That felt a little overpowered actually, so maybe the rules will see additional tweaks in those areas.

For those who are familiar with behavioral psychology, the concept of sunk costs and the eponymous fallacy is not new information. Sunk costs cause people to value what they have, and more specifically what they have sacrificed for, more dearly than what they don’t have. This can create inefficiencies in markets but those are usually marginal enough that they don’t have a major impact on a person’s life. What can have an impact on a person’s life is allowing the sunk cost fallacy to keep them in a career they don’t like out of a desire not to have “wasted” the years spent obtaining the credentials necessary to pursue that career. Or staying in a bad relationship (though neither of those things is applicable to me at this point). Nothing that transpired in the past can be changed, but sunk costs keep us from moving forward anyway.

I’ve been plagued by sunk costs this year—I have lingered as a result of money spent on housing elsewhere. Sure that money was already spent and there has been no recourse available to recover even a single penny, but I’ve hesitated to spend yet more money on housing. Since money is fungible, this is irrational. I knew this all along, but that didn’t change my behavior: that is the sunk cost fallacy in action. At least now I am doing so out of agentic choice as I have trips planned for the next few weekends for which I am more-or-less centrally located. Then after that it’s time to get moving. I don’t have a fixed plan of where I’m going yet, but even contemplating the options has been an enjoyable exercise over the past few days. Whatever comes, there should be great variety in content over the next few months. Also, let this be a reminder that just because you have poured a lot into something doesn’t mean you have to keep doing that thing. Time only moves forward and so should we.

Back in January I wrote a post entitled “Double-Barrel Information Intake” about an experiment I was about to conduct in which I would simultaneously read and listen to a book. After about two months of going through the exercise, I can now report the results. I will not be adopting this approach to my nonfiction reading moving forward. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be using audio versions of nonfiction books at all in the future as I haven’t gotten the results I wanted to obtain. That isn’t to say that I won’t listen to a work of fiction ever again. It’s just that right now I don’t have a commute and making my commute better was the function of those books.

My conclusion about listening to nonfiction books was echoed by some findings that I took in (somewhat ironically) through Cal Newport’s podcast describing how there is magic in the time spent between words and sentences that allows for the absorption of material and forming synaptic connections in the brain. When I tried to click through the link in the episode description to the study he referenced, the site wouldn’t open in my browser, but here is a link anyway: LINK. There may be broader evolutionary implications of those findings given the shift away from prolonged and focused reading in favor of ever-shorter bursts of dopamine in short-form video applications but this post isn’t a polemic; it’s just me reporting my own experience and being honest about something that I tried and will not continue.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading four different books, each at a more-or-less consistent time and for a different purpose. The early returns on this experiment are positive. Maybe I’ll write another post about this approach in a few months.

My birthday was this week. It was a subdued affair and a solo dinner out. I did at least I get myself an ice cream cone for dessert, vanilla lest anyone have doubts. I’ve never been a fan of big birthday parties anyway. As with many other milestones I took a little time to reflect on another circumnavigation of the sun, this time sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean. It’s now 10 years since I graduated from college and 5 during which the rate of change in my life has accelerated. I’ve had five more-or-less permanent addresses during that time. The only place I’ve woken up more than once on my birthday during that span is where I am now in what has become my in-between home. And every indication is that the trend will continue over the next twelve months. Where I am isn’t at all where 22 year old me thought I’d be when I left Wofford for a stint in Boston. That disconnect doesn’t look like it’s going to change in the year to come either and I’m glad that that is the case. I tried a version of the dreams 22 year old me dreamed and as it turned out my vision missed the mark. It may have been directionally good but many of the particulars were off. I doubt I’ve got all of the details sorted in my current vision of my future either, but I’m more directionally accurate than I was 5 or 10 years ago. At least I hope so.

I was having a conversation this week about ChatGPT, AI in general, and what the technology might mean for the future. I’ve continued to experiment with the ChatGPT interface and have found several resources that have helped me write prompts that get more out of the tool. In the short term, I’m now convinced that the people who learn how to interact with these new AI tools will see massive productivity increases and rapidly outcompete others, at least in the domains in which the AI tools function.

During the conversation, a thought came to be in the form of a connection to another idea I heard on a podcast a few weeks prior. I haven’t spent hours and hours turning over this thought, but that is one of the purposes of the act of writing. The thought is this—these AI technologies are going to do to the digital world what the discovery of the neutron did to the physical world. The discovery of the neutron opened up the possibility of nearly unlimited energy by tapping into potential of which we had known nothing previously. It also led to nuclear weapons. These versions of AI systems are surely already being weaponized (after all, the real breakthrough of ChatGPT was to make the outputs more human-like; there are already more advanced AI systems that have been created), but the effects will only compound as future iterations are created and released. Sure, nearly every new technology comes with positives and negatives and metaphors have their limits, but this one does have a Pandora’s box sort of feeling to it. Or maybe more of a 1984 feeling to it. And if that inkling is correct, then it is already too late to reclose this particular Pandora’s box. It probably isn’t too late to course correct, but my knowledge of how these systems work is too limited to allow even a half-educated guess as to how that might occur.

I watched All Quiet on the Western Front this weekend. It picked up several awards and was adapted from a novel I’ve actually read so I had some anticipation built up.

The visual depictions were stark and didn’t shy away from gory, grimy violence as so many war movies do. It wasn’t a glorification of war. The protagonist is no Rambo rampaging across battlefields, nor is he an antihero—he is a teenager swept up by circumstances and events around him. The movie was well shot, alternating between closeups and wide-angle shots with good flow, and the musical score has a few numbers that really add to the ominous tone of particular moments. I watched with the original German audio and read subtitles. I cannot speak to the viewing experience of watching and listening to a dubbed version, but as a rule I find that distracting and so choose to read the dialogue instead.

It was a very good movie, but not a great one. The film failed to capture the final measure of the message conveyed by the novel. Fatalism abounds, yes, but the screenwriter opted for extra drama by altering the chronology into a race against time for survival as the armistice approached. The movie took events to within a few minutes of the end of the war. This was unnecessary and cheapened the narrative by making it shallower. This decision made the movie more like The Alamo or Titanic where you already know the ending but still spend most of the movie hoping that somehow it will end differently. This is the easier thing to do and I understand that it attracts a broader audience. That said, the most poignant moment of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front is the novel’s final image and the existential void that it manifests. Reading those paragraphs left me feeling hollow, a lessened version of the hollowness the protagonist felt (and not only for himself, but for his entire generation). Watching the movie didn’t do that. It stopped short, and that was a terrible shame.

ChatGPT has garnered a lot of attention since it was released for public use. Lots of people have begun experimenting with it to test its capabilities and see how it might augment their efforts. There have even been many posts and articles written about how to use ChatGPT that were written using ChatGPT. I have had multiple conversations with people considering buying content sites. My advice has been the same—don’t do it. The content game has changed forever and now is probably not the time for new entrants.

I have also tried a few prompts myself. It can give you meal ideas and recipes. It can help you create an exercise program. It can take prose that was written by one author and rewrite that prose in the (passable) style of another author. I’m sure it can do much more, but those are some of the things I’ve done with it thus far with my own limited creativity. It also makes some odd errors when asked for specific details. It will provide a link to a YouTube video but get the name of the creator incorrect. It will compile a list of academic studies on a particular subject, complete with authors and short summaries, but then you will find that those studies aren’t real. There may have been similar studies, but not the ones listed. ChatGPT does similar things when asked to provide biographical information, getting one’s alma mater incorrect or what have you.

I don’t know what to think about the program at this point. It, along with the neural network technology that underpins it, is sure to change many things. New business models will emerge. Old business models will falter. But the whole enterprise is something of a black box, and I’m not technical enough to parse the details of how the neural networks actually function. That gives me pause as to the larger implications but simultaneously won’t prevent me from trying to use the tool to improve my work.