theologic (u/theologic)

theologic commented on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2 ufried.com/blog/ironies_o... · Posted by u/BinaryIgor

jjk166 · 4 days ago

In my experience plenty of places are quite inefficient at doing the wrong things as well. You might think this reduces the number of wrong things done, but somehow it doesn't.

theologic · 3 days ago

It's almost comical isn't it, but it actually turns out that this is a big foundation behind behavioral economics. In essence you can get trapped in an upper level heuristic and never stop for a moment and thinks things through.

Another one of my favorite examples is that there is some research out of Harvard that basically suggested that if people would take and spend 15 minutes a day reviewing what they had done and what was important, they increased their productivity 22%. Now you would think that this is so obvious and so dramatic you would have variety of Fortune 500 companies saying "oh my goodness we want all of our workers to be 22% more productive" and so they would simply send out a memo or an email or some sort of process to force people to do some reflecting.

I would also suggest that Microsoft had a unique advantage based out of the idea that people should have their own enclosed workspace to do coding. This was deeply entrenched when Bill was running the company day-to-day. And I'm sure as somebody that was a coding phenomenon, it simply made sense to him. But academically, it also makes sense.

Microsoft has reversed this policy, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have anything to do with the research. It has to do with statements about working together efficiently. or AI productivity. If there's real research then it's great.

My problem is it just doesn't appear to be any real research behind it. Yet I'm sure many managers at Microsoft thinks that it's very efficient. Of course, if you do know anybody at Microsoft that codes, they have their own opinion, and rather than me repeating hearsay, it would be fantastic to have somebody anonymously post what's really going on here. I'll betcha a nickel that 90% of them are not reporting that they feel a lot more effective.

theologic commented on Rob Reiner has died hollywoodreporter.com/mov... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

benzible · 3 days ago

You may be confusing jameslk with me - I'm actually the one who linked the CASPEH exec summary. Your underemployment math is interesting, but I'd note the study also reports 34% have limitations in daily activities, 22% mobility limitations, 70% haven't worked 20+ hours weekly in 2+ years. When asked why, participants cited disability, age, transportation, and lack of housing itself as barriers. So the causation may be more circular than "fix jobs first" as the same factors driving underemployment are driving housing instability, and being unsheltered makes holding a job harder.

theologic · 3 days ago

Yep sorry about that lost track of who did what.

But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).

It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."

It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.

This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.

This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.

"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.

Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."

theologic commented on Rob Reiner has died hollywoodreporter.com/mov... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

jameslk · 3 days ago

> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).

I already have in my prior comment:

>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

In other words, your logic is:

Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home

Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:

* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?

* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?

* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?

* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?

* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?

With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.

theologic · 3 days ago

Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.

If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:

Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.

Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.

Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.

In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.

Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.

There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.

Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.

theologic commented on Rob Reiner has died hollywoodreporter.com/mov... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

jameslk · 4 days ago

> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.

It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.

0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)

theologic · 3 days ago

Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.

However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.

In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.

As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.

theologic commented on Rob Reiner has died hollywoodreporter.com/mov... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

benzible · 4 days ago

UCSF published a comprehensive study of homelessness in California in 2023 [1]. A few relevant points:

The ~1/3 substance use figure holds up (31% regular meth use, 24% report current substance-related problems). But the study found roughly equal proportions whose drug use decreased, stayed the same, or increased during homelessness. Many explicitly reported using to cope with being homeless, not the reverse.

On whether money helps: 89% cited housing costs as the primary barrier to exiting homelessness. When asked what would have prevented homelessness, 90% said a Housing Choice Voucher, 82% said a one-time $5-10K payment. Median income in the 6 months before homelessness was $960/month.

The severe-mental-illness-plus-addiction cases like the family member mentioned exist in the data, but the study suggests they're the minority. 75% of participants lost housing in the same county they're now homeless in. 90% lost their last housing in California. These are mostly Californians who got priced out.

[1] https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...

theologic · 4 days ago

There is very good research to indicate that when housing costs a lot, versus geos where housing costs a little, homelessness clearly is lower. while this is not causation, the correlation is extremely clear. I think that Gregg Colburn, The University of Washington has done a good job arguing for this correlation and it's difficult to argue against it. What's nice about his research is it's not reliant on self-reported surveys to dig out these trends.

So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.

But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.

When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.

Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:

- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week. - 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.

For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:

- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week. - 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.

We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.

theologic commented on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2 ufried.com/blog/ironies_o... · Posted by u/BinaryIgor

jinwoo68 · 5 days ago

"Most companies are efficiency-obsessed."

But what most of them do is not to be more efficient but to be shown to be more efficient. The main reason they are so obsessed with AI is because they want to send the signal that they are pursuing to be more efficient, whether they succeed or not.

theologic · 5 days ago

Peter Drucker popularized the phrase "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."

Being a credibly efficient at doing the wrong things, turns out to be a massive issue inside of most companies. What's interesting is I do think that AI gives opportunity to be massively more effective because if you have the right LLM, that's trained right, you can explore a variety of scenarios much faster than what you can do by yourself. However, we hear very little about this as a central thrust of how to utilize AI into the work space.

theologic commented on US cities pay too much for buses bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

dzhiurgis · 3 months ago

Could US gov just buy out one the patents and make it free for all?

theologic · 3 months ago

The challenge is that we have a rapidly evolving GLP/GIP/Other landscape being developed. In other words, you take a risk that the government buys the wrong thing. However, I think with a little push, you could have a highly competitive field to lower the federal cost, and the ROI should be easy to plot.

Actually, you don't need to do everybody all at once. Target the biggest (no pun intended) opportunities first.

theologic commented on How to make sense of any mess howtomakesenseofanymess.c... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

dsrtslnd23 · 3 months ago

Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist... and OODA loops

theologic · 3 months ago

At the time of the FAA making up this framework, I would venture more than half of commercial pilots had some military aviation background. It is so close to Boyd's model, I would think that a research might find that it was highly inspired if not a direct descendant of Boyd's work.

However, Body was real time combat, and I think the FAA is supposed to be beyond a cockpit crisis, and maybe another framework is Demings PDCA framework, which looks like you could roughly match the pieces.

theologic commented on US cities pay too much for buses bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

Y_Y · 3 months ago

And congratulations to any of today's lucky ten thousand who are just learning of the Principal-Agent Problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

theologic · 3 months ago

Throw in confirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias and you have a lot of inertia from changing. Not only do they not have the right info, but because they have invested in the ongoing solution, it is difficult to get any change going because humans tend to simply see everything as supporting their current viewpoint.

theologic commented on US cities pay too much for buses bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

cogman10 · 3 months ago

Cancer, in particular, can be practically free to insurance if caught early. Colon and skin cancer are the poster children. Colon cancer can be treated in the process of doing the screening when caught early. And skin cancer is a pretty minor "just lop off that mole" procedure that also ends up being the treatment.

Letting it grow and catching it when symptoms arise is terribly expensive. The chemo, surgery, scans, and frequent doctors visits are all crazy expensive.

About the only way I could see preventative care not costing less is if you just let the people die and call it god's will rather than calling it a death that could have been prevented.

theologic · 3 months ago

Another variation of this are GLP 1 drugs.

Obesity costs USA $1.75T (https://milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/news-releases/econom..., grossed up for inflation)

Number of people that are obese: 100M

Annual economic impact from obesity per person: $17,500 per year

GLP-1 "For All": $6,000 per year (assuming multiple vendors, and some will be over vs under)

Savings: $11,500 per year per person.

Economic impact: Around $1T

This should free up around 3% of GDP for better uses of money rather than just fixing up people.

Obviously, the devil is in the details, but the potential impact is so massive that it should be deeply studied.