The Wind and the Line
GPT, DMV, FTX
The Wind of Change
The world is heavy with soul-wrenching philosophical debate over the world-changing significance of ChatGPT—OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-driven ghost-writing chatbot. ChatGPT, it is said (sometimes by me), is the end of writing, a 24/7 ideological indoctrination camp, and an engine of future unemployment. In France, I have learned, the discussion is just a tad less elevated. My friend Gérard alerted me to the fact that in his native country, considerable attention is being focused on the name “ChatGPT,” rather than on the substance of ChatGPT. “Chat,” you see, is the French word for “cat.” And “GPT,” when pronounced with a French accent (zhay-pay-tay), sounds almost exactly like the French expression «J'ai pété», meaning—forgive me—“I farted.” It is, I imagine, somewhat difficult to wax apocalyptic over something called, “Cat, I farted.”
Queue-Anon
Decades ago, a friend left his job in Washington, DC, to work for a bank in Lower Manhattan. While he underwent the agonizingly slow task of searching for a New York apartment, the bank gave him temporary housing in an apartment on the Upper East Side. Each morning, a van would pick him up at 7:00 or 7:30 and drive him several miles down the island to the office.
Each morning, he noticed, there was an enormous line stretching down the sidewalk on a particular block and then bending around the corner and continuing into the distance. The building was unmarked and nondescript. He wondered what it was that brought this motionless throng to the same spot each morning. Regardless of the weather, the line was always there and always stationary, like a bread line in old Soviet film footage. After a few weeks, he thought, “I’ll bet it’s the DMV.” Soon, he found an apartment and passed the mysterious line no more.
A few months later, he needed to get a New York driver’s license. He looked for an address in the New York telephone directory. (This was years before the internet was even imagined.) The directories, however, had only phone numbers, with no addresses. He called the numbers repeatedly, but they always yielded annoying busy signals. (Voicemail was still a rarity.)
After days or weeks of frustration, he had an idea. One morning, he left his apartment in Brooklyn bright and early and headed for the mysterious queue that always enveloped the nondescript East Side block. He stepped to the back of the line, tapped the person on the end and said, “Excuse me, but is this the line for the DMV?” After a few hours of standing on the line and sitting in the nondescript building, he had his new driver’s license.
Ehhhhhhh … I Don’t Think So
The spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its founder, Samuel Bankman-Fried makes me sympathize with comedian Larry David and lead me to confess a peccadillo of my own. Last year, David starred in one of the funniest Super Bowl advertisements ever. In it, he plays a series of whiny, Larry David-esque characters throughout history, each pooh-poohing some pathbreaking invention of his time (e.g., the wheel, coffee, the toilet, the light bulb). At the end, some earnest fellow tells David about FTX and cryptocurrency, and David says, once again, “Ehhhhhhh … I don’t think so. And I’m never wrong about this stuff. NEVER.” Given subsequent events, the ad is painfully ironic and David is caught up in the legal wrangling over FTX’s collapse. His advertisement will live forever.
David’s retrospective gaffe reminds me that a little under a decade ago, I deleted a tweet from my Twitter feed that, had it remained, would have proven mildly embarrassing soon thereafter and remained so ever since. It was late 2014 or early 2015, when Theranos founder and (subsequently) convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes was the recipient of endless adulation. My writings at the time focused heavily on high-tech health startups, and I posted a tweet that was overly generous in praise of Holmes’s accomplishments and which referred to her as “a billionaire.” I don’t remember the specifics of what I wrote, but almost immediately, someone posted a tweet calling me to task for what he presciently saw as premature conclusions. He said something like, “No start-up entrepreneur is a billionaire until they cash out of their investment.”
I decided he was correct and immediately deleted my tweet. In the years since, I’ve had mixed feelings about that deletion. On the one hand, no one could retweet it to show that I, too, had been vulnerable to the Holmes hype. But, on the other hand, curating one’s words denies others a chance to evaluate one’s reliability. Since that time, I’ve mostly refrained from editing my past words, except to correct typos or clarify awkward language. For the most part, my errors are free to roam alongside my insights.
In 2021, Pradheep Shanker was a guest on the podcast I had at the time. Pradheep is a radiologist who was, in my view, Twitter’s top statistical bard as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. His numbers, explanations, and predictions were informative, profound, and fair. When I interviewed him on March 11, 2021, he spoke of the relatively low spread of COVID in India as of that date. Due to production delays, the podcast didn’t get posted online for seven weeks, by which time India was drowning beneath the pandemic. The people with whom I worked at the time thought it unfair to saddle Pradheep with statements that were true when he spoke them but which were now clearly erroneous. They offered to delete that portion of the podcast, but Pradheep said no. “It was my opinion at the time!” he said, to which I replied:
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about Pradheep’s pandemic posts has been his intellectual honesty and willingness to highlight where his predictions have not been borne out.
As a thank-you to Pradheep for that admirable honesty, I’ll share a tweetstorm where he describes seeing through Elizabeth Holmes long before I praised her in that long-deleted tweet. Here’s Pradheep’s first tweet. Click on it, and then read his whole thread, which is quite entertaining and which gives great insights into what led to the Theranos disaster. My favorite point in his account is where, at a crucial meeting, he was sleep-deprived from work and failed to convince a large company to avoid funding Holmes. He said he suspects that if he had drunk a better cup of coffee that morning, he could have saved the company several hundred million dollars.
Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos
