This week on Complex Systems I was honored to interview Mikey Dickerson, probably best known as one of the architects of the healthcare dot gov rescue operation. He also founded the US Digital Service. We discussed government software, procurement, and staffing.
@patio11
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Institutional Responsibility: Churches and Universities Beyond Self-Interest
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… Totally fair, and I can now broaden that to an influential subset of churches, but in fairness I think we understand universities/churches are probably not in the do-nothing-but-do-well-for-selves part of the spectrum.
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Illegal Activities at Scale: Negative Update for AI Development
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(That’s plainly illegal. Illegal things happen all the time, of course, but that particular illegal thing happening at scale would be a negative update for me.)
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Choosing Interesting Conversations: Expertise Meets Professional Curiosity
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Some combination of "Who do I think gets to have the most interesting conversations during their day job?" and "What do I understand well enough to talk to an expert about but not well enough to be an expert in?"
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First Professor Discovers Graduate Students: A Humorous Reflection
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I think I am feeling what the first professor to discover grad students felt.
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Negative Prompting and CoT Countermeasures in AI Models
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(I have used “You are bad at X; please don’t” to some effect this last year but it had not occurred to me to sketch out suggested countermeasures, in part because have spent less time in CoT prompting experiments than I should have.)
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Prompt Engineering Techniques for More Effective AI Model Responses
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(That prompt has some interesting things going on incidentally and annotating it with “this technique might get models to be more effective than simply sending a tweet-sized expression of desired outcome to them” would be a useful thing to have on Internet somewhere.)
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AI Results Reliability: Strategic Use Cases Beyond Perfect Reproducibility
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Potentially unnecessary point for you but: it doesn’t need to reproduce reliably to be very interesting, since some actors only need plausible results rather than true results, other actors can ask 20 AIs and vote, and others will simply work on prompts for a few weeks.
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Poker Table Mindset: Reframing Negotiation Strategy
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(An evocative thing poker people sometimes say is “You are at one table your entire life. The other players rotate in and out of it.” That might actually be a helpful mindset for thinking about negotiation; no need to think about others’ opinions on other tables.)
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Corporate relationships and complex financial dynamics in tech ecosystems
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There might be a large universe of other people who have complicated feelings about money and other C corps that have different feelings about you but tables you are actually at always have you and then have small number of C corps that matter.